The bloody mistress is the real story of the bloodiest woman. The story of a beautiful noblewoman

In 1768, near the Execution Ground, near the pillory stood the landowner Daria Saltykova - the famous Saltychikha, who tortured at least 138 of her serfs to death. For a woman who is not a ruler, this is a kind of record, the largest number of victims in history ...

While the clerk read from the sheet the crimes she had committed, Saltychikha stood with her head uncovered, and a plaque with the inscription "Tormentor and Murderer" hung on her chest. After that, she was sent to eternal imprisonment in the Ivanovo Monastery.

Daria Nikolaeva Saltykova, nicknamed Saltychikha (1730-1801), is a Russian landowner who went down in history as the most sophisticated sadist and murderer of more than a hundred serfs subject to her. She was born in March 1730 into a family that belonged to the pillar Moscow nobility; relatives of Darya Nikolaevna's parents were the Davydovs, Musins-Pushkins, Stroganovs, Tolstoys and other eminent nobles. Aunt Saltykova was married to Lieutenant General Ivan Bibikov, and her older sister was married to Lieutenant General Afanasy Zhukov.

Marriage

Saltychikha's maiden name was Ivanova. She was the daughter of a nobleman who was related to the Davydovs, the Musin-Pushkins, the Stroganovs and the Tolstoys. She married the captain of the Life Guards Cavalry Regiment Gleb Alekseevich Saltykov. They had two sons who were enrolled in the Guards regiments.

Surprisingly, she was still a flourishing and, moreover, a very pious woman. Daria herself married Gleb Saltykov, captain of the Life Guards Cavalry Regiment, but in 1756 she was widowed. Her mother and grandmother lived in a nunnery, so Darya Nikolaevna became the sole owner of a large fortune. The 26-year-old widow was left with two sons, enrolled in military service in the capital's guards regiments. Almost every year, Daria Saltykova took a trip on a pilgrimage to some Orthodox shrine. Sometimes she drove quite far, visited, for example, the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra; during such trips, Saltykova generously donated "to the Church" and distributed alms.

crimes

At twenty-six, Saltychikha became a widow and received full possession of about six hundred peasants on estates located in the Moscow, Vologda and Kostroma provinces. In seven years, she killed more than a quarter of her wards - 139 people, most of them women and girls! Most of the murders were carried out in the village of Troitskoye near Moscow.

The main reason for the punishment was dishonesty in mopping or laundry. The punishment began with the fact that she struck the guilty peasant woman with blows with an object that fell under her arm. The offender was then flogged by grooms and haiduks, sometimes to death. Saltychikha could douse the victim with boiling water or singe her hair on her head. Victims were starved and tied naked in the cold.

In one episode, Saltychikha also got a nobleman. Land surveyor Nikolai Tyutchev - the grandfather of the poet Fyodor Tyutchev - was in a love relationship with her for a long time, but decided to marry another, for which Saltychikha almost killed him along with his wife.

Complaint to the Empress

The initial complaints of the peasants only led to the punishment of the complainants, since Saltychikha had an influential relationship and she managed to bribe officials with bribes. But still, two peasants, Savely Martynov and Yermolai Ilyin, whose wives she killed, in 1762 managed to convey a complaint to Catherine II, who had just ascended the throne.

At the beginning of the summer of 1762, two fugitive serfs appeared in St. Petersburg - Yermolai Ilyin and Savely Martynov - who set themselves an almost impossible goal: they set out to bring a complaint to the Empress Empress Ekaterina Alekseevna against their mistress, a large landowner Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova. The fugitives had almost no chance of success: firstly, they were in an illegal position and could not verify their identity with passports; secondly, the Sovereign Empress, according to the rules of the then office work, considered documents submitted only by the ranks of the highest four levels of the Table of Ranks (that is, not lower than the Privy Councillor). Before the era of Emperor Paul the First, who fixed a special box on the wall of the Winter Palace for denunciations of "all persons, without distinction of rank", there were still almost four decades; and this meant that a simple person could not be heard by the Power, which did not honor him with audiences and did not accept his petitions. You can say this: the Higher Power simply did not notice their slaves.

However, Ilyin and Martynov had no way back. They could only appeal to the highest Authority in the Empire and move only forward in an attempt to realize their plans. The way back meant certain death for both. Surprisingly, both were able to successfully complete an almost hopeless enterprise.

If the fugitives acted according to the law and tried to file a complaint against their mistress at the place of residence, they would certainly have expected the saddest end. Such attempts have already been made by their predecessors, and they all ended for the daredevils in a very sad (and sometimes downright tragic) way. Therefore, Ilyin and Martynov preferred a long and at first glance illogical path: at the end of April 1762, they fled from the Moscow house of their mistress, but did not move south, to the free Don steppes, but in the exact opposite direction, to the capital of the Empire. With all sorts of hardships and vicissitudes, the unpassported serfs reached St. Petersburg and hid there.

The fugitives were looking for approaches to the Winter Palace, more precisely, for such a person through whom they could convey a complaint to the Empress. It is not known how exactly such a person was found, it is not known at all who he was; most likely, not without a bribe. Be that as it may, in the first half of June, Catherine II received a "written assault" (as statements were called in those days) of Ilyin and Martynov.

Catherine II

In it, the serfs reported the following:
- They are known for their mistress Darya Nikolaevna Saltykova "deadly and not unimportant criminal cases" (as in the original);
- Daria Saltykova "from 1756 the soul with a hundred (...) her, the landowner, was destroyed";
- The authors asked the Empress of all serfs Saltykova "to protect from mortal destruction and merciless inhuman torment";
- Emphasizing the large number of people tortured by Darya Saltykova, the informers stated that only one of them, Yermolai Ilyin, had the landowner successively killed three wives, each of whom she tortured with her own hands;
- For themselves, the authors asked "not to give them, informers, and others into the possession of the landowner."

Lawlessness of the peasants

It should be noted that, in fact, the murders of peasants by landowners were very frequent; during the period under review, the Senate considered several dozen cases with one or more serf victims.

And how many cases did not reach the court, especially the Senate? However, before the Saltychikha case, even the Senate most often justified the landowners, especially if the victim did not die immediately after punishment, but after a while.

For example, a certain wife of Unterschichtmeister Gordeev, "having beaten her girl, drove her barefoot through the frost, so that she almost froze, and then kept her in a cold hallway, from which she died. However, due to Gordeeva's denial that this stay in the cold happened on her orders, the Senate acquitted her.

Even during the consideration of the case of Saltychikha, her serf, who contributed to the disclosure of atrocities, the Senate was sentenced to the whip "for false denunciation" in view of the fact that he incorrectly named the name of one of the victims tortured by her.

But the Saltykova case became a landmark case that marked a new era of legality, where a high position did not automatically give the right to excesses. All were to be equal before the law.

The gentry of the Smolensk gentry Vysotsky, who killed the wife of his peasant, was, however, sentenced to a whip and exile to Nerchinsk. Having canceled the whip, Catherine 2 supplemented this punishment with some shameful penalties. The widow Maryina, who, together with her young son, found a serf, was sentenced to confinement in a monastery, and the empress also increased the punishment.

Borzenkov, who had flogged two serf girls to death, was sentenced (according to the decision of the Belgorod provincial office) to deprivation of rights, a whip, tearing of the nostrils and imprisonment in the Alexander Fortress. The empress replaced this punishment with life imprisonment in a monastery with deprivation of rights and maintenance for some time on bread and water. A similar punishment befell: Lieutenant Turbina; Solodilova; Bibikov; Milshin, who killed three serfs at once; Kulyabka.

Even high-ranking dignitaries could no longer disregard the law. The senate sentenced Prince Kantemir to "exile to work," despite the fact that Chertkov, the governor of Kharkov and Voronezh, strongly stood up for him. The Senate sentenced Prince Davydov to severe punishment, who killed his man with a cleaver, and again the Empress added to the exile laid down by the Senate, 4 weeks of maintenance on bread and water.

In all these cases, despite the high position of the murderers, the Senate recognized the murder and did not look for extenuating circumstances. In addition, for some time now, even if the landowner was not found guilty of murder, he was tried for arbitrariness, because the state, not the landowner, should punish the peasants for the offenses.

A certain von Ettinger was accused of torturing serfs, one of whom died as a result. From the Orenburg Provincial Chancellery, the case passed to the Senate, which imposed a very light punishment on the guilty person, namely: imprisonment for a month, church repentance and the withdrawal of a subscription, that henceforth she would not show such severity. However, on October 18, 1770, the highest command was issued in this case, which indicated that Ettinger had tortured the serf for his escapes, i.e. for cases “which are not subject to investigation by her, but are subject to city justice”, that the serf, in essence , would be liable for escape to a state court, and that this abuse of power on the part of Ettinger by the senate was ignored.Revising its decision, the senate found that Ettinger had indeed appropriated the power of an official, and supplemented its first sentence with a decree for the confiscation of the Ettinger estate.

To the same punishment and for the same reasons was sentenced by the Senate to a prominent dignitary of that time, personally known to the Empress, General-in-Chief von Weymarn, who had beaten his servant Heidemann on suspicion of theft; this time the punishment was mitigated by the Empress, who ordered Weimarn to be reprimanded in the College of Justice and to recover 3,000 rubles from him. in favor of Heidemann.

Consequence

The Empress did not brush aside the paper, it was too painful for a large number of victims to be discussed there. Although Saltychikha belonged to a noble family, Catherine II used her case as a show trial that marked a new era of legality.

From the Office of Her Imperial Majesty, the denunciation of Ilyin and Martynov was submitted for consideration and decision to the Governing Senate. From there, he was transferred to the Moscow office of the Governing Senate, and then ended up in the College of Justice. There it was accepted into production (i.e., they began to consider it on the merits) on October 1, 1762. Although the Moscow Justice College was directly involved in detective cases in this case, the general management of the search was carried out from St. Petersburg by the Senate. It was this autonomy, which allowed the detectives not to obey the Moscow administration, as it will become clear from the subsequent course of events, that made it possible to bring the search to the end.

In the Moscow College of Justice, the case fell into the hands of the most “mongrel” (that is, ignoble, without family and business ties) official - Stepan Volkov. In every organization there are two categories of workers: those who pull the strap, do the job and remain unnoticed by anyone, and those who do nothing, but manage to be in front of the authorities and receive all the thanks. Court adviser Volkov was from the first category. When a command came from the northern capital to accept a complaint against Daria Saltykova for investigation, all the officials immediately realized that the matter was risky: on the one hand, in St. because she has all of Moscow in her relatives. In short, wherever you throw it - everywhere is a wedge! Therefore, all of Volkov's more or less eminent colleagues managed to push this matter away from themselves, as they say.

The fact that it was the poorest and humblest investigator who took up this case may have predetermined the success of the entire investigation. In any case, it was thanks to him that the search, which lasted for several years, made it possible to stop the landowner who did not know any brakes. In submission to Volkov, a young court adviser, Prince Dmitry Tsitsianov, was appointed. Together, they actually "promoted" this case.

During the first year - until November 1763 - the investigators studied the account books arrested from Saltykova and interrogated witnesses. Numerous servants of the landowner, who lived in her Moscow house on Kuznetskaya Street, on Sretenka, were interviewed. Her servants from the estates in Troitsky (near Moscow) and in Vokshino were interrogated.

The study of the account books allowed the investigators to quite accurately determine the circle of officials of the Moscow administration who had warm relations with Daria Saltykova and received various kinds of presents from her. In addition, it was possible to trace the movement of serfs in the landowner's possessions: whom and to whom she sold, who went to work and crafts, who died, who signed up for the service staff.

Female mortality among serfs

A lot of interesting things have been revealed here. First of all, the percentage of officially deceased serfs seemed rather suspicious to the investigators, and the death rate among women far exceeded the death rate among men, which could not find any logical explanation. From the very beginning, the deaths of some people were presented as a consequence of a crime, which, however, no one thought to investigate. So, for example, in November 1759, the body of the deceased serf Saltykova Khrisanf Andreev with noticeable bodily injuries was presented to the Detective Order of Moscow. The investigation into his death was carried out by officials of the order with obvious and gross violations in the execution of documents, for example, documents dated early referred to later ones, which undoubtedly indicated forgery.

Saltychikha at work. Lubok picture of the 19th century

In addition, investigators from the College of Justice compiled a list of Saltykova's serfs by name, the circumstances of whose life or death, even according to the documents, seemed very suspicious. For example, a young, healthy, 20-lazy woman ended up in Saltykova's house as a domestic servant and died two weeks later. The deaths of Yermolai Ilyin's three wives were very suspicious, as the latter mentioned in a denunciation addressed to the Empress. Ilyin, by the way, held the position of Saltykova's "personal groom", that is, he was a person quite close to the landowner, in any case, who came into contact with her daily. Within three years, Yermolai Ilyin's three young wives died one by one. Saltykova, according to the entries in her house books, let some of her servants go to her patrimonial villages, but for some reason they either died immediately or disappeared there, so much so that no one could really say where these people are now .

In total, court adviser Volkov counted 138 (!) Saltykova's serfs, who, in his opinion, became victims of the mistress's crimes.

Along the way, the archives of the office of the Moscow civil governor, the Investigative Order, and the Moscow police chief were checked. It turned out that in the period 1756-62. 21 (!) Complaints were filed against Darya Saltykova by her serfs. For those dark times, it was a kind of record. Each of the complaints cited specific examples of beatings and subsequent deaths of serfs. Formally, all the complaints filed were properly checked, but its bias was not in doubt. The fate of the complainants was painful: the police returned them to the landowner, where they were followed by a strict "recovery", or put on trial "for slander". In the latter case, the complainants were sent to hard labor in Siberia. Like many landowners of that era, Daria Saltykova had her own prisons with torture chambers, decks, shackles, "chairs". Some of the scammers once got there, remained in prison for years and were released only thanks to the investigation that arose.

Arrest

Quite quickly, investigators from the Moscow College of Justice became convinced that Saltykova was obstructing justice. As long as this woman remained at large and controlled the lives of her slaves, the investigators could not count on the complete frankness of the witnesses. A domineering and self-confident woman spread an aura of permissiveness around her. Saltykova's servants, seeing the complete futility of complaints against the hostess, directly told Volkov and Tsitsianov that "there could be no justice against her" and, on this basis, refused to help the investigation.

Therefore, in an extract from the case dated November 6, 1763 and sent to the Governing Senate (in St. Petersburg), it was proposed to allow the investigation to resort to radical measures that could help obtain the necessary information. First of all, the capital was asked for permission to torture Daria Saltykova. In addition, the Justice College asked the Governing Senate to appoint a property manager for Saltykova, and to remove the suspect from managing estates and funds in order to make it impossible to intimidate serfs and give bribes to officials. Also, as one of the measures that could help justice, the investigators named a "general search" on the estates of Saltykova with a total interrogation of all the serfs who lived there.

