Daria Nikolaeva Saltykova, nicknamed Saltychikha (1730-1801), was a Russian landowner who went down in history as a most sophisticated sadist and murderer of more than a hundred serfs under her control. She was born in March 1730 into a family that belonged to the staunch Moscow nobility; relatives of Daria Nikolaevna's parents were the Davydovs, Musins-Pushkins, Stroganovs, Tolstoys and other eminent nobles. Saltykova’s aunt was married to Lieutenant General Ivan Bibikov, and her older sister was married to Lieutenant General Afanasy Zhukov.
Today, as a rule, they prefer to remember only the ceremonial side of the “Russia that we lost” about the Russian Empire.
“Balls, beauties, footmen, cadets...” waltzes and the notorious crunch of French bread undoubtedly took place. But this pleasant-to-the-ear bread crunch was accompanied by something else—the crunch of the bones of Russian serfs, who provided this entire idyll with their labor.
And it’s not just a matter of backbreaking work - the serfs, who were in the complete power of the landowners, very often became victims of tyranny, bullying, and violence.
The rape of courtyard girls by gentlemen, of course, was not considered a crime. The master wanted it, the master took it, that’s the whole story.
Of course, there were also murders. Well, the master got excited in anger, beat up the careless servant, and whoever pays attention to this kind of thing takes his breath and gives up the ghost.
However, even against the background of the realities of the 18th century, the story of the landowner Daria Saltykova, better known as Saltychikha, looked monstrous. So monstrous that it came to trial and sentencing.
At twenty-six, Saltychikha was widowed and received full ownership 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 charges - 139 people, most of them women and girls! Most of the murders were carried out in the village of Troitsky near Moscow.
In her youth, a girl from a prominent noble family was known as the first beauty, and in addition to this, she stood out for her extreme piety.
Daria married the captain of the Life Guards Cavalry Regiment, Gleb Alekseevich Saltykov. The Saltykov family was even more noble than the Ivanov family - Gleb Saltykov’s nephew Nikolai Saltykov would become His Serene Highness Prince, Field Marshal and would be a prominent courtier in the era of Catherine the Great, Paul I and Alexander I.
Left a widow, the landowner changed a lot.
Surprisingly, she was still a blooming and, moreover, a very pious woman. Daria herself married the captain of the Life Guards Cavalry Regiment, Gleb Saltykov, but was widowed in 1756. Her mother and grandmother lived in a nunnery, so Daria Nikolaevna became the sole owner of a large fortune. The 26-year-old widow was left with two sons who were enrolled in military service in the capital's guards regiments. Almost every year Daria Saltykova went on a pilgrimage to some Orthodox shrine. Sometimes she traveled quite far, visiting, for example, the Kiev Pechersk Lavra; During such trips, Saltykova generously donated “to the Church” and distributed alms.
As a rule, it all started with complaints about the servants - Daria did not like how the floor was washed or the clothes were washed. The angry mistress began to beat the careless maid, and her favorite weapon was a log. In the absence of one, they used an iron, a rolling pin - whatever was at hand. The guilty one was then flogged by grooms and haiduks, sometimes to death. Saltychikha could pour boiling water over the victim or singe the hair on her head. The victims were starved and tied naked in the cold.
At first, Daria Saltykova’s serfs were not particularly alarmed by this - this kind of thing happened everywhere. The first murders did not frighten me either - sometimes the lady got excited.
But since 1757, the killings have become systematic. Moreover, they began to be worn especially cruel and sadistic. The lady clearly began to enjoy what was happening.
In one episode, the nobleman also suffered from Saltychikha. 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 someone else, for which Saltychikha almost killed him and his wife. Tyutchev officially notified the authorities of a possible attack and received 12 soldiers as guards while traveling to Tambov. Saltykova, having learned about the captain’s security, canceled the attack at the last moment.
At the beginning of the summer of 1762, two fugitive serfs appeared in St. Petersburg - Ermolai Ilyin and Savely Martynov - who set themselves an almost impossible goal: they intended to bring a complaint to the Empress Ekaterina Alekseevna against their mistress, the large landowner Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova. The fugitives had almost no chance of success. There were still almost four decades before the era of Emperor Paul the First, who installed a special box on the wall of the Winter Palace for denunciations of “all persons, regardless of rank.” And this meant that an ordinary person could not be heard by the Authority, which did not honor him with audiences and did not accept his petitions. You can say this: the Supreme Power simply did not notice its slaves.
