The Bloody Lady - the Saltychikha case
The chronicles of the beginning of the reign of Catherine II are rich in descriptions of criminal processes that are associated with mass torture and murder of their serfs by landowners. A special place in these processes is occupied by the "Case of Saltychikha" - a Moscow noblewoman who killed about 140 people. She killed Saltychikha of any motivation, with “special”, as they would say now, “cruelty”, just like that, out of love for this business, not yielding, and in many ways surpassing the most notorious monsters of the human race.
Daria Nikolaevna Ivanova was born in 1730. She was the third daughter of a simple nobleman, many of whom served the sovereign and the fatherland in the vast Russian expanses. At the age of 20, she married Gleb Alekseevich Saltykov, captain of the Life Guards Cavalry Regiment. The married life of the Saltykovs did not differ in any way from the life of other high-born families of those times. Daria gave birth to her husband two sons - Fyodor and Nikolai, who, as was then customary, were immediately signed up from birth to serve in the Guards regiments.
However, after six years, in 1756, her husband unexpectedly dies. The loss of her husband, who left the young widow a house in the center of Moscow, a dozen estates in the Moscow region and 600 serfs, had a negative impact on her mental state: the widow began to experience uncontrollable fits of severe anger, which she poured out, usually on the slaves around her.
The picturesque, quiet, surrounded by a coniferous forest, the Saltykovs' estate in Troitsky near Moscow soon turned into some kind of cursed place. “Like a plague has settled in those parts,” the neighbors whispered. But the inhabitants of the "creepy estate" themselves lowered their eyes and pretended that everything was as usual and nothing special was happening.
Meanwhile, the number of serfs was inexorably decreasing, and a new grave mound appeared in the village cemetery almost every day. The reason for the inexplicable plague among the Saltykov serfs was not a terrible epidemic, but a young widow, mother of two sons - Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova.
Saltykova again got up in a bad mood. She called the serf to dress her. Soon the morning toilet was finished. There was nothing to find fault with. Then Saltychikha, for no reason, pulled the girl by the hair. Then the lady went to check the rooms to see if everything was clean. In one of them, she saw a small, yellow, autumn leaf flying through the window and sticking to the floorboard. The lady burst out. She ordered in a shrill voice to bring the one who was cleaning the rooms. Agrafena entered, neither alive nor dead.
Daria Nikolaevna grabbed a weighty stick and began to beat the “guilty” mercilessly until the girl, bleeding, fell to the floor. A priest was called, but Agrafena did not even have the strength to utter a word. So she died without repentance. Such scenes in a Moscow house at the corner of Kuznetsky Most and Lubyanka took place almost every morning, and then throughout the day. Those who turned out to be stronger endured the beatings. The rest suffered the fate of Agrafena.
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So, for underwear that was not well washed, in her opinion, she could easily, in a state of passion, grab the first thing that came to her hand - whether it was an iron or a stick - and beat the guilty washerwoman with it until she lost consciousness, and then call the servants and order them to beat the bloody sacrifice with sticks to death. Sometimes such murders were committed in her presence, at times - in the courtyard of the house, in front of other serfs. Those close to the Saltychikha carried out the orders of their deranged mistress unquestioningly. Or they could easily turn from executioners to victims.
Carts with a suspicious load, barely covered with mat, pulled out from the estate. Those who accompanied it not really that and hid from involuntary witnesses - they say, we are taking the corpses to the police office for examination, another girl died, the kingdom of heaven to her, ran away, fool, and on the way she gave God her soul, now everything is necessary, as it should be, commit. But the matting that had accidentally slipped down revealed a terrible disfigured corpse with scalded skin, scabs instead of hair, and stab and cut wounds.
Over time, Saltychikha's cruelty took on an even more pathological character. Simple beatings and the assassinations of serfs that would certainly follow them did not satisfy her, she began to invent more sophisticated tortures: she could set fire to her hair, tore her ears and nostrils with red-hot tongs, cut out the genitals of men and women who had been bound in advance, threw little ones alive into cauldrons of boiling water. girls.
And what about the serfs themselves? Could it be that they, like dumb cattle, were silent throughout all this time, with slavish obedience went to the slaughter?
On the contrary, dozens of complaints were written to all instances, but … Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova belonged to the upper class, she had “noble” blood in her veins, so it was not so easy to bring her to justice: all the local nobility could stand up to her defense.
Only in 1762, when Catherine II began to reign, one of the complaints against Daria Saltykova reached its destination and was accepted for consideration. It was submitted by a serf whose name was Yermolai; Saltychikha killed three of his wives in turn.