At this point it is necessary to make a small digression. By the middle of the 18th century, Russian legislators were becoming more and more convinced that the use of torture should be limited. In the draft of the new Judicial Code (the so-called Code of 1742), an attempt was made to legislate restrictions on the torture of women in childbirth and pregnant women, children under 12 years old and the elderly over 70 years old, as well as insane people. Subsequently, this project was supplemented by a restriction on torture against persons belonging to the first eight ranks of the "Table of Ranks", the minimum age of the tortured was raised to 15 years, a ban was introduced on the torture of persons of the nobility, etc. Although these proposals did not officially enter into force (since the draft Code of 1742 itself was not adopted), however, the ideas of introducing various restrictions on torture were already in full swing in the air. By the beginning of the 60s of the 18th century, Russian senators openly discussed the possibility of introducing such norms restricting torture, such as, for example, "the severity of torture should not exceed the severity of the punishment imposed by the court" or "torture is unacceptable in a case where indisputable evidence of guilt has been obtained" etc. Emperor Peter the Third spoke out in favor of the prohibition of the use of torture to obtain evidence during the preliminary investigation; Empress Catherine II, who succeeded him on the throne, repeatedly spoke in the same spirit. That is why the Moscow Justice College appealed to the Governing Senate with a request to officially allow the torture of Daria Saltykova.

Such permission has not been obtained. In the “Saltykova case”, the Empress resorted to a directive repeatedly repeated subsequently to the investigators: torture should be used to intimidate the interrogated person, but it cannot be used. During her reign, this technique was repeated many times in a variety of (and important) investigations: in the "case of Vasily Mirovich", in the investigation of the conspiracy of Peter Khrushchev and Semyon Guryev, in the investigation of the "Pugachev case", etc. Some time will pass and November 8, 1774 d. The Empress will sign a secret Decree banning throughout the Empire torture during interrogation. This decree was not publicly announced with the aim that the townsfolk did not know about the ban that had appeared and continued to tremble at the threat of torture. One can argue about how moral it is to intimidate the interrogated with torture, but it should be recognized that since the 60s of the 18th century in Russia they stopped torturing suspects in the dungeons (although the executioners, of course, survived: they carried out the sentences of the courts in terms of imposing bodily punishments).

Otherwise, the request of the Moscow investigators was satisfied: Daria Saltykova was removed from managing her property and money, which, from January 1764, Senator Saburov, who was appointed "guardian" (now he would be called "temporary manager"), began to dispose of. Investigators also received permission to conduct a "general search in the houses and estates" of the suspect, if such a need arises.

The same case of Saltychikha, stored in the state archive.

At the beginning of February 1764, court adviser Stepan Volkov officially informed Daria Saltykova about taking her "under guard" and the forthcoming torture. According to tradition, a priest was assigned to her, who was to prepare the woman for trial and possible death, and also to persuade Saltykova not to bring the investigation to extreme cruelty. The priest of the Moscow Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker Dmitry Vasiliev, by order of the Moscow mayor, spent exactly a month in the company of Darya Nikolaevna; during all this time, he persuaded the suspect to cleanse her soul with a sincere confession and repentance. Saltykova listened to the priest, indulged in general discussions about religion and morality, but she did not admit her guilt and claimed that she had been slandered by the servants. After a month - on March 3, 1764 - the priest submitted a report to the College of Justice, in which he officially informed the investigators about the failure of his mission: Saltykova did not stop her denial and was "prepared by him for inevitable torture."

Meanwhile, the investigators did not have sanctions for torture. But in order not to reduce the degree of psychological pressure on the suspect, Stepan Volkov decided on a rather cruel hoax: on March 4, 1764, Daria Saltykova, under strict military guard, was taken to the mansion of the Moscow police chief, where the executioner and officials of the search unit were also brought. The suspect was told that she was "delivered to be tortured." However, that day it was not her who was tortured, but a certain robber, whose guilt was not in doubt. Saltykova was present during the torture from beginning to end; cruelty of execution e. b. scare Saltykova and break her stubbornness. However, other people's suffering did not make a special impression on Darya Nikolaevna, and after the end of the "interrogation with passion", which she witnessed, the suspect, smiling, repeated in Volkov's face that "she does not know her guilt and will not slander herself." That. the investigator's hopes of intimidating Saltykova and thereby obtaining a confession of guilt were not crowned with success.

Such fearlessness of Darya Nikolaevna, most likely, had no moral force under it, but a banal awareness of the powers of the investigation. In any case, such an assumption seems to be the most reliable; as the subsequent course of events showed, Saltykova had good friends in the police environment, always ready to come to her aid.

However, Stepan Volkov did not calm down. The collegiate adviser once again wrote to St. Petersburg, hoping to get a sanction for "interrogation with prejudice." It is not difficult to understand the investigator: the confession of the suspect was considered as the most valuable evidence, and the theory of evidence within the framework of the law of that time was in its infancy. Volkov wanted to get official permission from the capital for the possibility of not only intimidating with torture, but also putting it into practice.

But on May 17, 1764, the 6th Department of the Governing Senate sent an order to Moscow to stop threatening Saltykova and witnesses in her case with torture: "(...) Her Imperial Majesty was ordered by decree not to repair either her (yard) people or torture ". The investigator had to reconcile himself and the question of the admissibility of torture was not raised in the investigation of the Saltykova case.

However, Volkov still had one more very effective instrument of inquiry in reserve: a general search.

General search on Sretenka

This investigative technique (quite common at that time) can be put in line with modern “cleansings”. In practice, a general search was carried out as follows: a large police team (garrison soldiers could be attached to it) blocked a settlement or a city block, and it was possible to get inside the cordon from the outside, but to get out - no, hence the saying: the entrance is a ruble, the exit - two). The police brigade interrogated without exception everyone who fell into the cordon, and, if necessary, conducted searches of any premises without any additional sanctions.

"General searches" stretched out for several days and were sometimes accompanied by individual interrogation of hundreds of people, and the persons awaiting interrogation and those who underwent it were kept separately. The effectiveness of this method of inquiry should not be underestimated; this technique was successfully used in the fight against large gangs of robbers who relied on accomplices who legally lived in cities and villages. The psychological effect was also important: the townsfolk saw numerous armed guards and were involuntarily imbued with a consciousness of the seriousness of the authorities' intentions, and the fear of slander from the neighbors usually pushed even the most timid witnesses to give frank and detailed testimony. The demonstrative activity of the detective and the fear of being accused of failure to report unleashed tongues better than any promise.

In the first ten days of June 1764, simultaneous general searches were carried out both in Moscow, in the quarter where the house of Darya Saltykova was located, and in the village of Troitskoye near Moscow, where, allegedly, the landowner sent her delinquent household.

Given the piety of Saltychikha, she must have been there.
However, this building was also rebuilt after the fire of 1812.

In Moscow, on Sretenka, the search was led by Stepan Volkov himself. The scale of the event can be judged by the fact that more than 130 people were interrogated alone! A significant part of those interrogated reported the exact dates of the murders committed by Saltykova and even named the names of the dead.

Among the crimes, which were told by residents of neighboring houses and priests of the Vvedensky Church and the Church of John Belogradsky (both located in the immediate vicinity of Saltykova's house), in particular, were:
- murder by means of prolonged beatings of a 12-year-old courtyard girl (presumably Praskovya Nikitina);
- the murder as a result of prolonged torture of 19-year-old Fekla Gerasimova (whose body was officially handed over to the 1st police team, where the priests saw the deceased);
- keeping serfs in shackles and logs (this was reported independently by four people who lived next door to Daria Saltykova's house);
- long-term maintenance of barefoot serfs in the winter in the snow (testimonies were given by nine witnesses);
- prolonged corporal punishment of the servants, during which Saltykova personally commanded the torturers "beat more!" (five witnesses).

It should be noted that 94 people interrogated by Stepan Volkov during the general search on Sretenka stated that they knew nothing about the crimes of Daria Saltykova.

In addition to the testimonies of the neighbors, the stories of the yard servant of the suspect turned out to be very important for the investigation. From the very beginning of the investigation, the serfs did not make any contact with Volkov. Apparently, disbelief in the power of the law dominated the intimidated and downtrodden people. Now, when the arrested lady lost the aura of personal immunity, the serfs gradually believed that the principled investigator would still be able to find justice for the presumptuous noblewoman.

An important result of the general search conducted in the Moscow house of Darya Saltykova was the discovery of a very remarkable ledger, filled in by the housekeeper Savely Martynov, which listed all the bribes distributed by Saltykova to officials of the Moscow administration. This most curious document revealed the extreme degree of corruption and unscrupulous greed inherent in prominent officials, thanks to which the murders committed in the very center of Moscow year after year were ignored by officials responsible for maintaining law and order and legality.

Among the persons who received valuable gifts and money from Darya Nikolaevna were: the head of the police office, real state councilor Andrey Ivanovich Molchanov, the prosecutor of the Detective order Fyodor Khvoshchinsky, those present at the Detective order, court advisers Lev Velyaminov-Zernov and Pyotr Mikhailovsky, secretary of the Secret Office Ivan Yarov, actuary of the Investigative Department Ivan Pafnutiev, etc. This explained why none of the complainants against Saltykova could find the truth in Moscow.

General search in Troitskoye

Simultaneously with the general search on Sretenka, a similar operation was carried out in the Trinity estate near Moscow and the village of the same name Saltykova, as well as the villages adjacent to it. In addition to Troitsky, some other settlements also got into the police cordon: the villages of Salarevo, Orlovo, Semenovskoye. The search was led by Prince Dmitry Tsitsianov, later (after the search in Moscow) Volkov came to his aid.

The Troitskoye estate (now the village of Mosrentgen) is now a very quiet and peaceful place. In the photo is the place where the manor house stood.

The number of people interrogated was in the hundreds. Only in the extract on the case, prepared in the following - 1765 - year, the testimony of almost 300 people interrogated by Tsitsianov during the general search is mentioned.

In general, the information obtained by the investigator related to the following criminal acts of Daria Saltykova:
- the murder in the summer of 1762 of the yard girl Fekla Gerasimova; information about this crime supplemented the information received by Volkov in Moscow. The elder of the village of Troitsky, Ivan Mikhailov, who directly transported the corpse of the tortured girl, gave incriminating testimony to Saltykov and named witnesses who could confirm the correctness of his words, in particular, police doctor Fyodor Smirnov, who examined the body of the murdered woman in the premises of the Moscow provincial office;
- beatings, torture by hunger and the subsequent deaths of the yard girls Afimya and Irina (which they reported in their deathbed confession to the priest of the Trinity Church Stepan Petrov);
- the facts of Saltykova's repeated and cruel mockery of her serfs were confirmed by a significant number of peasants in neighboring villages (80 people). However, it should be noted that none of them was a direct witness to the beatings and gave their testimony from hearsay;
- a significant number of Saltykova's serfs (22 people) told the investigation that they had heard from the servants of the mistress that she had committed repeated murders of people, but they themselves were not witnesses of such.

In general, the searches of Volkov and Tsitsianov made it possible to move the investigation forward sharply. Now the detectives had at their disposal a significant number of witnesses, on the basis of whose testimony it was possible to quite accurately reconstruct both the circumstances of the life of Saltykova herself and her servants. Recall that Volkov had a list of serfs in his hands, consisting of 138 names, the fate of which should be clarified, because they were all potential victims of their mistress. Of this list, 50 people were officially considered "dead from illnesses", 72 people were "missing without a trace", 16 were considered "left to her husband" or "gone on the run."

The serfs of Daria Saltykova accused their mistress of the death of 75 people. However, not all of the cases of murders alleged by Saltykova had witnesses or accomplices; a significant proportion of the applicants' statements were made with reference to missing or deceased persons, and therefore such statements required careful verification. In addition, some of the yard servants were involved in the crimes of the hostess (following her orders to beat people) and therefore, recognizing some events, these people categorically refused to recognize others. The latter circumstance noticeably confused the investigation, since it caused contradictions among the witnesses on a large number of facts.

Nevertheless, the investigators managed to separate the "wheat from the chaff" and, through a scrupulous comparison of a huge number of details, restore the bloody path of Darya Nikolaevna Saltykova, which had stretched for years. It makes sense to dwell on some of the most egregious (and at the same time characteristic) crimes of this landowner.

Three wives of Yermolai

First of all, the investigation was interested in the question of whether the three wives of Yermolai Ilyin (one of the two authors of the petition addressed to the Empress) were really tortured by Saltykova? In other words, had the informer misled the Empress?

It turned out that in March 1762, among the domestic servants of Saltykova, who permanently lived in her Moscow house, a kind of conspiracy was formed. The conspirators - the brothers Shavkunov, Tarnokhin, Nekrasov and Ugryumov - decided to inform the Moscow authorities about the atrocities of the lady.

I must say that this was far from the first attempt by the servants to inform the authorities about Saltykova's crimes, but for the first time not one, not two, but five people at once decided to make an agreed statement. Knowing that Darya Nikolaevna has excellent personal relations with the ranks of the Moscow police, five daredevils decided to file a complaint with the Senate office (that is, the branch of the Governing Senate in Moscow).

The serfs hid from the house of the landowner at night, but she missed the fugitives and sent a chase after them. Five servants, fearing reprisals on the spot, turned to the night police guard for help. The fugitives were detained, taken to the neighborhood, then escorted to the police chief's office. They were kept there for two weeks, during which they repeatedly announced the numerous murders of people committed by Saltykova, mentioning, among other things, the murder of Yermolai Ilyin's three wives.

The police tried to return the five servants to the mistress, but the people refused to go to her house, for which they were beaten by the police right on the street. In the end, all five were taken to the Senate office, where the applicants were officially interrogated and ... returned to Daria Saltykova. There, the fugitives were flogged and sent to Siberia. It was the unfortunate outcome of the escape of the brothers Shavkunov, Tarnokhin, Nekrasov and Ugryumov that led Yermolai Ilyin and Savely Martynov to the idea of ​​seeking the truth in St. Petersburg.

So, Stepan Volkov found out that denunciations about the murder of Ilyin's three wives had already been submitted before both to the police and to the Senate office. This, of course, increased the credibility of Yermolai Ilyin's statement. But besides this, the investigator for the first time learned the names of people who were direct witnesses to the murders of the mentioned wives. These were Mikhail Martyanov, Pyotr Ulyanov, Vasilisa Matveeva and Aksinya Stepanova. In addition, a significant number of people were able to confirm the presence on the bodies of dead women of obvious and, moreover, very significant bodily injuries (scab on open wounds, torn hair, traces of scalding with boiling water, burned ears, bruises, etc.; however, about the methods of killing Saltykova people will be discussed later). That. the investigation, thanks to a general search, was able to find confirmation that the three wives of Yermolai Ivanov were indeed killed by the landowner.