The surprising thing is that both were able to successfully complete an almost hopeless undertaking.
The men had nothing left to lose - their wives died at the hands of Saltychikha. The story of Ermolai Ilyin is completely terrible: the landowner killed his three wives one by one. In 1759, the first wife, Katerina Semyonova, was beaten to death. In the spring of 1761, her second wife, Fedosya Artamonova, repeated her fate. In February 1762, Saltychikha beat Yermolai’s third wife, the quiet and meek Aksinya Yakovleva, with a log.
The fugitives were looking for approaches to the Winter Palace, or more precisely, for a person through whom they could convey a complaint to the Empress. It is not known exactly how such a person was found, it is not known at all who he was. Be that as it may, in the first half of June, Catherine the Second received “written assault” (as the statements were called in those days) from Ilyin and Martynov.
In it, the serfs reported the following:
- They are known for their owner Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova’s “deadly and very important criminal cases”(sic);
- Daria Saltykova "since 1756, a hundred souls (...) were destroyed by her, the landowner";
- Emphasizing the large number of people tortured by Daria Saltykova, the informers stated that only one of them, Ermolai Ilyin, had the landowner successively kill three wives, each of whom she tortured with her own hands;
The Empress had no great desire to quarrel with the nobility over the mob. However, the scale and cruelty of Daria Saltykova’s crimes made Catherine II horrified. The Empress did not brush aside the paper, it was too much about the large number of victims they were talking about. Although Saltychikha belonged to a noble family, Catherine II used her case as a show trial that marked a new era of legality.
The investigation was very difficult. High-ranking relatives of Saltychikha hoped that the empress’s interest in the matter would disappear and it would be possible to hush it up. Investigators were offered bribes and were hindered in every possible way in collecting evidence.
Daria Saltykova herself did not admit her guilt and did not repent, even when she was threatened with torture. However, they were not used in relation to a high-born noblewoman.
But in order not to reduce the degree of psychological pressure on the suspect, investigator 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 “brought in for torture.”
However, on that day it was not her who was tortured, but a certain robber, whose guilt was beyond doubt. Saltykova was present during the torture from beginning to end. The cruelty of the execution should have frightened Saltykova and broken her tenacity.
But other people’s suffering did not make a special impression on Daria Nikolaevna, and after the end of the “interrogation with bias,” which she witnessed, the suspect, smiling, repeated to Volkov’s face that “she does not know her guilt and will not incriminate herself.” Thus, the investigator’s hopes to intimidate Saltykova and thereby achieve a confession of guilt were not crowned with success.
Nevertheless, the investigation established that in the period 1757 to 1762, landowner Daria Saltykova lost 138 serfs under suspicious circumstances, of whom 50 were officially considered “died of disease,” 72 people went missing, 16 were considered “to go to their husbands” or “ gone on the run."
Investigators managed to collect evidence that allowed them to accuse Daria Saltykova of murdering 75 people.
The Moscow College of Justice found that in 11 cases the serfs slandered Daria Saltykova. Of the remaining 64 murders, 26 cases were considered “remaining under suspicion,” meaning there was insufficient evidence.
Nevertheless, 38 brutal murders committed by Daria Saltykova were recognized as fully proven.
The landowner's case was transferred to the Senate, which made a decision on Saltychikha's guilt. However, the senators did not make a decision on punishment, leaving it to Catherine II.
The Empress's archive contains eight draft sentences - Catherine was painfully thinking about how to punish a non-human in a female form, who was also a well-born noblewoman. 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 Saltykova and the procedure for its administration.