Catherine II referred the complaint to the Moscow Justice College, and she was forced to open a criminal case. In the course of the investigation, terrible details of the atrocities committed by Daria Saltykova in her house on Kuznetsky Most began to surface. According to the testimony of many witnesses, during the period from 1756 to 1762, the Bloody Lady killed 138 people with her own hands! But in the future, the investigation was able to officially establish and prosecute the facts of only 38 murders (Saltychikha and her henchmen knew how to hide ends in the water). But even these episodes were enough to make even seasoned judges indescribable horror.
Even at a time when the investigation in the Saltychikha case was in full swing, torture and murder did not stop in Saltykova's house: witnesses for the prosecution who dared to complain about their mistress were destroyed. The whole nightmare of those times was that the serfs, having given evidence against their master or mistress, were forced to return to him at the end of the interrogations.
The system of judicial protection did not apply to slaves.
The aggressiveness of the Bloody Lady was looking for a way out all the time and finally began to splash out not only on the serfs, but also on people of noble origin like her. When her lover, Count Tyutchev, told her that he wanted to marry another, Saltykova was so enraged that she ordered her servants to kill both Tyutchev and his bride, and also to burn down their houses so that nothing else could remind her about the insult inflicted. Fortunately, the henchmen, encouraged by the course of the investigation, ignored the order of Daria Saltykova, and Count Tyutchev survived.
The investigation into the Saltychikha case was conducted for 6 long years. The Bloody Lady in every possible way "greased" the lawyers, giving bribes to the right and to the left, and at social events and balls, where they did not stop inviting her, she repeatedly said that there was nothing to judge her, first of all, since serfs are not people, and secondly, it is impossible, because she is of “blue blood”.
But, despite the many obstacles created by the investigation by Saltychikha and her high-ranking patrons, the case was finished and brought to court. The ending of the bloody drama has come.
Having considered all the circumstances of the case, the Justice Collegium passed a death sentence to Daria Saltykova, admitting that “she inhumanly, torturously killed a large number of her men and women to death”.
Secret mechanisms were immediately set in motion, and the Senate in St. Petersburg made another decision - replacing the death penalty with punishment with a whip and hard labor. The patrons of the Bloody Lady were also not satisfied with this sentence, and finally Catherine II herself put an end to the matter. By a personal decree of the Empress, Saltykova was sentenced to one hour of standing in the center of Moscow at the pillar of shame and life imprisonment.
1768, October 7 - Saltychikha was brought in a canvas shroud to Execution Ground, hanging on her chest a board on which it was written: "The torturer and murderer", gave a lighted candle in his hands and tied to a post. According to contemporaries, thousands of people gathered to look at Saltykova, which the people have long been associated with the fabulous Baba Yaga and the ghoul. Red Square was crowded with people. Onlookers even climbed onto rooftops and trees. For an hour, while the Bloody Lady stood at the pillar of shame, the executioners beat her with whips, branded with a red-hot iron and cut out the nostrils of those who helped her in her atrocities at her feet. Toward the end of the "performance", the priest was also branded, who, at the behest of Saltychikha, performed the funeral service and buried those tortured by her as dead natural deaths.
On the next day, all of Saltychikha's henchmen were sent in convoy to the Siberian city of Nerchinsk for eternal hard labor, and Daria Saltykova herself was sent to the Moscow Ivanovo nunnery and lowered into a deep dark pit, called by the nuns "a penitential dungeon." The fanatic spent eleven long years in that dungeon on water and bread. During these years, she saw the light only when food was brought to her: together with the food, a lighted candle was lowered into the pit.
1779 - Saltkova's sentence was commuted, and she was transferred to a brick "cage" - an extension to the monastery wall. There was a barred window in the extension. One of his contemporaries told how through this window Saltychikha spat on the curious, cursed at them and tried to hit with a stick thrust through the bars of the grate. The 11-year repentance in the pit did not lead her to repentance, it only made her even more embittered.
An amazing fact: somehow Saltychikha managed to seduce the soldier guarding her and enter into an intimate relationship with him, as a result of which she became pregnant and gave birth to a child. Then she was already 50 years old! The soldier was severely punished with gauntlets and sent to a penal company for correction, but nothing is known about the fate of the newborn. Most likely, he could have been identified in any of the monasteries, where until the end of his days he atoned for the many sins of his bloodthirsty mother.
Daria Saltykova died on November 27, 1801 at the age of 71. They buried her in the Donskoy Monastery, next to her relatives.
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