The story of the three wives of Yermolai Ivanov, restored by the investigation, turned out to be in general terms as follows: the first wife of the coachman lady was the "yard girl" Katerina Semenova, whose duty was to wash the floors in the master's house (she did this along with other servants). Having caused the displeasure of the hostess with poor washing of the floors, Semenova was flogged with batogs and whips, after which she died. This happened in 1759. The Moscow priest Ivan Ivanov was invited to the dying woman, who was content with the "deaf confession" of the dying woman (the woman could no longer speak) and allowed the body to be buried in the cemetery at the temple in which he served. Saltykova quickly married her coachman, because she did not want him to "languish without a woman." It can be assumed that Ivanov was in good standing with his mistress, in any case, she clearly did not want a young, well-informed peasant to walk in bachelors.

The second wife of Yermolai was the young Fedosya Artamonova, who was settled in the Moscow house of Saltykova and assigned various household chores. Very soon, Fedosya aroused the displeasure of the hostess and, like Katerina Semenova, was subjected to the most severe flogging. As a result, in the spring of 1761, Fedosya died, and Saltykova again called her good friend, priest Ivanov. He, however, was embarrassed by the obvious traces of violence visible on the face and body of the murdered woman and stated that he would not allow her to be buried as an ordinary deceased: they say, let Saltykova present the body to the police and receive official permission for burial. Darya Nikolaevna, of course, did not trouble herself; she ordered the corpse of Fedosya Artamonova to be taken to Troitskoye, so that the local priest Stepan Petrov would bury it without delay. And so it was done.

Less than six months later, Yermolai Ivanov, at the behest of the mistress, was married for the third time. The last wife - pretty and quiet Aksinya Yakovleva - was very fond of him. However, the age of Aksinya, like her predecessors, turned out to be very short-lived, she was killed at the end of February 1762. None of the witnesses could remember the reason for Daria Saltykova's anger: the landowner suddenly attacked the maid and began to beat her with her own hands. After several blows with her hands, Saltykova armed herself with a rolling pin, then, considering it not a serious enough tool, she grabbed a log. Witnesses Mikhail Martynov and Pyotr Ulyanov watched the murder scene from beginning to end, and a little later they were joined by Matveyeva and Stepanova. Saltykova called the last ones herself, so that they would give the beaten wine to drink and prepare for communion. The landowner ordered to call the priest, so that he would commune the dying woman and allow her to be buried in Moscow.

However, it was not possible to revive Aksinya Yakovlev. The woman died without regaining consciousness. Priest Ivanov, seeing a corpse with black bruises on the face and hands and jets of blood from the nose and ears, refused to bury Yakovlev. Saltykova ordered to take the murdered woman to Troitskoye and instruct the priest Petrov to bury Yakovlev. The order of the landowner was carried out by Aksinya Stepanova and the coachman Roman Ivanov (the latter was Saltykova's confidant and took part in many of her crimes). They handed over the body to the headman of the village, Ivan Mikhailov.

It is noteworthy that the murder of Aksinya Yakovleva caused a nervous breakdown Yermolai Ilyin, the husband of the deceased. The coachman cried and shouted, fearlessly threatened revenge on the fierce landowner, and his fury frightened her in earnest. Saltykova ordered to put him in her prison under guard. Yermolaya was guarded by two "haiduks" (guards) of the landowner, and he had to demonstrate feigned humility and ask for forgiveness from the mistress in order to get out of custody.

It should be noted that the investigation did not insist on Saltykova's guilt in the murder of Yermolai Ilyin's first two wives. Although a number of considerations incriminated the landowner, nevertheless, direct evidence and testimonies did not exist. In general, the investigation interpreted all doubts in favor of the suspect, recognizing only indisputable facts, firmly confirmed by several witnesses. Therefore, in the end, Saltykova was accused only of killing the third wife of her coachman, Aksinya Yakovleva.

Last victim

One of the most scandalous crimes of Daria Saltykova was the murder of Fekla Gerasimova. This courtyard girl turned out to be the last victim of the landowner, she died in July 1762, at the very time when the issue of initiating an investigation against Saltykova was already being decided in St. Petersburg.

Postcard. From the painting thin V. N. Pchelina. "Saltychikha". 20s of the 20th century

The woman, beaten in the Moscow house of Saltykova, was taken to the village of Troitskoye for burial. The headman was instructed to organize the funeral of Gerasimova, although the woman was still alive. There was no doubt that Gerasimova was subjected to the most severe beating; according to the elder Ivan Mikhailov, "and her hair was torn out, and her head was broken, and her back was rotten." Mikhailov, who until that time unquestioningly covered up the black deeds of the hostess and repeatedly put his signature as a witness under falsified entries in the church book (these entries certified the supposedly natural nature of the death of the buried), this time was indignant. It is difficult to say what prompted the headman to show integrity - either the rumors about the escape of Yermolai Ilyin and Savely Martynov, or the March escape of 5 serfs to the Moscow Senate - but Mikhailov suddenly announced that he would not bury Gerasimova. He took the body of the woman who died in his arms back to Moscow, and tried to draw the attention of as many people as possible to this. The corpse of Thekla, disfigured by beatings, was seen not only by the villagers of Troitsky, but also by residents of other villages.

Mikhailov presented the corpse of a tortured woman in the office of the Moscow civil governor. The case was rather scandalous, none of the officials wanted to pretend that nothing was happening, and therefore they had to call doctors and inform the police about what had happened. Dr. Fyodor Smirnov officially examined the body and recorded numerous traces of bodily injuries in writing, his act was transferred to the detective police. The body of Gerasimova was also sent there. There, the body was received, examined, and after some time ... returned back to Troitskoye with an order to carry out the burial.

The plot of crimes

The investigation absolutely accurately established the time of the beginning of Saltykova's murders and tortures of her domestics. Until the death of her husband in 1756, no one noticed a particular tendency to assault Darya Nikolaevna. But about six months after the death of her husband, she began to increasingly resort to such a strange way of admonishing her servants as beating with a log. In the Moscow houses of that time, heated by stoves and fireplaces, firewood lay in almost every room; Darya Nikolaevna grabbed the first chock that came to hand and began to beat people with it. Gradually, the severity of the wounds inflicted in this way became stronger, and the beatings themselves became longer and more sophisticated. Saltykova began to use hot curling tongs for torment (then they were called "cooking tongs"): with them she grabbed the offender by the ears. Daria Nikolaevna fell in love with "hair pulling", this procedure was accompanied by hitting a person's head against the wall and sometimes lasted for a quarter of an hour. Many people killed by her, according to the stories of witnesses, had almost no hair on their heads; Saltykova learned to tear her hair in strands (this is quite difficult and requires a lot of strength in the fingers).

Tired of the beatings, the serf-owner instructed her "haiduks" to continue the beatings. Her lackeys (read - guards) flogged the guilty with whips and sticks. Usually two or three "haiduks" took part in the beatings; the coachman Yermolai Ilyin, one of the denunciators of the Empress Saltykov, was among the trusted servants and regularly beat the guilty.

As early as 1757, systematic murders of people began in Saltykova's house. In December, the pregnant Anisya Grigorieva was beaten to death. During her section with batogs (this was done by the groom Bogomolov and the above-mentioned Yeromlai Ilyin on the orders of Saltykova), the woman had a miscarriage. Saltykova ordered Ilyin's wife (the same Katerina Semenova, who later herself died at the hands of the landowner) to bury the discarded fetus at the Vvedenskaya Church in Moscow; Semyonova at night, secretly fulfilled this order. Grigorieva died without receiving communion, and a visiting priest, Ivan Ivanov, refused to bury the body without official permission.

Police doctor Nikolai Telezhkin officially testified to the presence of numerous marks of beatings and open wounds on the body. Apparently, Anisya Grigorieva was dying for several days from blood poisoning, because the act signed by Telezhkin indicated putrefactive changes in the skin in the area of ​​\u200b\u200bthe wounds; the text of his conclusion leaves no doubt as to the violent cause of the woman's death.

The husband of the deceased stated directly in the office of the police chief that his wife had died from the beatings of the landowner. Chronologically, this was the first official denunciation of the atrocities of Daria Saltykova. However, there was no reaction from the authorities to the message received: the body of Grigorieva was returned to the serf with official permission to carry out the burial, and the informer, Trofim Stepanov, was given to Saltykova for punishment. It was officially stated that the husband of the deceased had escaped, and therefore his denunciation was dictated by the desire to avoid punishment for his own crime. Stepanov was severely flogged and exiled to the distant estate of Saltykova, where he soon died.

The ease with which the landowner got out of a dangerous situation for her clearly turned her head. In subsequent years, beatings and murders took on a phantasmagoric character.

three men

Not only women died at the hands of Saltykova (although, mostly they did!), But also men, for example, in November 1759, during a torture that lasted almost a day, a young servant Khrisanf Andreev was killed, and in September 1761 Saltykova personally killed the boy Lukyana Mikheeva.

The mockery of Andreev was especially sophisticated: at the behest of Saltykova, he was stripped naked and subjected to whipping. Khrisanf was flogged by his own uncle, groom Fedot Bogomolov. No one counted the number of blows received by Andreev, it is only known that after the beating stopped, the young man could not stand on his feet. He was left for the night in the yard "in the snow", a guard was posted nearby. The next morning Chrysanthos was still alive; Saltykova ordered him to be brought to her office and for some time beat him with a stick with her own hands. Then, with hot curling irons, she began to drag Chrysanthos by the ears, after that she poured boiling water from the kettle on his head, and then beat him again with a stick. In the end, Saltykova began to beat the unconscious body with her feet. Tired, she ordered Andreev to be carried away. The unconscious servant from Saltykova's office was carried out in his arms by the "haiduk" Leontiev. It remains to be added that the whole fault of Khrisanf Andreev, who died two hours later, consisted in "bad supervision of washing the floors"; Andreev was supposed to supervise the maids, and, according to the landowner, he did not cope well with this assignment.

Saltychikha. Illustration of the work of P.V. Kurdyumov to the encyclopedic edition "The Great Reform" - the anniversary encyclopedic edition of 1911, dedicated to the fiftieth anniversary of the implementation of the Peasant reform in Russia.
The artist Kurdyumov, when creating the picture, used the text of V.I. Semevsky:
Saltychikha beat her people with a rolling pin, a roller, a stick, logs, an iron, a whip, a whip, set fire to the hair on her head, took her ears with red-hot tongs, poured boiling water on her face, beat her head against the wall. By her order, the grooms punished the yard with butts from rods, batogs, lashes, and whips. She shaved her people's heads, put on stocks and in this form ordered them to work; in winter, after punishment, she exposed barefoot people to frost; starved. (See "Peasants in the reign of Catherine II", vol. 1, p. 224)

It should be noted that the murder of Khrisanf Andreev was a kind of exception: Saltykova did not torture men like that anymore. Lukyan Mikheev, apparently, was killed by her through negligence - the landowner hit him several times with his head against the wall, after which the death of the boy followed. Most likely, Saltykova did not expect to kill him at all. The investigation established that, at the behest of the landowner, another man died - Nikifor Grigoriev - but the reprisal against him was of an indirect nature, Grigoriev was beaten by "haiduks", while Saltykova herself did not touch him with a finger.

The list of men killed by Saltykova was exhausted by the three persons mentioned above. The bias towards female servants was obvious, although for some reason the investigation was not interested in the reason for such a strange preference (although this should have been done). In general, the investigator Volkov came to the conclusion that Darya Saltykova was "undoubtedly guilty" of the death of 38 people and "left in suspicion" regarding the guilt in the death of another 26 people. Regarding the guilt in the death of 11 people, the suspect was acquitted (or no charges were brought against Saltykova at all in their murder). The investigation considered that some of Saltykova's serfs wanted to slander the landowner and slandered her. Among such slanders, one can mention the testimony of a certain Vasily Antonov about the execution by order of the landowner of the village sorceress Irina Alekseeva, as well as the statement of Rodion Timofeev about the torture and subsequent murder of six "yard girls". It must be admitted that the investigation of the Justice College was carried out objectively and exactingly, without an obvious accusatory bias; all doubts about the veracity of the witnesses, all inconsistencies in their testimony were interpreted in favor of the suspect. The more valuable and more reliable the result!

Three questions

In particular, the investigation focused on three important issues that were not directly related to the murders of people committed by Saltykova, but that worried people and required clarification.

Lubok picture of the 19th century. Saltychikha atrocities

First, starting in 1764 and in subsequent years, rumors began to spread in Moscow, and then in other cities of Russia, that Saltykova not only killed people, but also ate human meat. Ignorant townsfolk explained precisely the culinary preferences of Darya Nikolaevna by her choice of women as victims (people believed that female meat should be more tender than male meat, and preliminary flogging of a person led to the separation of meat from bones, enabling the cannibal to get a high-quality tenderloin).

The investigation established with absolute certainty that all talk on this topic is groundless - Daria Saltykova never ate human meat and never gave orders to dismember the bodies of the people she killed. The accusation of cannibalism was never brought against her due to the lack of any grounds for this.

Secondly, the indictment specifically emphasized the fact that, in addition to the dead, a significant number of domestic servants systematically endured the most severe bullying and beatings from their mistress. Sometimes only a miracle saved the punished from seemingly inevitable death. So, for example, the oldest maid Agrafena Agafonova, taken to the Saltykovs' house by the late master Gleb Alekseevich in 1750, after the death of the latter, began to be subjected to systematic cavils from Darya Nikolaevna. At the end of 1756, on the orders of Saltykova, Agafonova was severely beaten by "haiduks" and her arms and legs were broken in several places. The woman turned into an invalid was sent to a distant estate, thanks to which she remained alive.

Many other servants of the landowner endured the cruelest bullying: Ekaterina Ustinova, the wife of the groom Shavkunov, was beaten with an iron, Akulina Maksimova burned all the hair on Saltykov’s head with her own hand with a torch, etc. its extremes, extreme manifestations; the terror itself did not actually stop. The objects of persecution of Darya Saltykova were not only the wives of the groom Yermolai Ilyin, who were killed by her, but also the wives of other servants - Shavkunov and Yudin. The list of persons who suffered from Daria Saltykova, presented by the Justice College, included 75 people (we repeat, only 38 of them were unconditionally recognized as dead as a result of beatings).

Thirdly, the investigators specifically investigated the issue of Saltykova's preparation for the murder of the nobleman Nikolai Andreevich Tyutchev. This captain, who worked in the provincial committee of lands and destinies, was engaged in surveying, that is, drawing boundaries on the ground between the lands of various owners. The position is very important, taking into account the fact that all the nobility of that time fed from land plots.

Tyutchev - unsuccessful love, failed last victim

The young captain, who in 1760 was engaged in reconciling the borders of Saltykova's estates near Moscow with entries in the land cadastre, became the lover of a young widow (Daria Nikolaevna was then 30 years old). Everything was fine at first, but in January 1762 Tyutchev was about to marry another.

Saltykova decided to destroy the unfaithful lover, and to do it in the most literal sense. The groom Savelyev bought 2 kg of gunpowder in two steps, which, after adding sulfur and tinder, was wrapped in flammable hemp. It turned out to be a powerful bomb.