The sentence of the convicted landowner was carried out on October 17, 1768 on Red Square in Moscow. According to the recollections of contemporaries, already a few days before this date, the ancient capital of Russia began to seethe in anticipation of reprisals. The general excitement was facilitated by both the public announcement of the upcoming event (in the form of publications in leaflets read out by officers in all crowded squares and crossroads of Moscow) and the distribution of special “tickets” that all Moscow nobles received. On the day of the massacre, Red Square was completely filled, people crowded into the windows of 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 guard by mounted hussars; in a black cart next to the former landowner there were grenadiers with drawn swords. Saltykova was forced to climb onto a high scaffold, where the decree of Empress Catherine the Second dated October 2, 1768 was read out. Saltykova was tied with chains to a pole, and a large wooden shield with the inscription “torturer and murderer” was placed around her neck. After an hour, Saltykova was taken from the scaffold and seated in a black cart, which, under military guard, headed 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 flogged and branded. All three were sent to hard labor in Siberia.
Daria Saltykova’s “repentance chamber” was an underground room a little more than two meters high, into which no light entered at all. The only thing allowed was to light a candle while eating. The prisoner was not allowed walks; she was taken out of the dungeon only on major church holidays to a small window in the church so that she could hear the bells ringing and watch the service from afar.
Visitors to the monastery were allowed to look through this window and even talk to the prisoner. The memories of contemporaries have been preserved that many Moscow residents and visitors came to the Ivanovo Monastery themselves and brought their children with them specifically to look at the famous “Saltychikha”.
To annoy her, the kids allegedly even came up with a song:
Saltychikha-talkykha, and the highest dyachikha!
Vlasyevna Dmitrovna Savivsha, the lady of the press!..
Saltychikha died on November 27, 1801 at the age of 71, having spent more than 30 years in prison. There is not a single piece of evidence that Daria Saltykova has repented of what she did.
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. We know the names of some of Daria Saltykova’s victims, unlike the names of millions of people tortured by Russian landowners during the existence of the serfdom in Russia.
BY THE WAY:
Saltychikha is not a unique phenomenon in world history. We know the names of no less terrible criminals. For example, Gilles de Rais - “Bluebeard” - killed more than 600 children in the 15th century, and for example, a hundred years before the Saltychikha, there lived a “bloody countess” in Hungary...
Erzsebet Bathory of Eched (1560 - 1614), also called the Cachtica Lady or the Bloody Countess, was a Hungarian countess from the famous Bathory family, notorious 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 murdering hundreds of girls between 1585 and 1610. The largest number of victims named during Bathory's trial was 650 people.
"The Second Saltychikha" popularly called the wife of the landowner Koshkarov, who lived in the 40s of the 19th century in the Tambov province. She found special pleasure in tyranny over defenseless peasants. Koshkarova had a standard for torture, the limits of which she went beyond only in extreme cases. Men were supposed to be given 100 lashes of the whip, women - 80. 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 whipped her because there were not enough onions in the soup.
Another "Saltychikha" discovered in Chuvashia. In September 1842, landowner Vera Sokolova beat to death the courtyard wench Nastasya, whose father said that the mistress often punished her serfs by “pulling their hair, and sometimes forced them to flog them with rods and whips.” And another maid complained that “the lady broke her nose with her fist, and from punishment with a whip there was a scar on her thigh, and in winter she was locked in a latrine in only a shirt, because of which she froze her legs”...
I cannot help but add that the portrait of this beautiful and stately lady is often passed off as “Saltychikha”. In fact, this is Daria PETROVNA Chernysheva-Saltykova (1739-1802). State lady, cavalry lady of the Order of St. Catherine, 1st degree, sister of Princess N. P. Golitsyna, wife of Field Marshal Count I. P. Saltykov. The eldest daughter of the diplomat Count Pyotr Grigorievich 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 famous head of the secret chancellery under Biron, Count Andrei Ivanovich Ushakov.
Historical figures. Daria Saltykova (Saltychikha)In 1768, next to the Execution Place, the landowner Daria Saltykova, the famous Saltychikha, who tortured to death at least 138 of her serfs, stood at the pillory.
While the clerk read out the crimes she had committed from a sheet of paper, Saltychikha stood with her head uncovered, and on her chest hung a plaque with the inscription “Tormentor and Murderer.” After that, she was sent to eternal imprisonment in the Ivanovo Monastery.
How she hated them!.. Why are they staring at her, demonic spawn! Why did the mouths open! It's like she's a monster from overseas. Or a wild beast. She is a person, a person, although for some reason everyone calls her a monster or, in the fashionable French manner, a monster or monstrum. If only she could get them! I would torture him to death. Either a log in the forehead, or boiling water in the face! Otherwise she would have been beaten to death with batogs. They also say that she is a monster. They're all monsters!