By order of Saltykova, two attempts were made to plant this bomb under the Moscow house in which Captain Tyutchev and his bride lived. Both attempts failed because of the fear of the sent serfs before retribution. Timid grooms - Ivanov and Savelyev - were brutally whipped, but unsuccessful attempts to blow up the house forced Saltykova to reconsider the plan.

She decided to organize an ambush on the captain's route to Tambov, where he was supposed to go on business in April 1762. In an ambush, b. 10-12 men from Saltykova's estates near Moscow will participate.

The matter turned out to be serious: an attack on a nobleman when he was fulfilling a state task was no longer drawn to robbery, but to a conspiracy! This threatened the peasants not even with hard labor, but with beheading. The serfs, who knew about the successful escape of the peasants with a complaint about the saltychikha, were again afraid and threw an anonymous letter to the captain, in which they warned him about the impending assassination attempt on him.

Tyutchev officially notified the authorities of a possible attack and received 12 soldiers as guards during the journey to Tambov. Saltykova, having learned about the captain's protection, canceled the attack at the last moment.

The investigators of the Justice College, having studied the information about the preparation of the assassination attempt on Tyutchev, considered it reliable and admitted that Saltykova really bought gunpowder and prepared an ambush for the captain. Therefore, the suspect was found guilty of "malicious intentions against the life of Captain Tyutchev."

Mutual responsibility

Investigators could not help but dwell on the concealment of Saltykova's crimes by officials of the Moscow administration. Now such an interaction between law enforcement officers and a criminal would be called "corruption", but in those days they did not use such a term, they said differently: mutual responsibility. The officials covered by such were, by order of Saltykova, entered in a special notebook; in the same place, records were made about the sums of money and various goods transferred to officials in the form of gratitude (hay, firewood, honey, pig carcasses, geese, etc.). The presence of such a notebook, on the one hand, greatly facilitated the task of the investigation, and on the other hand, put Volkov in an extremely delicate position: Saltykova's friends were too high.

In January 1765, the Justice College circulated among the officials of the city administration, the police and the spiritual department a demand to declare the bribes received from Saltykova. The detectives hoped that the corrupt officials would turn themselves in and denounce themselves, thus saving the investigators from having to prove anything. The calculation was not justified: not a single official announced that he had received any gifts from Saltykova.

The position of corrupt officials improved markedly after the death in October 1764 of the Moscow priest Ivan Ivanov, who buried the people killed by Saltykova without confession and communion. The priest's papers were in great disarray: no documents were found in Ivanov's archive, obtained from the police chief's office, on the basis of which the priest was allowed to bury corpses with obvious bodily injuries. These documents would make it possible to name the official who covered up the crimes of Daria Saltykova, however, the disappearance of these papers did not allow this. It is difficult to say when and by whom the dangerous documents were destroyed - whether Ivanov himself did it, or one of the policemen after his death - this remained unclear.

Even more, the situation of those suspected of bribery improved after the court councilor Peter Mikhailovsky died unexpectedly in February 1765. This man worked in the Investigative Department and often helped Saltykova "to hide the ends in the water." Mikhailovsky liked to drink, and on this basis he could be considered a weak link in the chain of bribe takers.

But even after the deaths of Ivanov and Mikhailovsky, the investigation had a real opportunity to bring the criminals to clean water. However, this did not happen. All the officials interrogated in the Saltykova case - state councilor Molchanov, prosecutor Khvoshchinsky, court councilor Velyaminov-Zernov, actuary Pafnutiev - denied their involvement in concealing the crimes and swore an oath on the Holy Scriptures.

The suspects were greatly helped by the mistakes made in the testimony of Saltykova's serfs. So, for example, the groom Roman Ivanov, who took food to the house of Velyaminov-Zernov, claimed that the court adviser lived on Ordynka Street; in fact, Velyaminov-Zernov's house was located on Kuznetskaya Street. And the clerk Savely Martynov, who personally filled out a notebook with a list of bribes, erroneously stated that Saltykova had presented the actuary Pafnutiev with the serf Gavril Andreev. A check, according to the lists of the Moscow serf office (property rights to serfs were registered there), showed that Saltykova sold Andreev in 1761 for 10 rubles to a certain Agafya Leontyeva. The latter, in turn, gave Gavrila Andreev to her friend Anisya Smirnova, who was the great-aunt of Pafnutev's wife. It was in this way that the mentioned serf appeared in Pafnutev's house. The investigators failed to interrogate Gavril himself: in March 1765, he fled from his mistress, stealing 200 rubles from her.

There were other inconsistencies in the testimony of the serfs. By and large, they did not at all refute the striking facts of corruption among the Moscow bureaucracy, but the investigation clearly did not want to demonstrate an accusatory bias in this direction. Based on formal inconsistencies in the testimonies of the Justice College, Saltykova's accomplices were released from criminal prosecution, recognizing them as "formally cleared of suspicion." It is impossible not to recognize the obvious tension of this wording: we recall that in five and a half years, Saltykova's serfs filed 21 (!) Official complaints (or denunciations) against her and none of these appeals was properly considered by the authorities. The unwillingness of the Moscow police and officials of the city administration to consider the appeals of the serfs on the merits cannot be explained by anything other than the bribery of Saltykova.

Sentence

In the spring of 1765, the investigation in the Moscow Justice College was formally completed and sent for further consideration to the 6th Department of the Governing Senate. The supreme body of the judicial power of the Russian Empire at that time functioned quite differently from the current courts. The competitiveness of the court in the modern sense did not exist: the parties and witnesses were not invited to participate in the meetings, respectively, there were no interrogations and debates. The senators studied the investigative proceedings on the "extract", a brief note compiled from fragments of documents essential for understanding the case. If something in the extract seemed incomprehensible or doubtful, the senator could refer to the original source document, but this was the exception rather than the rule: senators usually did not work with the investigative file itself. But solicitors worked with him, preparing a report on the case for a meeting of the Senate Department and various information on the case. Much depended on the solicitors, they could focus on some circumstances and retouch others, so there were frequent attempts to bribe Senate officials by interested parties. If a senator - a nobleman and a very rich man - was very problematic to bribe (and this was the guarantee of the objectivity of the Senate court), then it was incomparably easier to give a bribe to the solicitor.

The latter circumstance, back in tsarist times, led to the appearance of a considerable number of accusatory and satirical maxims, which, since the time of Herzen, were not stingy with the enemies of the Autocracy. But by and large, there is no reason to consider the Senate court more inert or more corrupt than the highest courts in other European countries; one can say that he was quite in keeping with the spirit of his time.

It was unlikely that anyone could doubt that the court verdict would be guilty: the evidence presented by the investigation was too eloquent and convincing, and the spirit of Catherine hovered over the senators invisibly, not allowing their sense of class solidarity to triumph over common sense. For more than three years, the consideration of the "case of the murderer Saltykova" in the sixth department of the Senate dragged on; in the end, the judges found the defendant guilty of murdering and torturing courtyard people "without leniency." The wise senators did not issue a specific verdict, but sent a report to the Highest name, shifting the burden of making a decision on the monarch's shoulders. Such self-elimination of judges was quite legal: the Monarch was the source of law and, in principle, could make any decisions on court cases of any subordination. Since Catherine the Second stood at the origins of this case, it was up to her to finish it - so, apparently, the judges judged.

During the second half of September 1768, the Empress returned several times to the question of the final sentence for Darya Nikolaevna Saltykova. At least four rough drafts of the sentence are known, made by the Empress herself. Apparently, this question was extremely interested in Catherine II, who found herself in a very difficult dilemma: on the one hand, guided by the letter of the law, Saltykov should have been executed, and on the other, this should not have been done, since the Empress worked hard to create her own image in the eyes of her contemporaries as " humane and child-loving" ruler.

Finally, on October 2, 1768, Empress Catherine the Second sent a decree to the Governing Senate, in which she described in detail both the punishment imposed on Saltykov and the procedure for its administration. This decree is textually reproduced in volume 125 of the "Archive of the Governing Senate" and in view of its rather large size it does not make sense to bring it here, those who are interested can read it and. But we can dwell on the main points of this very curious document.

Daria Saltykova was referred to in it with the most derogatory epithets, such as: "an inhuman widow", "a freak of the human race", "a completely God-accessible soul", "a tormentor and a murderer", etc. father or husband, including in court (that is, Saltykova was forbidden to indicate her noble origin and family ties with other noble families); serving for an hour a special "reproachful spectacle", during which Saltykova had to stand on a scaffold chained to a pole with the inscription "tormentor and murderer" above her head (this punishment can be considered a prototype of a civil execution); to life imprisonment in an underground prison without light and human communication (light was allowed only during meals, and conversation was only with the head of the guard and a female nun). Interestingly, by the decree of Catherine of June 12, 1768, Saltychikha was deprived not only of all rights and all property, but also decided to continue to "call this monster a man."

In addition, by her decree of October 2, 1768, the Empress decided to return to her two sons all the property of the mother, which until then had been in the guardianship, and to punish Daria Saltykova's accomplices. These were recognized as the priest of the village of Troitsky Stepan Petrov, as well as one of the "haiduks" and grooms of the landowner (unfortunately, these people were not named in the decree, and therefore it is not entirely clear which servants were in question, perhaps they were footman Leontiev and groom Ivanov who participated in so many massacres of Saltykova).

Punishment

The punishment of the condemned landowner was carried out on October 17, 1768, on Red Square in Moscow. According to the memoirs of contemporaries, already a few days before this date, the ancient capital of Russia began to seethe in anticipation of reprisals. Both the public announcement of the upcoming event (in the form of publications in leaflets read out by officers in all crowded squares and intersections of Moscow) and the distribution of special "tickets" that all Moscow nobles received contributed to the general excitement. On the day of the massacre, Red Square was completely filled, people crowded into the windows of the buildings overlooking the square and occupied all the roofs.

At 11 o'clock in the morning, Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova was taken to the square under the guard of mounted hussars; in a black wagon next to the former landowner were grenadiers with drawn swords. Saltykova was forced to climb a high scaffold, where the decree of Empress Catherine II dated October 2, 1768 was read out. After an hour, Saltykova was brought down from the scaffold and put into a black wagon, which, under a military guard, went to the Ivanovo Convent (on Kulishki). On the same scaffold on the same day, priest Petrov and two servants of the landowner convicted in the Saltykova case were subjected to flogging and branding. All three were sent to hard labor in Siberia.

In the monastery, where the convict arrived after the punishment on Red Square, a special cell was prepared for her, called "repentant". The height of the room dug in the ground did not exceed three arshins (i.e., 2.1 m), it was completely below the surface of the earth, which excluded any possibility of daylight getting inside. The prisoner was kept in complete darkness, only at the time of eating she was given a candle stub. Saltykova was not allowed to walk, she was forbidden to receive and transmit correspondence. On major church holidays, Saltykova was taken out of her prison and taken to a small window in the wall of the temple, through which she could listen to the liturgy. A special board fence, which closed the space between the exit from the cell and the window, did not allow outsiders to see Saltykova and thus prevented all communication with people.

For spiritual guidance, the abbess of the monastery was allowed to Saltykova. Unfortunately, we do not know anything about whether the prisoner repented of anything, whether she asked for communion, whether she found any justification for her actions, etc. There are no documents about Saltykova’s behavior in captivity and her conversations with the abbess of the monastery in the synodal archive not preserved.

It remains to be added that Saltykova's detention regime symbolized "burial alive." For all its severity, such a regime was not something exceptional for that time, many prisoners
Solovetsky monastery, for example, were kept in similar or more difficult conditions.

Daria Saltykova was kept in the underground prison until 1779, that is, 11 years. Then there was a noticeable relaxation in the regime of her detention: Daria Saltykova was transferred to a stone annex to the cathedral church of the Ivanovo Monastery (in the figure - a small annex on the left), in which there was a barred window.

Cathedral Church of the Ivanovsky Monastery in Moscow. Saltychikha was imprisoned in a stone annex (on the left).

Visitors to the monastery were allowed to look through this window and even talk to the prisoner. The memoirs of contemporaries have been preserved that many residents of Moscow and visitors came to the Ivanovo Monastery themselves and brought their children with them specifically to look at the famous "Saltychikha".

According to the historian G.I. Studenkin, at the same time she:
"swearing, spitting and sticking a stick through the bars into an open, in the summer, window, thereby revealing her inveterate atrocity, which did not extinguish in her either remorse for atrocities, or the languor of long-term imprisonment in a gloomy rivet. Who saw the saltychikha at the end of the last century is now deceased State Councilor Rudin told P. G. Kicheev that she was full of herself and was already in advanced years, and from her movements it seemed that she was not completely sane ... "

To annoy her, the children allegedly even came up with a song:
Saltychikha-boltychikha, and high deacon!
Vlasyevna Dmitrovna Savivsha, old lady!...

Already after 1779, Saltykova gave birth to a child from a guard soldier; however, the reliability of this information is not great, since by this time the convict should have already been about 50 years old.

After death

It is impossible not to note the hypocrisy of the empress, who pursued the criminal, but wished not to notice the vile tricks of her patrons. By and large, the story of Saltykova can tell us about our ancestors no less than the works of Fonvizin and Karamzin, although, of course, this story will turn out to be completely unromantic.

After her death, the chamber in the church was adapted as a sacristy. Unfortunately, the historical church has not survived to the present day: it was dismantled in 1861.

Saltychikha's grave at the cemetery of the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow

Her grave is located in the fourth section of the cemetery at the Donskoy Monastery. There, still in the wild, she bought a plot, and there she was buried in a double grave with her eldest son, who died at the same time in the same 1801. There is even an inscription visible from the side of the collapsed sarcophagus (her eldest son).

From the story of G.I. Studenkin, "Saltychikha". Journal "Russian Antiquity" 1874 volume 10:
The evil memory of her was preserved among the people. The decree of Catherine II, dated October 2, 1768, went from hand to hand in printed copies and in many handwritten lists. The personification of her shameful kazpi passed even to popular prints. The word "Saltychikha" turned into a curse.

Indeed, for many decades, Daria Saltykova remained in the memory of the people as an example of the most inhuman sadism. Rumor accused the hated "Saltychikha" even of such crimes that she did not actually commit (for example, cannibalism).

Psychiatry

Although the general plot of the investigation of Saltykova's crimes is quite simple and does not raise any special questions, one cannot but admit that the motivation for the landowner's actions has remained unclear. The investigation did not establish what caused Saltykova's uncontrollable aggressiveness, to be more precise, the investigation did not ask this question at all. For some time now they began to look at Darya Nikolaevna as if she were crazy; meanwhile, such a view is hardly justified.