Oh, how she hated them!
I just wanted to tear it to pieces!
Daria Saltykova, nicknamed Saltychikha, looked with a wild look full of anger at the crowd of onlookers gathered on Red Square near the Execution Ground.
It was midday. It was cold. The gray, impenetrable sky hung like leaden weight over the Kremlin. Light snowflakes fluttered and fell onto 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 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. on the appointment of state criminal Daria Saltykova to civil execution and on her eternal imprisonment in a monastery. Having finished reading the order, the priest immediately began to read out the list of crimes and victims of Saltychikha. There were 38 proven people, 26 unproven people, and as many as 138 suspected people! The only words heard from the clerk were: tortured, killed, strangled, spotted, drowned, beaten to death...
Someone groaned, someone gasped, wailed, branded, and scolded the murderer. Someone pointed a finger at her and spat in her direction. In the eyes of onlookers there is curiosity, horror, fear, bewilderment. How could she commit such atrocities? She is a person or a beast in human form. His actions are like a beast.
The snow got heavier. It was no longer small snowflakes that flew, but flakes.
Suddenly a woman with crazy eyes flew out of the crowd and rushed at Saltykova. A knife flashed in the hands of the abnormal woman. Another second - and sharp steel would have pierced the criminal's throat. But the deft guard grabbed the attacker’s hand and threw the woman aside. Other guards ran up and instantly pinned her down. It was one of Saltychikha’s former servants. Once upon a time, a 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 take place. Apparently the time has not yet come for the villainess to die.
“I will ruin you anyway! You will answer for the death of your husband!” - the woman screamed in powerless rage. - “I’ll find you in the next world! I’ll go down to hell for you! Wherever you are, I’ll be there! Monster, murderer!”
The would-be avenger was dragged to the police station, and Saltykova caught her breath: a little more - and she would have been in heaven! Thank God she’s alive. But what difference does it make? Is this life when you stand tied to a pillory, and people point their fingers at you? No, it is 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. It’s unlikely that she ever wanted such a fate. But everything started out so well in her life...
Daria Petrovna Saltykova and Baroness Natalya Mikhailovna Stroganova.
Daria Nikolaevna was born in March 1730 into a family of Moscow noblemen. Her relatives were the Musins-Pushkins, Davydovs, Tolstoys, Stroganovs and others. She changed her maiden name Ivanov 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 modern Teply Stan. It is in this mansion with a pond and a forest that terrible and bloody actions will unfold, the main participant of which will be Daria Nikolaevna.
At the age of 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, she initially generously donated money to the church and gave out 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 radically changed the fate of Daria Nikolaevna.
One day she was informed that a man was hunting in her forest.
“Who’s in charge there?” the lady raised her eyebrows menacingly. - Come on, quickly catch this insolent person and bring him to me. I'll deal with him!"
The peasants rushed into the forest with guns and stakes. Soon they brought a pleasant-looking man, who turned out to be Captain Nikolai Tyutchev.
Nikolay Tyutchev
He was engaged in land surveying, and came here to resolve a land dispute between two landowners, Saltykova’s neighbors. And while hunting in his spare time, he accidentally wandered into the territory of an imperious landowner, where he was noticed by vigilant men.
Daria Nikolaevna immediately laid her 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 shot of vodka. The captain was exhausted from alcohol. Lo and behold, the hostess, who at first seemed not so pretty, became simply beautiful! The captain stayed up late, got to talking, and Tyutchev seemed to have some kind of interest in the landowner. The visits began to be repeated. The captain's boredom disappeared. The wartime romance has begun. After some time, Nikolai Andreevich and Daria Nikolaevna began to share a common bed. Saltykova fell in love with the officer without memory. But the captain was in no hurry to tie the knot between Hymen and the landowner. He soon became bored with her and stopped liking her. Daria seemed rude and somewhat primitive to him. An unheard of thing, she did not know how to read and write, did not know how to write, and could not even sign an official document. She was distinguished by her large build and good physical strength. While Tyutchev was making love with Daria Nikolaevna, he took a closer look at one of Saltykova’s neighbors, a girl named Pelageya Panyutina, (it was 1762), fell in love with her and decided to marry her. And he got married. It is not difficult to guess what Saltykova’s reaction to this news was. She simply became enraged: such a blow to a woman’s pride! They preferred someone else to her! And an insidious plan for monstrous revenge matured in her head: she decided to kill both. Moreover, blow them up in Panyutina’s mansion, which was located behind the Prechistensky Gate near Zemlyanoy Val.
She called her two grooms - Alexey Savelyev and Roman Ivanov - and ordered:
“Buy five pounds of gunpowder from the main office of artillery and fortification, then mix it with sulfur and wrap it in hemp, and tuck this charge under the Pelageya zashtra (zastrakha is the lower, overhanging edge of the roof of the hut)! Don’t disgrace yourself, you bastards! I’ll skin it, if something is wrong!"
No matter how much the servants wanted to become murderers, they had to obey. They did as their mistress ordered them. Savelyev bought gunpowder, and his friends made a homemade bomb due to misfortune. But at the last moment, the would-be killers abandoned their plan. They were scared. For this disobedience, Saltychikha ordered them to be mercilessly beaten with batogs.
So, the plan to assassinate her unfaithful lover ended in failure, but the persistent Saltykova did not let up. Having learned that the newlyweds were going to leave for Bryansk district along the great 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 and the girl. And when they go, attack them and then kill them, and write off their death as simple robbery.
Someone, for a fee or out of good conscience, told Tyutchev about this idea. He was seriously scared and turned to the authorities for help. And soon four sleigh crews with guards and the newlyweds proceeded past the village of Troitskoye. The assassination attempt again failed. Saltykova was vomiting and screaming with anger.
After this love tragedy, something happened to Daria Nikolaevna’s psyche. Saltykova became even more cruel and sophisticated in torture. If she had previously only mocked and tortured her victims, now she began to simply kill them. She especially loved to kill beautiful girls with light brown hair. No wonder, after all, her happy rival Pelageya was a beauty and had light brown hair.
One day 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 in a large convoy for the winter to the mansion on Sretenka. Christmas and New Year were approaching. Her people repaired and prepared sleighs and carts to load them with meat, poultry, butter, sour cream, pickles, and jam. They loaded things. There was a bustle of work, the final preparations for departure were underway.
Saltykova was bored. She sat down on the sofa, took out the album and began leafing through it. Poems, humorous epigrams, fables, wishes, congratulations... This was written by a hussar lieutenant, this was a state councilor, and this was some kind of drinker. Daria Nikolaevna turned over another sheet - and shuddered! She recognized this sweeping handwriting. A poem from the once beloved Nikolai Tyutchev. And the signature: “Dedicated to the adored and incomparable Daria Nikolaevna.”
Saltykova became gloomy: past spiritual wounds reminded of themselves again. The bad blood instantly went to my head. She, looking at the floor in the living room, shouted: “What kind of dirt is this?! Who cleaned it up?! Varvara?! Well, call the bastard, let him come to me for a conversation!”
The butler brought in a pretty blonde girl with blue eyes. Varvara was shaking with fear. She knew firsthand about the lady’s atrocities. Once, a landowner hit her on the head with a stick for a poorly ironed dress, causing sparks to fly out of her eyes. After this, the girl felt sick for a long time and felt dizzy. Once the lady pulled Varvara by the hair. I even tore out a clump. It was very painful.
"What do you want, madam?" - The maid humbly bowed her head.
Daria Nikolaevna looked angrily at the girl. Saltychikha was irritated by her beauty and blond hair. In some way she reminded her of her happy rival Pelageya Panyutin. 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. Varvara fell, bleeding profusely. She even lost consciousness.
The butler rushed towards the motionless maid.
"Alive?" - Saltychikha asked.
The butler nodded.
“Thank God... Come on, my dear, please call the grooms and dress me warmer.”
It seems that Daria Nikolaevna has come 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 and a sable hat. They tied it with a warm colorful scarf. The butler, cook and coachman grabbed an easy chair and a healthy rug.