It is known that Saltykova was a woman who was not very intellectually developed. She did not know how to write, and all documents that required her signature were signed by her eldest son. At the same time, illiteracy did not at all prevent the development of a strong religious feeling in Saltykova’s soul: she strictly monitored the observance of external Orthodox rituals, went on pilgrimage to Moscow monasteries, and even made a rather lengthy pilgrimage to the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra. It is known that the criminal was a generous donor for churches and monasteries. There is no reason to suspect that Saltykova's religiosity was ostentatious and insincere; her power and influence were such that there was no need for her to break the comedy and do what she did not want to.

The fact that a sincerely believing person committed those monstrous atrocities in which Saltykova is guilty objectively testifies to the existence of a serious psychiatric anomaly in him. Most likely, Saltykova was an epileptoid psychopath, since it is this category of patients that is most prone to unmotivated and extremely brutal murders. Epileptoid psychopaths commit their attacks in a state of dysphoria (from the Greek "disphoria" - irritation), an unmotivated viciously gloomy mood, the tension of which cannot be removed without conflict. In many features of his pathological personality, this person resembles an epileptic (this explains the use of the word "epileptoid"), although such a psychopath is not an epileptic. This category of people demonstrates a number of specific behavioral traits that distinguish them from other psychopaths, for example: a) an unreasonably gloomy and dreary mood, intensifying over several days; b) sadism, manifested in relation to both animals and people; c) the inability to quickly extinguish anger even after the external cause of its occurrence has been eliminated (in psychiatry, such stability of an emotion or experience is called "rigidity"); d) inability to control anger even in cases where the development of the conflict poses a danger to the psychopath himself; e) relatively low sexual activity, aggravated by an abnormal attraction (the latter is understood as jealousy, which has reached extreme forms of expression); f) a tendency to hoarding, prudent spending of material assets and funds.

All of the above features of an epileptoid psychopath can be seen in the behavior of Daria Saltykova. She was a gloomy, unsmiling woman, always in a bad mood. The sadistic inclinations of this woman are very fully described in the investigative proceedings, and this essay gives an idea of ​​​​how exactly Saltykova mocked the "guilty" people in her understanding. The beatings of the serfs sometimes dragged on for many hours and even days (here it is - the rigidity of emotions!) And the quick murder of the boy Lukyan Mikheev was not the rule of Saltykova, but just the same exception to the rule. The fact that Saltykova poorly controlled her anger was especially well manifested in the assassination attempts on Captain Tyutchev. Unsuccessful attempts to blow up the house did not stop the criminal, and only giving Tyutchev military protection forced Saltykov to finally abandon her plan. The history of relations with Captain Tyutchev confirms the thesis about Saltykova's low sexual activity; in fact, this was the only man in the life of a young widow for six years. At the same time, the landowner was insanely jealous of her chosen one and could not forgive him for choosing another woman.

It can be assumed that the assumption of Saltykova's epileptoid psychopathy describes well certain features of her behavior, but the lack of information about the childhood period of development does not allow us to unequivocally state that such an assumption is unconditionally true. Russian psychiatrist P. B. Gannushkin, who first formulated the very concept of "psychopathy" as an anomaly of character, pointed to the stability of the manifestation of pathological traits that are already noted at an early age. With regard to Saltykova, there are no such observations left; the investigators of the College of Justice, for obvious reasons, were not interested in the childhood and youth of the criminal.

Of course, Saltykova's choice of another victim was influenced by her gender and age. Of the nearly four dozen people tortured by her (and this is only the proven number of deaths!) Only two were men and one boy, the rest were young women and girls. The choice of objects of encroachment testifies to the latent homosexuality of Saltykova. During the investigation, no one ever accused her of inclinations towards same-sex sex, moreover, Saltykova herself would most likely reject such suspicions with indignation. Meanwhile, if the assumption about the epileptoid psychopathy of this criminal is correct, then her homosexuality does not in the least contradict the described features of the manifestation of this behavioral pathology. Many epileptoids demonstrate homosexuality, and unlike other psychopaths, they always play an active role in sex. Epileptoids tend to humiliate and beat a person who is sexually interesting to them, and in such cases they always act extremely rudely. You can say this: refined sadistic tricks are not for them. The fact that Saltykova pursued young girls and women indirectly indicates her sexual interest in them.

Of course, all of the above has a subjunctive mood. No one conducted a psychiatric examination of Daria Saltykova, since the science of psychiatry itself did not exist in those days. But those defects in her behavior and character, which made an indelible impression on her contemporaries, from the point of view of modern scientific ideas about counting, find fairly simple explanations and do not at all seem mysterious.

It must be emphasized that Saltykova was by no means a crazy woman. She was fully aware of the criminality of her own behavior, this is clearly seen from the stubbornness with which she denied even the most obvious evidence and convincing accusations. Considering herself a sincere Christian, she did not even think that pilgrimage trips and generous donations by no means cancel the Christian attitude towards living people. But the inability to understand this, in general, simple, thought does not stem from Saltykova's mental retardation, but rather is a defect in her upbringing. The bitterness of the situation lies in the fact that in the conditions of serfdom, callous, arrogant, unscrupulous people received the right to dispose of the lives of their serfs simply by virtue of their noble origin.

This happens quite rarely.

Saltychikha is not a unique phenomenon in world history. We know the names of no less terrible criminals. For example, Gilles de Re - "Bluebeard" - killed more than 600 children in the 15th century, and for example, a hundred years before Saltychikha, there lived a "bloody countess" in Hungary ...

Elizabeth Bathory of Eched(1560 - 1614), also called Chakhtitskaya pani or Blood Countess - a Hungarian countess from the famous Bathory family, infamous for the serial murders of young girls. The exact number of her victims is unknown. The Countess and four of her servants were accused of torturing and killing hundreds of girls between 1585 and 1610. The largest number of victims named during the trial of Bathory, 650 people.

However, this number comes from the statement of a certain woman named Shushanna, who allegedly found a list of the countess's victims in one of Bathory's private books and reported this to the participant in the trial of the countess, Jacob Silvashi. However, the book was never found and was not mentioned again in Silvasi's testimony. Despite all the evidence against Elizabeth, her family's influence kept the Blood Countess from being brought to justice.

The history of serial killings and brutality of Bathory is proven by the testimony of more than 300 witnesses and victims, as well as physical evidence and the presence of horribly mutilated bodies of already dead, dying and imprisoned girls found during the detention of the Countess.

In December 1610, Báthory was imprisoned in the Hungarian castle of Ceyte, where the countess was immured in a room until her death four years later.

"Second Saltychikha" the people called the wife of the landowner Koshkarov, who lived in the 40s of the 19th century in the Tambov province. She found particular pleasure in tyranny over defenseless peasants. Koshkarova had a standard for torture, from the limits of which she went only in extreme cases. Men were supposed to give 100 blows with a whip, women - 80 each. All these executions were carried out by the landowner personally.

The pretexts for torture were most often various omissions in the household, sometimes very insignificant. So, the cook Karp Orlov Koshkarova was whipped with a whip for the fact that there were few onions in the soup.

Another "Saltychikha" found in Chuvashia. In September 1842, the landowner Vera Sokolova beat to death the yard girl Nastasya, whose father said that the mistress often punished her serfs "by flaying their hair, and sometimes forced them to flog with rods and whips." And another maid complained that “the mistress broke her nose with her fist, and from punishment with a whip on her thigh there was a scar, and in winter she was locked in a latrine in one shirt, because of which she froze her legs” ...

Video lecture about Saltychikha

Video investigation of the Saltychikha case

Myths, fakes and portraits of namesakes

For some reason, very often the narrow-minded authors of articles about the Saltychikha think that if they found a portrait of Daria Saltykova, then this is exactly her, the Saltychikha. This is not true.

In fact, there were no lifetime portraits left of Saltychikha, there are only popular prints and fantasy paintings painted much later than her death.
But since the surname was noble, there are a lot of branches in it, there are portraits of "other" Saltykovs, whom for some reason, not very smart people, without any checks, rank as portraits of the Saltychikha.

For example, Daria Petrovna Saltykova from the portrait on the left has nothing to do with Saltychikha, but everyone stubbornly sticks her portrait into their pseudo-articles and under-reports.

This is NOT a saltychiha! Let's see who this stately lady really is:
Daria PETROVNA Chernysheva-Saltykova (1739-1802). Lady of State, Cavalier Lady of the Order of St. Catherine, 1st Class, sister of Princess N. P. Golitsyna, wife of Field Marshal Count I. P. Saltykov.

François Hubert Drouet the Younger. Portrait of Countess D.P. Chernysheva-Saltykova. 1762

The eldest daughter of the diplomat Count Pyotr Grigoryevich Chernyshev, the godson of Peter the Great, who was considered by many to be his son. Her mother, Countess Ekaterina Andreevna, was the daughter of the well-known head of the secret office under Biron, Count Andrei Ivanovich Ushakov.

Darya Petrovna spent her childhood and young years abroad, where her father was for many years an envoy to the Danish, Berlin and English courts and an ambassador to Paris. There she received that brilliant upbringing, which put her, as well as her sister, Princess Natalya Petrovna Golitsyna, known as "Princesse Moustache", among the most educated Russian women of the late 18th century. They possessed refined manners, secular gloss, were fluent in four languages, but did not know Russian well. Returning with her parents to Russia in 1765, Daria was granted Catherine II as a lady-in-waiting.

She lived during the crimes of the Saltychikha at court, in St. Petersburg.

The creators of the historical series "Catherine. Rise" generally directly call Saltychikha a countess! Well, which of the widows of the captain is the countess ?! Apparently they spent the budget on something more necessary than a historical consultant. Indeed, why is it needed for a historical series ;-)

She is in a more advanced age in the figure on the right.

Ritt, Augustine Christian - Portrait of Countess D.P. Saltykova, 1794

I also came across a myth in fairly serious literature that supposedly Napoleon, having taken Moscow, wished to see this "curiosity". This is a fiction even based on the fact that Saltychikha died 11 years before Napoleon's invasion of Russia.

Most likely, the information about the child allegedly born by her in prison is also not true. At the age of more than 50 years, in the conditions of modern medicine and living in prison, such a pregnancy is simply unbelievable, and if it happened, the birth would most likely end sadly for both the mother and the child.

Saltychikha also has a "folk" tombstone - the one in which it is buried according to "secret folk knowledge", passed down from generation to generation. Some strange personalities draw flowers on it, put lamps on it... The infantry general buried under it, in fact, in the next world, could be pleased with such attention! Well, unless, of course, you count the felt-tip graffiti applied to the tombstone with the name of Saltychikha instead of the fallen off plate with the name of the real owner ...

This is NOT Saltychikha's grave!

B. Akunin in his "Cemetery Stories" also followed the lead of "secret knowledge" and suggested that Saltychikha's grave in the cemetery at the Donskoy Monastery was there (see left).

SALTYCHIKHA (SALTYKOVA DARIA NIKOLAEVNA)

(born in 1730 - died in 1801)

A Moscow lady, a "torturer and murderer", who killed more than 100 of her yard girls and terrified the whole district with her atrocities. Her name has become a household name for the definition of senseless cruelty.

Daria Nikolaevna Ivanova was born in 1730 in the family of a nobleman. Having married the captain of the Life Guards Cavalry Regiment Gleb Alekseevich Saltykov, she gave birth to two sons, and at twenty-six years after the death of her husband she remained the owner of 600 serf souls and estates in the Vologda, Kostroma and Moscow provinces. The life of the widow took place in the Moscow house on Sretenka and in the Troitskoye estate, where all the bloody events took place. For 7 years, Saltychikha tortured to death more than 100 people, mostly women, including two 12-year-old girls. Sources give different figures: from 120 to 139 people, of which 38 murders are proven.

Today it is difficult to surprise with the murders of women and children, torture, and the scale of executions. It is unlikely that in the days of Saltychikha this was an unusual thing. Nevertheless, the tormentor near Moscow can be put on the level of the infamous Count Dracula. If in the case of the latter it strikes, paralyzes the scale and real otherworldliness of atrocities, absolute evil is evil in its purest form, then in the case of Saltychikha, absolute dirt and stupidity terrifies. In a patriarchal estate near Moscow, blessed and hospitable, in a Moscow manor house with samovars, noodles and going to church, a young, healthy, stupid lady, who can neither read nor write, with the full connivance of those around her, out of boredom, killed innocent young women , girls and girls.

The torture lasted for a long time, death had to wait for hours, sometimes several days. One peasant woman was driven up to her neck into a pond after beatings (in November). A few hours later she was taken out and finished off, and the corpse was thrown under the windows of Saltychikha. The "accomplices" threw a living baby on the mother's corpse. The child also died immediately. Modern psychotherapists and psychiatrists, if they had a little more information about Saltychikha's childhood and youth, would certainly have found the reasons for her pathological behavior, explaining it with some kind of illness. However, the facts say that Saltychikha, and the current bigots like Chikatilo, and the NKVD investigators from Stalin's times, and just executioners, as a rule, have rare health, live to a ripe old age, even in prisons, and until death retain a clear mind and never than they do not repent. And before the moratorium on the death penalty, serial killers were not executed, and Saltychikha was not executed either. It seems that they all knew that they would live long.

In torture and murder, Saltychikha did not show ingenuity. She usually attacked the girls while they were mopping the floors or doing laundry. She beat them with a log, a roller, an iron, and when she got tired, haiduks, on her orders, dragged the victim into the yard and flogged. With special “inspiration”, Saltychikha tied the victim naked in the cold, starved, poured boiling water over her, burned her hair and pulled out her ears with red-hot tongs. Her “team” included 2-3 hayduk, a groom, a yard girl Aksinya Stepanova and a “priest”. The materials of the investigation spoke simply about the "priest". In those days, death was officially certified by the priest or the police in extraordinary cases. Apparently, Saltychikha had her own clergyman to cover up crimes. But not only him - everyone covered her. As one serf Saltychikha said during the investigation, if she had not been allowed to disband, then she would not have done anything. In Russia, the cruelty of landlords towards serfs was commonplace. Each province, each county, had its own local tyrant. Therefore, it is understandable why Muscovites and residents of the surrounding villages, passing terrible rumors from mouth to mouth, did nothing. Saltychikha's revelry was also facilitated by police and judicial officials, who for bribes did not give legal progress to complaints against the lady, and the complainants themselves were returned to the landowner for reprisal. It can even be assumed that Saltychikha had patrons at court.

But not everything is so simple. Researchers of the atrocities of Saltychikha usually assigned her serfs the role of dumb victims, but this is not entirely true. Both before Stepan Razin and after Pugachev, the peasants sent their landowners to the other world, burned and robbed the estates, and went on the run. Serf Russia was ruled not by landlords and not even by their managers, but by village elders, who themselves were serfs. There was practically no headman without a standard set of sins - spoiling girls, extortion in their favor, theft, sending objectionable soldiers, letting the recalcitrant around the world. And Troitsky was ruled not by the cannibal Saltychikha, but by the serf warden Mikhailov.

When Saltychikha sent the corpse of the peasant Andreev, who had been tortured by her, to the village to be buried without church and police examination, Mikhailov quickly figured out the legal nuances and realized that he would be guilty. He not only did not bury the corpse, but also forbade anyone to do so.

Gaiduk Bogomolov, who brought the corpse, was also frightened of the consequences and went to Moscow to the Detective Department with a complaint against the lady. In order to hush up the case, Saltychikha had to turn to the official of the police office, Ivan Yarov. He carried out explanatory work with Mikhailov, and the headman, making sure that he himself was beyond suspicion, gave false testimony. The case was closed.

Another example: the "inconsolable widow" had a long-term affair with the land surveyor Tyutchev. When she was taken under house arrest, love passed and Tyutchev married a commoner. Saltychikha did not forgive betrayal and arranged two conspiracies to kill both her former lover and his wife. Both conspiracies failed, because the haiduks were not going to fulfill them. The illiterate Saltychikha had literate serfs: they calmly beat unrequited girls to death, but they understood that the murder of a nobleman, a state official, was a completely different matter.

While Saltychikha was engaged in torture, yard accomplices robbed her. Starosta Mikhailov blackmailed the peasants, he could always send a woman from an objectionable house to wash the floors to the mistress. Even the neighboring landowners, voluntarily or involuntarily, benefited from Saltychikha. Against its background, they were just angels for their serfs. The blood of innocent victims directly or indirectly was on many. This was understood by the investigators involved in the Saltychikha case.

This is one of the few cases in the history of Russian jurisprudence when a case that had political overtones was investigated fully and objectively, and all those responsible were punished, including state and police officials. There were reasons for that. Catherine II ascended the Russian throne. The young queen and her entourage, primarily Count Orlov, tried to carry out progressive reforms. Catherine wanted to win the love of the people and did everything so that the Russian people saw her as an intercessor, a just monarch.

In the summer of 1762, the peasants Saveliy Martynov and Yermolai Ilyin (the latter's wife Saltychikha successively killed three wives) fled to the capital and filed a complaint against the lady with the empress. One can only imagine how much courage it took to take this step. Catherine II reacted immediately. High-ranking officials arrived in Moscow and took Saltychikha under house arrest. The Empress kept the investigation under personal control.

On May 17, 1764, a criminal case was opened against Saltychikha. For a whole year, two investigators worked in Troitskoye and on Sretenka. From the hiding places of the Detective Order, complaints and testimonies of the peasants were raised. They became a verdict for many bribe-taking officials. Catherine II spared neither strength nor means for a full investigation of the case. It was important to her for many reasons. The Saltychikha case was a good occasion for personnel purges and reshuffles in the police and the state apparatus as a whole. On this wave, it was possible to carry out a number of progressive reforms and transformations, while demonstrating to the world the best qualities of the new empress. There was another reason that lay on the surface. It is not difficult to imagine how patriarchal Moscow treated the new capital, its Western innovations, ideas, and indeed all the inhabitants of St. Petersburg. The Saltychikha case gave a legitimate reason to replace the "old guard" with loyal managers. At the same time, Catherine II won the sympathy of Muscovites, demonstrating in practice the ability to fight bribery, cruelty, and routine. Mother Queen showed concern for the people and their rights.

The investigation lasted 6 years. Saltychikha was found guilty and sentenced to death. All bribe-taking officials who covered up the murderer were stripped of their titles and property and sent into exile. Saltychikha's accomplices - peasants, courtyards and "priests" - were punished by a judicial college with a whip with cutting out their nostrils and exiled to Nerchinsk for eternal hard labor.

"one. Deprive her of her noble rank and ban her throughout our empire, so that she will never be named by anyone by the name of the family of either her father or her husband.

2. Order in Moscow to take her to the square and chain her to a pole and fasten a leaf around her neck with the inscription in big words: "Tormentor and murderer."

3. When she stands for an hour at this reproachful spectacle, then, enclosed in glands, take her to one of the women's monasteries located in the White or Earthen City, and there, near which there are no churches, put her in a specially made underground prison, in which she will be kept after death in such a way that it has no light in it from anywhere.

After the civil execution, Saltychikha was imprisoned in the underground prison of the Cathedral Church of the Ivanovo maiden monastery. Here she sat until 1779, and then until her death - in a dungeon attached to the wall of the temple. In total, Saltychikha lived in prison for 33 years and never once showed a shadow of remorse.

Daria Daria, an old woman from a distant village, came to the city to pray to the servants ... She beat all her legs on the road on roots, on flints: The ichor flows from ulcerated legs ... All dusty, sweated to the bone, The sun burned the skin on her face, peeled off, And Daria dragged herself along To

Sisters. Daria In the Volkov family, like many at that time, there were many children. Several children died very young. Those who survived, grew up, became adults - six. Four sisters and two brothers. Daria is the elder sister and, in general, the first of the Volkov children. The difference between her and

SALTYCHIKHA At the age of 25 she became a widow, her husband left her enormous wealth, three villages, a mansion on Sretenka and a bunch of serfs. Saltychikha was associated with the city mafia and the mayor of the city of Moscow, with his wife she arranged lesbian sado-masoorgies. In orgies

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Daria Saltykova, or as the people call her simply “Saltychikha”, entered the history of the country with a bloody trail. She became famous as a real sadist of noble blood, who did not spare the life and health of her serfs, mocking people for her own pleasure.

Society became zealously interested in the true history of Saltychikha thanks to the historical series presented by the Russia-1 channel. The history of the "Bloody Lady" on the screen is shown rather softly in comparison with what happened in the life of a famous woman.

The creators tried to convey in an artistic way the suffering of a woman who could not cope with her own outbursts of rage and explained the cruelty of the lady by her complete misfortune in her personal life. But how it really happened is not completely known, because they tried to destroy all existing documents and even portraits about her, considering her at one time “the shame of the human race.”

So, Daria Saltykova. Born March 11 (22), 1730 - died November 27 (December 9), 1801 in Moscow. A Russian landowner who killed dozens (according to other sources, almost one and a half hundred) serfs.

Father - pillar nobleman Nikolai Avtonomovich Ivanov.

Mother - Anna Ivanovna (nee Davydova).

Grandfather - Avton Ivanov - was a major figure in the times of Princess Sophia and Peter I.

She received a home education, at that time quite good. She spoke foreign languages, played musical instruments. She grew up in a pious family and in her youth she was distinguished by piety - about which many memories were left from those who knew her.

She was married to the captain of the Life Guards Horse Regiment Gleb Alekseevich Saltykov (died around 1755) - the uncle of the future Highness Prince Nikolai Ivanovich Saltykov. His uncle - Semyon Andreevich Saltykov - in 1732-1740. was the governor-general of Moscow. Also in 1763-1771, the governor-general of Moscow was his cousin, Field Marshal Pyotr Semenovich Saltykov.

Two sons were born in the marriage: Fedor (01/19/1750 - 06/25/1801) and Nikolai (d. 07/27/1775), who were enlisted in the guards regiments.

Widowed at the age of 26.

It is known that during the life of her husband, Saltychikha did not notice a particular tendency to assault. She was a blooming, beautiful and at the same time a very pious woman. Thus, one can suspect the mental illness of Darya Saltykova, associated with the early loss of a spouse.

The wealthy landowner entered the history of the state as one of the most cruel housewives. In her estates and mansions, inherited from her husband, there was complete order, but he got the serfs at the cost of their lives.

Saltykova brutally beat her servants, tortured her to death for the slightest offense, and sometimes for no apparent reason. Saltykova's victims were young girls and married women - it is for this reason that many are sure that Saltykova really went crazy after her husband's death. Other information says that the woman went crazy after she was rejected by her lover, the grandfather of the poet Fyodor Tyutchev - she even organized an attempt on the nobleman, but later he was warned by the servants about the impending drama.

If we talk about the consequences, then Saltykova's victims, according to official figures, were fifty people. According to unofficial reports, she managed to torture more than a hundred serfs. People tried to complain about the mistress, but they were not heard, because outwardly she looked like a very worthy, God-fearing, educated lady.

As a rule, it all started with claims to the servants - Daria did not like how the floor was washed or the clothes were washed. The angry hostess began to beat the negligent maid, and her favorite weapon was a log. In the absence of such, an iron was used, a rolling pin - everything that was at hand.

At first, the serfs of Darya Saltykova were not particularly alarmed by this - this kind of thing happened everywhere. The first murders did not scare either - it happens that the lady got excited.

But since 1757, the killings have become systematic. Moreover, they began to wear especially cruel, sadistic. The lady clearly began to enjoy what was happening. The victims of torture were subsequently killed and buried and buried - some disease was called the cause of death of a person, or he was put on the wanted list as an escaped serf.

Killing the peasant woman Larionova, Saltychikha burned her hair on her head with a candle. When the woman was killed, the mistress's accomplices put the coffin with the body in the cold, and a live infant was placed on the corpse. The baby froze to death.

In the month of November, the peasant woman Petrova was driven into a pond with a stick and kept standing in water up to her throat for several hours, until the unfortunate woman died.

Another entertainment of Saltychikha was dragging her victims by the ears around the house with red-hot curling irons.

She beat, not sparing, pulled out her hair, boiled in boiling water or burned with a red-hot iron. Tortured victims rarely survived - they were usually finished off or they died during the torture.

As a result, the servants could not stand such treatment and denounced the landowner to Empress Catherine II. Complaints to the local authorities and the priest did not give any result, and therefore two serfs fled from the mistress, not fearing death, and turned to the highest authorities in Russia.

The investigation has been going on for over six years. Catherine personally checked all the documents and could not believe that her noblewoman was capable of such acts. To prove, as already mentioned above, the murder of less than fifty people was successful. He left a few dozen more in the case as “suspected of murder”, Saltykova was acquitted on 11 episodes.

The empress personally chose the punishment for the noblewoman, the site reports. She did not dare to publicly execute a respected person, but she did not have the right to forgive the deeds of the widow. Saltykova was chained for an hour to a pillory with a sign "The Murderer". She was deprived of all noble titles and was even forbidden to be called a woman due to cruelty towards people.

Saltykova was sent to a monastery, where she was imprisoned in an underground cell - she did not see daylight at all, and she was allowed to light a candle only occasionally. Saltykova spent 11 years underground, after which she was transferred to a cell above ground. People were allowed to visit the prisoner, but neither sons nor friends came to her - only onlookers came to look at the sadist.

Saltykov spent more than thirty years in prison. She died at the age of 71, never repenting of her actions.

Modern criminologists and historians suggest that Saltychikha suffered from a mental disorder - epileptoid psychopathy. Some even believe that she was a latent homosexual.

It is not possible to establish this reliably today. The story of Saltychikha became unique because the case of the atrocities of this landowner ended with the punishment of the criminal. Often the nobles got away with bullying the serfs.

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In 1768, near the Execution Ground, near the pillory stood the landowner Daria Saltykova - the famous Saltychikha, who tortured at least 138 of her serfs to death.
While the clerk read from the sheet the crimes she had committed, Saltychikha stood with her head uncovered, and a plaque with the inscription "Tormentor and Murderer" hung on her chest. After that, she was sent to eternal imprisonment in the Ivanovo Monastery.

How she hated them! .. Why do they stare at her, demonic offspring! Why did the mouths pop! Like she's a monster overseas. Or a wild animal. She is a man, a man, although for some reason everyone calls her a monster or, as fashionably in the French manner, a monster or monstrum. They would fall into her hands! I would torture you to death. Either a log in the forehead, or boiling water in the face! Otherwise, she would have been beaten to death with batogs. And they say she's a monster. They are all monsters!
Oh, how she hated them!
I just wanted to tear it apart!
Daria Saltykova, nicknamed Saltychikha, looked around with a wild, full of anger look at the crowd of onlookers who had gathered on Red Square near the Execution Ground.
It was noon. It was cold. The gray impenetrable sky hung over the Kremlin like lead. Light snowflakes fluttered and fell on the pavement. And they didn't melt. After all, it was already November. Seventeenth day of the month. 1768.
The former landowner was tied to a pole, and a sign hung around her neck with the inscription: "torturer and murderer." A young clerk with a goatee and in a long black cassock, standing on a tall and healthy block of wood, loudly read out to those present the order of Her Highness Empress Catherine II. about the appointment of a civil execution to the state criminal Darya Saltykova and about her eternal imprisonment in a monastery. Having finished reading the order, the priest immediately began to announce the list of crimes and victims of Saltychikha. There were 38 people proven, 26 unproven, and as many as 138 suspected! Only such words were heard from the deacon: she tortured, killed, strangled, spotted, drowned, beat to death ...
Someone groaned, someone gasped, lamented, branded, scolded the murderer. Someone was pointing a finger at her, spitting in her direction. In the eyes of onlookers - curiosity, horror, fear, bewilderment. How could she do such atrocities? She is a human or a beast in human form. Acts like a beast.
The snow has intensified. Not small snowflakes flew, but flakes.
Suddenly, a woman with crazy eyes flew out of the crowd and rushed at Saltykova. A knife flashed in her hands. Another second - and sharp steel would have stuck into the throat of the criminal. But the dexterous guard intercepted the attacker's hand and threw the woman aside. Other guards ran up and immediately tied her up. It was one of the former servants of Saltychikha. Once upon a time, the landowner brutally tortured her husband, and the woman decided in this way to avenge the death of her beloved. She made her way through the crowd to the Execution Ground and attacked the killer. A little bit of luck - and Saltykova would have lost her life. But the people's revenge did not come true. Apparently the time has not yet come for the villain to die.
"I will ruin you anyway! You will answer for the death of your husband!" the woman screamed in impotent rage. - "I'll look for you in the next world! I'll go down to hell for you! Wherever you are, I'll be there! A monster, a murderer!"
The failed avenger was dragged to the police station, and Saltykova took a breath: a little more - and she would have been in heaven! Thank God she's alive. But what does it change. Is this life when you are tied to a pillory, and people point their fingers at you. No, it's better to die than to experience such shame. She is a pillar noblewoman, a representative of a noble family, exposed to the ridicule of the mob. She had never wished for such a fate. But it all started so well in her fate ...

Daria Petrovna Saltykova and Baroness Natalya Mikhailovna Stroganova.

Daria Nikolaevna was born in March 1730 in a family of Moscow pillar nobles. Her relatives were Musins-Pushkins, Davydovs, Tolstoys, Stroganovs and others. She changed her maiden name Ivanova when she married Gleb Alekseevich Saltykov, captain of the Life Guards Horse Regiment. She gave birth to her husband two sons. A married couple lived in a house on the corner of Kuznetsky Most and Sretenka. And in the summer to the Troitskoye estate, which is in the area of ​​\u200b\u200bmodern Teply Stan. Here in this mansion with a pond and a forest, terrible and bloody actions will unfold as a result, the main participant of which will be Daria Nikolaevna.
At 26, Daria was widowed. Having received a huge fortune that belonged to her mother, grandmother and husband, estates in the Moscow, Vologda and Kostroma provinces, at first she generously donated money to the church and distributed alms. But then sexual dissatisfaction, irrepressible energy and the makings of a sadist turned the young woman into a bloodthirsty monster. But this was preceded by one incident that dramatically changed the fate of Darya Nikolaevna.
One day she was told that a man was hunting in her forest.
"Who's the boss over there?" the lady raised her eyebrows menacingly. - Come on, quickly catch this impudent one and bring it to me. I'll deal with him!"
The peasants rushed into the forest with guns and stakes. Soon they brought a nice-looking man, who turned out to be Captain Nikolai Tyutchev.