Grooms Alexey Savelyev and Roman Ivanov took Varvara out onto the street. In one dress and shoes. The head is not covered with a shawl or scarf. A light frost bit my ears and cheeks. Blood from a cut eyebrow dripped onto her dress and snow. A trail of scarlet spots followed the girl. She cried bitterly.
“Have mercy, madam!” Varvara begged.
But the cruel Saltychikha did not even think of forgiving the maid. The show was just beginning.
The whole procession stopped at the pond. They laid out a carpet and placed a chair on it. The lady sat down in it, preparing to enjoy the bloody torture. She waved her hand imperiously.
“Well, undress her immediately!”
The maid, despite her desperate resistance, was torn off her outer dress, and then her shirt. Varvara appeared naked. Her nakedness was beautiful: thin waist, beautiful wide hips, delicious breasts. But this beauty infuriated Saltychikha even more. Someone is 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!" - the landowner yelled. - “Stronger! Even stronger!”
The grooms began to beat the maid mercilessly. She screamed shrilly, tried to dodge, cover herself with her hands, run away - but where could she go? A fragile girl against two hefty men - clearly unequal forces! They knocked her down and began to whip her while she was lying down. Disgusting bloody stripes appeared on the beautiful dark body. The fun didn't last long.
"Enough!" - Daria Nikolaevna shouted at the torturers. “Otherwise he will go to another world ahead of time.”
The grooms reluctantly parted ways: they, like the mistress, liked to torment and torture people. A twisted girl’s figure lay in the snow, and blood was splattered all over the snow. Red on white. A beautiful, but at the same time tragic picture.
The maid, trembling from the cold, knelt down and lamented pitifully:
“Don’t ruin me, lady, 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 the monster from the village of Troitskoye? And did this woman even have a heart if she did such a thing? Rather, there was a stone instead.
"Throw her into the hole!" - Saltychikha gave the order.
The servants grabbed the kicking and screaming Varvara by the legs and arms and threw her into the hole.
Bultikh! The maid's head disappeared under the icy water. Seven seconds passed. Incredibly, Varvara swam out. The young body avoided the cold shock that occurs when suddenly immersed in icy water. The maid took a deep breath of cold air and grabbed the edge of the ice. Having caught my breath, with great difficulty I crawled out of the hole. She crawled on her knees a few meters and stood up there. Staggering and sobbing, she went to the lady so that she would spare her. But the sadistic maniac was not going to forgive the maid. The girl rushed to her clothes, but the groom Savelyev roughly pushed her away. Varvara fell. She was again whipped and driven to the water.
And Saltychikha sat in a chair and laughed.
“Serves you right, dirty fellow, serves you right! I don’t need this bastard to serve me, let him die from the cold!”
Varvara was freezing. The insidious destructive cold penetrated deeper and deeper into her body. She no longer felt her legs, fingers, or lower abdomen. She wrapped her arms around herself and tried to keep warm. But where it was, it didn’t get any warmer.
Another ten minutes passed. Saltychikha clearly enjoyed the torment of the victim.
Varvara’s skin turned white. The poor thing was no longer crying, but was sobbing convulsively. She wasn't shaking, she was just shaking violently. Teeth chattered against teeth. The lips did not move. The maid made some interjections and indistinct sounds. My eyes became cloudy.
She froze.
"Let's get her back into the hole!" - the landowner shouted ominously.
The grooms readily grabbed the demoralized, defenseless and numb girl by the arms and dragged her to the ice hole. Having finished dragging, they threw it into the water again...
Bultikh! And cold splashes flew in different directions! The girl disappeared under the water for the second time.
Saltykova smiled with satisfaction:
“It won’t come out this time, you bastard! I bet it won’t.”
Suddenly, to her great surprise and the surprise of everyone, Varvara swam out! The girl, struggling with her last strength for her life, which was slipping away every minute, tried to grab the edge of the ice 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 life-saving ice, but to no avail! Her fingers, curled by the deadly cold, only scratched the ice. The girl began to flounder helplessly in the water. The cold completely overwhelmed her. The blue stars of the eyes faded away. Strength faded, muscle tremors stopped, heart rates gradually slowed down, breathing became shallow. Varvara felt a blissful warmth spreading throughout her body. She fell asleep and died at the same time. Death took her body, and the innocent soul was preparing to appear before God.