Nikolai Tyutchev

He was engaged in land surveying, and came here to resolve a land dispute between two landowners, Saltykova's neighbors. And while hunting at his leisure, he accidentally wandered into the territory of an imperious landowner, where he was noticed by vigilant peasants.
Darya Nikolaevna immediately laid eyes on the officer. She, exhausted by lovesickness, was just in search of a suitable gentleman.
The gallant captain accepted the landowner's invitation to have tea. Where there is tea, there is cherry tincture, and where there is tincture, there is a bottle of vodka. The captain was pissed off from alcohol. Look - and the hostess, who at first seemed not so pretty, became just a beauty! The captain stayed up late, started talking, and Tyutchev seemed to take some interest in the landowner. The visits began to repeat. The captain's boredom dissipated. The military field romance began. After some time, Nikolai Andreevich and Darya Nikolaevna began to be united by a common bed. Saltykova fell in love with an officer with no memory. But the captain was in no hurry to connect the bonds of Hymen with the landowner. She soon bored him and disliked him. Daria seemed to him rude and somewhat primitive. Unheard of, she was not literate, she could not write, she could not even sign an official document. She was distinguished by a large build and good physical strength. While Tyutchev was spinning cupids with Daria Nikolaevna, he took a closer look at one neighbor Saltykova, a girl named Pelageya Panyutina, (it was 1762) fell in love with her and decided to marry her. And he got married. What was the reaction to this news Saltykova is not difficult to guess. She just got angry: what a blow to women's pride! She preferred someone else! And an insidious plan of monstrous revenge ripened in her head: she decided to kill both. Moreover, blow them up in Panyutina's mansion, which was located behind the Prechistensky Gates near Zemlyanoy Val.
She called her two grooms - Alexei Savelyev and Roman Ivanov - and ordered:
“Buy five pounds of gunpowder in the main office of artillery and fortification, then mix it with sulfur and wrap it in hemp, and tuck this charge under Pelageya’s jam (the jam is the lower, overhanging edge of the roof near the hut)! Yes, look, don’t be disgraced, scoundrels! if not!"
How the servants did not want to become murderers, but they had to obey. They did as the hostess told them to. Savelyev bought gunpowder, friends in misfortune made a homemade bomb. But at the last moment, the unfortunate killers abandoned their plan. Frightened. For this disobedience, Saltychikha ordered them to be beaten mercilessly with batogs.
So, the plan to assassinate the unfaithful lover ended in failure, but the stubborn Saltykova did not let up. Having learned that the newlyweds were going to leave for the Bryansk district along the big Kaluga road (and it passed by her estate), the insidious landowner decided to ambush them. She ordered her people to arm themselves and wait for the officer with the girl. And when they go, then attack them and then kill them, and write off their death as a simple robbery.
Someone, for a fee or in good conscience, told Tyutchev about this undertaking. He was seriously frightened and turned to the authorities for help. And soon four sleigh crews with guards and with the newlyweds proceeded past the village of Troitskoye. The attempt again did not take place. Saltykova tore and threw with anger.
After this love tragedy, something happened to the psyche of Darya Nikolaevna. Saltykova became even more cruel and sophisticated in torture. If she had only mocked and tortured the victims before, now she began to simply kill them. She especially liked to kill beautiful girls with light blond hair. No wonder her happy rival Pelageya was a beauty and had light blond hair.

Once Saltykova went into the living room to rest. It was winter. December. Tomorrow morning, she, along with her servants, belongings and food, according to tradition, left for the winter in a mansion on Sretenka. It was Christmas and New Years. Its people repaired, prepared sledges and carts to load with meat, poultry, butter, sour cream, pickles, jam. Loaded things. There was a bustle of work, there were final preparations for departure.
Saltykova was bored. She sat down on the couch, took out an album and began flipping through it. Poems, playful epigrams, fables, wishes, congratulations... This is what a hussar lieutenant wrote, this is a state councilor, and this is some kind of piit. Darya Nikolaevna turned over another sheet - and shuddered! She recognized the sweeping handwriting. A poem from the once beloved Nikolai Tyutchev. And the signature: "Dedicated to the adored and incomparable Daria Nikolaevna."
Saltykova grew gloomy: the spiritual wounds of the past again reminded of themselves. Bad blood immediately hit his head. She, looking at the floor in the living room, shouted: "What is this dirt?! Who cleaned it?! Barbara?! Well, call the bastard, let him come to me for a conversation!"
The butler brought in a pretty fair-haired girl with blue eyes. Barbara was shaking with fear. She knew firsthand about the atrocities of the lady. Once, for a poorly ironed dress, a landowner hit her on the head with a stick, so much so that sparks fell from her eyes. After that, the girl was sick for a long time, and her head was spinning. Once the lady pulled Varvara by the hair. She even tore out a tuft. It hurt a lot.
"What would you like, madam?" The maid humbly bowed her head.
Darya Nikolaevna looked angrily at the girl. Saltychikha was annoyed by her beauty and blond hair. In some ways, she reminded her of her happy rival Pelageya Panyutina. And then the image of the traitor Tyutchev appeared. Here Saltykova could not restrain herself. She grabbed a heavy candelabra from the table and hit the maid on the head with it. Barbara fell, covered in blood. She even lost consciousness.
The butler rushed to the motionless maid.
"Alive?" - asked Saltychikha.
The butler nodded.
"Thank God ... Come on, my dear, if you please, call the grooms, but dress me warmer."
It seems that Daria Nikolaevna came up with a way to punish the maid. He will be terrible.
"Let the grooms drive her to the pond. We'll have fun there," the lady ordered.
The landowner was dressed in a sable fur coat, put on a sable hat. Tied up with a warm colorful scarf. The butler, the cook, and the coachman brought along an easy chair and a healthy carpet.
Grooms Aleksey Savelyev and Roman Ivanov led Varvara out onto the street. In one dress and shoes. The head is bare, neither a shawl nor a scarf. A light frost bit his ears and cheeks. Blood from a cut eyebrow dripped onto her dress and onto the snow. A path of scarlet spots stretched behind the girl. She wept bitterly.
"Have mercy, mistress!" Varvara pleaded.
But the cruel Saltychikha did not even think of forgiving the maid. The show had just begun.
The whole procession stopped at the pond. They spread the carpet, put a chair on it. The lady sat down in it, preparing to enjoy the bloody torture. She waved her hand dismissively.
"Well, undress her immediately!"
With the maid, despite her desperate resistance, they tore off the upper dress, and then the shirt. Barbara appeared in the nude. Her nakedness was beautiful: a thin waist, beautiful wide hips, amazing breasts. But this beauty infuriated Saltychikha even more. Someone better than her and more beautiful. No, that won't happen! She will destroy this beauty! And in the most brutal way!
"Beat her with whips!" yelled the landlady. - "Stronger! Even stronger!"
The grooms began to beat the maid mercilessly. She screamed piercingly, tried to dodge, cover herself with her arms, run away - but where is there! A fragile girl against two hefty men - obviously unequal forces! They knocked her down and began to whip her lying down. Disgusting bloody streaks appeared on a beautiful swarthy body. The fun didn't last long.
"Enough!" Darya Nikolaevna shouted at the torturers. “Otherwise, he will go to another world ahead of time.”
The grooms parted reluctantly: they, like the lady, liked to torture and torture people. The crooked figure of a girl lay in the snow, and blood spattered all around the snow. Red on white. Beautiful, yet tragic at the same time.
The maid, shivering from the cold, knelt down and wailed pitifully:
"Don't ruin me, mistress, I'm freezing, have pity on me! Give me back my clothes! I'm cold!"
But will the girl's prayers touch the cruel and savage heart of a monster from the village of Troitskoye. And did this woman even have a heart, since he did such a thing. Rather, instead of it there was a stone.
"Throw her into the hole!" - Saltychikha gave the order.
The servants seized Barbara, who was kicking and squealing, by the legs and arms and threw her into the hole.
Bultykh! The head of the maid disappeared under the icy water. Seven seconds passed. Incredibly, Barbara emerged. The young body has escaped the cold shock that occurs when suddenly immersed in icy water. The maid took a deep breath of cold air and clung to the edge of the ice. Recovering her breath, she climbed out of the hole with great difficulty. She crawled on her knees for several meters, and with that she stood up. Staggering and sobbing, she went to the mistress so that she would spare her. But the sadistic maniac was not going to forgive the maid. The girl rushed to her clothes, but she was rudely pushed away by the groom Savelyev. Barbara fell. They whipped her again with whips and drove her to the water.
And Saltychikha sat in an armchair and laughed.
"To serve you, dirty, to serve you! I do not need this scoundrel for service, let him die from the cold!"
Barbara froze. The insidious destructive cold penetrated deeper and deeper into her body. She no longer felt her legs, fingers, lower abdomen. Wrapping her arms around herself, she tried to keep warm. But where there, it did not get warmer.
Another ten minutes passed. Saltychikha clearly enjoyed the torment of the victim.
Barbara's skin turned white. The poor thing was no longer crying, but sobbing convulsively. She wasn't trembling, she was just trembling. Teeth chattered against teeth. The lips didn't move. The maid made some interjections and indistinct sounds. Eyes clouded.
She froze.
"Let's get her back in the hole!" the landowner shouted ominously.
The grooms readily grabbed the demoralized defenseless and stiff girl by the arms and dragged her to the hole. Having dragged it, they threw it into the water again ...
Bultykh! And cold spray flew in different directions! The girl for the second time the girl disappeared under water.
Saltykova smiled with satisfaction:
"It won't come out this time, you bastard! I bet it won't come out"
Suddenly, to her great surprise and the surprise of everyone, Barbara emerged! The girl, with her last strength fighting for her life slipping away every minute, tried to grab the edge of the hole, but her frostbitten fingers no longer obeyed her, and she slipped into the water. In a desperate attempt, she again tried to cling to the saving ice, but to no avail! Her fingers, twisted by the deadly cold, only scratched the ice. The girl began to flounder helplessly in the water. The cold completely crushed her. The blue stars of the eyes faded away. Forces melted away, muscle trembling stopped, heart rate gradually slowed down, breathing became superficial. Barbara felt a blissful warmth spread through her body. She fell asleep and died at the same time. Death took her body, and an innocent soul was preparing to stand before God.
And here's another second - and the girl's head disappeared under the water. A minute passed - Varvara no longer surfaced. The creepy show is over.
"Drowned," the landowner said without regret. - "There she is dear. Take the darlings of the hooks, rummage along the bottom, it's not so deep here, pull her out onto the ice. Further into the station. Say she committed suicide, she jumped into the hole."
The grooms nodded obsequiously, took the hooks and, after rummaging for about ten minutes, got the drowned woman. They brought up a corpse-sleigh. How many corpses were transported in it - a lot! The servants could not straighten the stiff limbs of the dead girl and, like a frozen carcass, were thrown into the sleigh. They covered him with matting and took him to the police to record his death.
And Saltychikha, having come into the living room, ordered to kindle the fireplace harder: she was a little cold, she needed to warm up. Her eyes fell again on the ill-fated album. Moreover, it was opened in the same place as before. Where were Tyutchev's poems. Blood immediately rushed to the temples. And squeezed like a vise. The lady put her head in her hands and groaned. Again she dreamed of Panyutina. In an airy luxurious dress, with a white fan, white ball shoes and long white gloves. And now the gallant Tyutchev in a uniform comes up to her and the couple begin to spin in a dance ...
"Pelageya! Get out of Satan!" - Saltykova screamed in horror and, losing consciousness, fell to the floor.
This is how Darya Nikolaevna experienced the loss of her beloved, and this is how her servants and maids paid for these experiences. And they paid with their innocent souls.

Saltychikha beat not only girls, but even girls. And for the slightest fault. She starved her victims, poured melted wax into their ears, dragged them by the hair, pulled out tufts, poured boiling water over them. She beat everything that came to hand. If a log - then a log, if a stick - then a stick, a poker - then a poker. She forced the grooms to flog the guilty in the yard with whips, whips, rods, batogs. She burned her face with hot tongs. And Saltychikha, enjoying the torment of the victims, shouted: "Beat, beat to death!" The landowner was a bloodthirsty and ruthless killer. She tortured her victims for days. If she got tired of mocking the serfs, she ordered other servants to continue torturing people. And she herself, sitting in a chair, loved to watch the bloody tortures.
She sent some to hard labor - and they were really lucky. At least they remained alive after the maniac's fun.
Soon rumors about the killer landowner spread throughout the capital. But for the time being, there was no complete information about her atrocities. People didn't know if it was true, false or half-truth. There were rumors, but no one saw the bodies. And the thing is that the servants of Saltykova brought the dead on a sleigh to the police station. The landowner generously paid and gave gifts to the policemen so that they would be silent and write down what was needed in the official protocol. Those always recorded an unfortunate death. Like, the poor thing ran away from the mistress in a light dress, on the way she froze and died. And although the deceased were mutilated and all covered in bruises and bruises, they still wrote: "died as a result of an accident." Or they indicated that the person had committed suicide.
The clergy were also on the allowance of Darya Nikolaevna. They were supposed to bury people who had been put to violent death. She did not like Moscow saints: they often refused to perform a church ceremony at the sight of the brutally tortured bodies of the deceased. Took local. One of them, Stepan Petrov, was the staff priest of Saltychikha. For him, there were no problems with the funeral of the victims.
If someone ran away, they returned him back to Saltykova, because the police were bought by her. The landowner ordered the fugitives to be beaten to death with batogs or thrown into the dungeons and starved. The subjects of Saltychikha in the period from 1756 to 1762 filed 21 complaints against their mistress. But since the sadistic landowner had huge connections both in the police and among officials, she immediately found out first-hand which of her serfs was reporting on her. And then mercilessly punished informers and complainers. Whom she made disabled, and whom she killed, and whom she sent into exile.