And then another second - and the girl’s head disappeared under the water. A minute passed - Varvara no longer surfaced. The terrible show is over.
“Drowned,” the landowner said without regret. - “That’s where she goes. Take the little hooks and fumble along the bottom, it’s not so deep here, pull her out onto the ice. Then to the police station. Say she committed suicide and jumped into the hole.”
The grooms nodded obsequiously, took the hooks and, after rummaging for about ten minutes, found the drowned woman. They drove up a corpse sleigh. How many corpses were transported in it - a lot! The servants were unable to straighten the frozen limbs of the dead girl and threw her into the sleigh like a frozen carcass. They covered him with matting and took him to the police to register his death.
And Saltychikha, coming into the living room, ordered the fireplace to be turned on harder: she was a little frozen, she needed to warm up. Her gaze fell again on the ill-fated album. Moreover, it was opened in the same place as before. Where were Tyutchev's poems? Blood instantly rushed to my temples. And it squeezed like in a vice. The lady clasped her head in her hands and groaned. Again she dreamed of Panyutina. In an airy luxurious dress, with a white fan, white ballroom shoes and long white gloves. And then the gallant Tyutchev in his uniform comes up to her and the couple begins to dance...
"Pelageya! Be gone, Satan!" - Saltykova screamed in horror and, losing consciousness, fell to the floor.
This is how Daria 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 offense. She starved her victims, poured melted wax into their ears, pulled them by the hair, tore out tufts of hair, poured boiling water on them. She hit everything that came to hand. If it’s a log, then it’s a log, if it’s a stick, then it’s a stick, a poker, then it’s a poker. She forced the grooms to flog those who were guilty in the yard with whips, rods, and 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 on end. If she got tired of tormenting the serfs, she ordered other servants to continue torturing people. And she sat down in a chair and loved to watch the bloody torture.
She sent some to hard labor - and these were truly the lucky ones. At least they remained alive after the maniac’s amusements.
Soon rumors about the murderous 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 corpses. And the whole point is that Saltykova’s servants brought the dead on a sleigh to the police at the station. The landowner generously paid and gave gifts to the police so that they would remain silent and write down what was needed in the official protocol. They always recorded an unfortunate death. Like, the poor thing ran away from the lady in a light dress, froze on the way and died. And although the deceased were disfigured and all covered in bruises, they still wrote: “died as a result of an accident.” Or they indicated that the person committed suicide.
The clergy were also on Daria Nikolaevna’s pay. They were supposed to perform funeral services for people committed to violent death. She did not like the Moscow saints: they often refused to perform church rites at the sight of the brutally tortured bodies of the deceased. I hired locals. One of them, Stepan Petrov, was the full-time priest of Saltychikha. He had no problem with funeral services for the victims.
If someone ran away, he was returned 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 a dungeon and starved to death. Subjects of Saltychikha in the period from 1756 to 1762 filed 21 complaints against their mistress. But since the sadistic landowner had enormous connections both in the police and among officials, she immediately found out first-hand which of her serfs was informing on her. And then she mercilessly punished informers and complainers. Some she made disabled, some she killed, and some she sent into exile.
One day the following happened...
In April 1762, two Saltychikha serfs - Savely Martynov and Ermolai Ilyin - tortured by torture and abuse and having lost their wives at the whim of the sadistic landowner, ran away from her and went with a complaint against the cruel mistress to the Moscow branch of the Senate. But they were not allowed there and decided to hand them 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 a house on Sretenka to hand them over to the cruel landowner, but they, realizing that they were being taken not to the police station, but to the lair of a monster, shouted out of despair throughout the street:
"The sovereign's word and deed!"
This cry was adopted at that time to announce to the sovereign about some state crime, and not a single official could hush up this matter. That's what happened here too. The questioning of witnesses began, and senior police officials became involved. The atrocities of the Saltyks shocked everyone. The reports were delivered to Catherine II in St. Petersburg with the help of couriers. She ordered a thorough investigation of this high-profile case. It was led by court advisers to 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 and had no family or business ties with the criminal. For officials of noble birth and high rank, this proceeding would be a dangerous undertaking. Such a person could be put under pressure, bribed, intimidated. Or simply ask in a related way to close the case. An official like Volkov could not be put under pressure or intimidated: he was alien 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 the 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 Daria Nikolaevna would sincerely confess to all her crimes. But it was not there! For four months (!) she led the church minister 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 stubborn in her sins.