One day the following happened...
In April 1762, two serfs Saltychikha - Savely Martynov and Yermolai Ilyin - tortured to death and bullying and having lost their wives at the whim of a sadistic landowner, fled from her and went with a complaint about the cruel mistress to the Moscow branch of the Senate. But they were not allowed there and decided to hand over to the police. But it was not in vain that Saltykova fed the police, they again almost helped her out. The peasants were dragged to the house on Sretenka to be handed over to the cruel landowner, but the peasants, realizing that they were not being taken to the police station, but to the monster's lair, shouted out of desperation throughout the street:
"The word and deed of the sovereign!"
This cry was adopted at that time to announce the sovereign about some state crime and not a single official could hush up this matter. This happened here as well. Interrogation of witnesses began, the highest police ranks joined. The atrocities of the Saltykovs shocked everyone. The message with the help of courier was delivered to St. Petersburg to Catherine II. She ordered a thorough investigation of this high-profile case. It was led by the court advisers of the Moscow College of Justice Stepan Volkov and the young prince Dmitry Tsitsianov. The Empress specifically chose these people for the investigation.
Volkov was of humble origin, had no family and business ties with the criminal. For officials of noble birth and high rank, this trial would be a dangerous undertaking. Such a person could be pressured, bribed, intimidated. Or just ask a relative to close the case. An official like Volkov could not be pressured or intimidated: he was a stranger to this circle, had a spotless and honest reputation. Moreover, he had a powerful patron - the Empress herself! Under such protection, Volkov could calmly conduct an investigation and look for evidence of the criminal's guilt.
Saltykova immediately went under house arrest. Catherine II personally sent a priest to her in the hope that Darya Nikolaevna would sincerely confess to all her crimes. But it was not there! For four months (!) she led the minister of the church by the nose and did not repent a bit. The stunned confessor came to the empress and declared that the power of the devil in this man was stronger than ever and that the landowner was stagnant in sins.
Volkov and Tsianov arrived at the Mother See and took up the detective order, the Moscow police chief and the governor-general himself. Investigators dug for good reason, it turned out that Moscow officials had shelved more than 20 complaints of courtyards against Saltychikha, acts of examination of bodies, conclusions on the cause of death, and many other documents. A scandal erupted. In November 1763, it was proved that the majority of Saltychikha's subjects did not die of their own death. This was established thanks to the arrested account books of the landowner. According to the entries made in the book, the exact number of dead serfs was determined and the circle of influential officials involved in this matter was established. It became clear that most of the servants died a violent death and under very mysterious circumstances. For example, several times beautiful girls from 18 to 20 years old were taken into the service of the landowner and in two weeks they suddenly died in a strange way.
For example, it is documented that in 1759, in the Detective Order of Moscow, the body of the serf Saltychikha, Khrisanf Andreev, was presented for examination. On the body of the peasant there were many bodily injuries, bruises and bruises. The investigation into the circumstances of Andreev's death was lengthy, with obvious procedural violations. And safely and quietly closed.
The fact of violent death was revealed in relation to one of Saltykova's maids - Maria Petrova. Once, on the way to her residence, the village of Troitskoye, Saltychikha stopped in her other fiefdom - the village of Vokshino. There, the girl Masha displeased her with something. Or just a maniac wanted to defuse his dark energy. Here is a girl and turned up under the arm. The wording of the complaints against the maid was quite common: poorly washed floors. The far-fetched accusation was followed by the most real massacre. At first, Saltychikha beat her with a rolling pin. Scoffing, she ordered that the groom Bogomolov beat Masha with a whip and drove her up to her throat into the pond. The servant did just that. Petrova stood in the water for a quarter of an hour. Then he kicked her out and again ordered to wash the floors. But the girl, beaten to a pulp, was physically unable to do this. Saltychikha again began to beat the victim. But with a stick. When the tormentor got tired, she sat down to drink tea, the groom Bogomolov took the stick and the bullying resumed with renewed vigor. In the end, the maid died from mortal beatings. The body on two pairs of horses was secretly taken out late in the evening to the village of Troitskoye, where she was buried.
Strange were the deaths of all three wives of Yermolai Ilyin, the very one who denounced the landowner along with Savelyev. The first was Ekaterina Semenova, the second was Feodosia Artamonova, and the third was Aksinya Yakovleva. The first two were allegedly beaten by the landowner on the head and other parts of the body with her hands, feet, sticks, and logs for poorly washed floors. Then she ordered them to be beaten with batogs and whips. They died from beatings at different times. First Katerina - in 1759 she was secretly buried in Moscow at the parish cemetery, and then in 1761 Feodosy. Her corpse was taken to the village of Troitskoye and buried there. Ilyin's third wife, Aksinya, was beaten to death by a maniac with a rolling pin and logs in her mansion on Sretenka. This happened in the spring of 1762. When the servants carried Artamonov into one of the rooms, she still showed some signs of life. The nurse tried to give her wine to drink, but in vain. Without regaining consciousness, the poor thing died. She, too, under the cover of night, was taken to the Trinity estate, where priest Petrov secretly buried her. And the sadist Yermolaya warned menacingly:
"At least you will go to the denunciation, but you will not find anything, unless you want to be whipped like other informers."
It was just right to feel sorry for the unfortunate Ilyin, from whom Saltychikha took away three spouses one after another. Only Ilyin forgot to mention one small but significant detail during the investigation, which characterizes him as a person prone to excessive cruelty and clearly sadistic inclinations. Yermolai personally scolded the wives for dirty floors, assaulted them, and, together with other people, whipped them with batogs and whips.
They say the king is made by his retinue. Saltykova was surrounded by people like her. Cruel, base, narrow-minded and prone to bullying. They complemented their mistress. Ilyin, Savelyev, Ivanov and others. The only advantage of Ilyin was that he ran away from the Sretensky house and reported on the atrocities of the mistress. And then, apparently, because he understood: sooner or later, Saltychikha's people would kill him. He was an unwanted witness to three terrible deaths.
According to some records, many serfs were released to their villages and villages, but for some reason died "their own" death upon arrival at their place of residence, or even disappeared without a trace.
Saltychikha, throwing a lot of money for bribery, actively and in every possible way interfered with the investigation. Then the investigators decided to remove the maniac from managing his property and money, arrested him, and threw him into the dungeon.

Meanwhile, more and more witnesses appeared, and the terrible truth about the bloody atrocities of the Trinity monster was more and more revealed. The investigation into the case of a sadistic killer went on for six years. As a result, Volkov and Tsitsianov managed to prove the guilt of the defendant. She was sentenced to death, but Catherine II canceled it. Still, Saltykova was of a noble family, and she did not dare to execute a prominent noblewoman. In addition, Catherine had the image of a blessed and merciful queen and did not want to destroy it. And besides, she was worried about what the nobility would say about the execution of the landowner. After all, although Saltykova was a cruel murderer and tormentor, she was their circle. And it is impossible to execute the celestials, the privileged class. There must be some exception to the rule for them.
The Empress reviewed the verdict. Saltykova was sentenced to a civil execution on Red Square, and then life imprisonment was determined in the dungeon of the Ivanovsky Monastery.
She was deprived of the title of nobility, property, maternal rights. And her faithful servants - the priest Petrov, the butler, the coachman, the groom and other servants on the same day were flogged, chained and sent in stages to hard labor in distant and snowy Siberia. The maniac was thrown into the dungeon of the monastery, where she spent the rest of her life.

Saltychikha liked to visit the common people. Everyone wanted to stare at the Trinity monster.
...Two boys approached the Ivanovsky Monastery. One is red, the other is blond. Both are barefoot and grubby.
"Do you know who you can see here?" - the redhead asked his friend, he shook his head negatively. - "The famous Saltychikha ... You see that window with bars and green curtains ... She is there."
The blond-haired man rolled his eyes in surprise and followed his friend intrigued. The boy heard that this old woman tortured many people to death. What is this monster? She probably looks like a witch. Here to have a look. But it's kind of scary to go there! The little guy slowed down...
His friend, noticing the indecision of the fair-haired man, exclaimed defiantly: "What are you afraid of?"
The blond again shook his head negatively and, so that he would not be considered a coward, went after his friend. The redhead, as the most daring, parted the curtains...
There she is! Sitting behind bars ... Really an old woman and really looks like a witch. Gray long hair, yellowed face, angry scary look. Seeing the boys, she became furious, and, throwing a black scarf over her head, yelled with a good obscenity:
"Oh, sons of bitches, get out! Damn you! Get out!"
Kluka jumped out of the window and almost hit Red in the forehead. He deftly dodged. The prisoner threw herself on the bars in a frenzy.
"I'll ask you!" the prisoner spat.
How she wanted to reach them, hit them, hurt them. But there is no way she can get to them, well, just no way. The boys, realizing that they were out of reach, began to tease her:
"Saltychikha fool! Saltychikha fool! Witch!"
Other onlookers appeared. They laughed and made fun of her. And she raged in impotent rage, shouting out some threats and curses, and shook the bars. Then, letting off steam, she drew the curtains and hid ...
Someone sang a daring song composed about a famous prisoner:
Saltychikha-boltychikha,
And a lofty deacon!
Vlasyevna Dmitrovna Savivsha,
Davis lady!
And our pies are hot, hot!
With a fish, with a tongue
With beef, egg!
Please visit us
Just right for you!
Atlas in our shop
canifas,
Hairpins, pins,
Boils and warts!
Saltychikha again burst into abuse at the audience, but did not open the curtains. And people continued to laugh and tease the bloody landowner. They didn't feel sorry for her at all.

Darya Nikolaevna lived in the monastery for 33 years, gave birth to a child from one guard, and once a week on Sundays she was let out to look at the domes of the Vladimir Church - the killer was not allowed to the altar.
The sinful tormentor died at the age of 81 and was buried in the cemetery of the Donskoy Monastery. There is still her marble sarcophagus.
Once, the participants in the program "The Battle of Psychics" were brought to Teply Stan to the place where Saltykova's mansion used to be, and were asked to present a picture of the events that had once taken place. And one of the psychics closed his eyes and began to tell:
"Here stood the master's house, and there the pond was shallow - before it was deeper ... And here is another picture I see - a girl in a white shirt is sitting on the shore and tears are running down her cheeks ..."
Isn't this our heroine Varvara, who found death on the orders of Saltychikha in this pond. Apparently from time to time our drowned woman descends from heaven, goes to the shore, sits down and bitterly mourns her unfortunate fate. Maybe she had an enviable fiancé, and they wanted to play a cheerful wedding, maybe she had cherished girlish dreams, and dreamed of her female happiness. Who knows. Everything was ahead of her. She was young, beautiful. Good-natured, joyful. But evil fate in the form of Daria Saltykova intervened in her fate. The thread of her life broke on this pond. For fun, for fun I am. And how many innocently killed souls fly here in this sinister place - you can’t count! Strangled, tortured, drowned. And the Trinity monster - Saltychikha is to blame for everything.
Having not found female happiness, the sadistic maniac took out her evil and disappointment on other people, depriving them forever of the right to happiness.

For many decades, Daria Saltykova remained in the memory of the people as an example of the most inhuman sadism. Rumor accused the hated "Saltychikha" even of such crimes that she did not actually commit (for example, cannibalism).
By and large, the story of Saltykova can tell us about our ancestors no less than the works of Fonvizin and Karamzin, although, of course, this story will turn out to be completely unromantic.

Copyright Mazurin

February 19 the premiere of the historical series directed by Yegor Anashkin will take place on the Rossiya TV channel "Bloody lady" based on the biography of the landowner Daria Saltykova. The role of the woman, whose name has become the personification of cruelty and inhumanity in Russia, was played by Julia Snigir.

History reference

The second half of the 18th century in the history of Russia is usually called the Age of Enlightenment and the Golden Age of the Russian nobility. Never before had the nobility been so refined and gallant. Sophistication was present in architecture and literature, feelings and relationships.

True, the life of the peasants, who ensured this whole idyll with their overwork, was completely different. Absolutely powerless, they often became victims of violence and tyranny of their masters.

A household name in the history of Russia in the 18th century was the name of the pillar noblewoman Daria Saltykova. This lady "became famous" for sadism, sophisticated torture and murder of her serfs.

"Saltychikha". Hood. Pchelin V.N.

In her family there were nobles with sonorous surnames - the Davydovs, the Musins-Pushkins, the Stroganovs and the Tolstoys. Young Daria lived in luxury, having received a huge inheritance.

The beauty married a noble groom - captain of the Life Guards Cavalry Regiment Gleb Alekseevich Saltykov. Daria was happily married, God gave the couple two sons.

But soon Saltykova lost her husband, becoming at the age of 26 the richest widow in Russia: she owned thousands of souls and huge estates. After the mysterious death of Gleb Alekseevich, she imprisoned herself in the Troitskoye estate near Moscow (today Trinity Park in Teply Stan). The extreme cruelty that she unleashed on her serfs "helped" the young widow to quench her grief. At the same time, Saltykova was very religious: she regularly made pilgrimages to shrines, donated a lot of money for the needs of the church and generously distributed alms.

True, the piety of the "bloody lady" did not protect her unfortunate servants. From the cruelty of Saltychikha, women and girls were the first to suffer. The enraged landowner tortured and tortured uncomplaining peasant women: she poured boiling water over the victims, tore out or set fire to their hair, tore their ears and nostrils with red-hot tongs. The unfortunate martyrs without clothes were left in the cold, starved, and locked up to death in the stables.

Among those killed by the landowner were young girls, pregnant women, girls and even babies.

Relatives of the victims tried to complain, but because of the money-grubbing of officials, their names were immediately reported to Saltychikha. It is clear that the lady punished the "informers" with particular cruelty.

Thus, for a long time the crimes of the landowner remained unpunished, and her tortures became more and more sophisticated.

According to the testimony of the peasants, Daria Saltykova enjoyed the torment of her victims. After the atrocities, she furiously bowed in monasteries and temples.

Once, the grandfather of the famous poet Fyodor Tyutchev, the nobleman Nikolai Tyutchev, who had a love relationship with Saltykova, almost died at the hands of a bloodthirsty lady. But Tyutchev went down the aisle with another, for which Saltychikha almost killed him along with his young wife.

Fearing for his life, Nikolai Tyutchev wrote to Catherine II, who had just ascended the throne. A little earlier, two peasants, whose wives were killed by Saltychikha, also managed to convey a complaint to the young empress.

Catherine was horrified. Having ascended the Russian throne, she wanted to introduce humane order and respect for the law, so the investigation began immediately. It lasted over six years. Hundreds of witnesses were interviewed. It turned out that Saltychikha ruined 139 lives, but only 30 serfs were able to prove the murders. The investigation was hampered by the influential family of the Saltykovs and the money of the landowner, who went to bribe witnesses.

But connections and millions did not help - Daria Saltykova was convicted. She was deprived of her noble rank, the right to be called by a human name (henceforth she should have been called "It").

Catherine II wished the death of the landowner, but at the last moment canceled the death sentence. Saltychikha was sentenced to life imprisonment in an earthen pit.

Saltykova was kept in the underground prison for 11 years. Then she was transferred to a stone annex to the cathedral church of the Ivanovo Monastery.

In total, Saltychikha spent 33 years in prison. People were allowed to look at her like a terrible animal. Daria Saltykova died at the age of 71. She was buried in the cemetery of the Donskoy Monastery, where Saltykova's relatives rested. The headstone has survived to this day.