Volkov and Tsianov arrived in the Mother See and took on the Detective Prikaz, the Moscow police chief and the governor-general himself. It was not without reason that the investigators dug; it turned out that Moscow officials had shelved more than 20 complaints from courtyard workers against Saltychikha, reports of examination of the bodies, conclusions about the cause of death and many other documents. A scandal broke out. In November 1763, it was proven that most of Saltychikha’s subjects did not die a natural death. This was established thanks to the seized account books of the landowner. Based on the entries made in the book, they determined the exact number of dead serfs and established the circle of influential officials involved in this matter. 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 after two weeks they strangely died suddenly.
For example, it is documented that in 1759, in the Sysknaya order of Moscow, the body of the Saltychikha serf, Khrisanf Andreev, was presented for examination. The peasant's body had many injuries, bruises and bruises. The investigation into the circumstances of Andreev’s death was long, 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. One day, on the way to her residence in the village of Troitskoye, Saltychikha stopped in her other estate - the village of Vokshino. There, the girl Masha displeased her for some reason. Or the maniac just wanted to discharge her dark energy. So the girl turned up under my arm. The wording of the complaints against the maid was quite ordinary: poorly washed floors. The far-fetched accusation was followed by the most real reprisal. At first, Saltychikha beat her with a rolling pin. Having mocked her, she ordered the groom Bogomolov to beat Masha with a whip and drive her into the pond up to her throat. The servant did so. Petrova stood in the water for a quarter of an hour. Then he kicked her out and ordered her to wash the floors again. But the girl, beaten half to death, was physically unable to do this. Saltychikha began beating the victim again. But with a stick. When the tormentor got tired, sat down to drink tea, the groom Bogomolov took the stick and the abuse resumed with renewed vigor. In the end, the maid died from the fatal beating. The body was secretly taken late in the evening on two pairs of horses to the village of Troitskoye where she was buried.
Strange were the deaths of all three wives of Yermolai Ilyin, the one who denounced the landowner along with Savelyev. The first was called Ekaterina Semenova, the second was Feodosia Artamonova, and the third was Aksinya Yakovleva. The landowner allegedly beat the first two 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 Feodosia. Her corpse was taken to the village of Troitskoye and buried there. The maniac beat Ilyin’s third wife, Aksinya, to death with a rolling pin and a piece of wood in her mansion on Sretenka. This happened in the spring of 1762. When Artamonova was carried into one of the rooms by the servants, she still showed some signs of life. The nurse tried to give her wine, but in vain. Without regaining consciousness, the poor thing died. She, too, was taken under cover of darkness to the Trinity estate, where priest Petrov secretly performed the funeral service. And the sadist Yermolaya warned menacingly:
“You can even go to denunciation, but you won’t find anything, unless you want to be whipped like other informers.”
It was time 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 had sadistic inclinations. Ermolai personally scolded their wives for dirty floors, assaulted them and, together with other people, whipped them with batogs and whips.
They say that a 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, etc. Ilyin’s only advantage was that he ran away from the Sretensky house and reported on the mistress’s atrocities. And that was 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, but for some reason they died a “natural” death upon arrival at their place of residence or disappeared completely.
Saltychikha, throwing a lot of money into bribery, actively and in every possible way interfered with the investigation. Then the investigators decided to remove the maniac from managing her property and money, arrested her, and threw her into a dungeon.
Meanwhile, more and more new witnesses appeared, and the terrible truth about the bloody atrocities of the Trinity monster was increasingly revealed. The investigation into the case of the sadistic killer lasted 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 overturned 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 sacred 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 torturer, she was from their circle. But it is impossible to execute the inhabitants of heaven, the privileged class. There must be some exceptions to the rules for them.
The Empress revised the verdict. Saltykova was sentenced to civil execution on Red Square, and then life imprisonment in the dungeon of the Ivanovo Monastery.
She was deprived of her noble title, property, and maternal rights. And her faithful servants - the priest Petrov, the butler, the coachman, the groom and other servants on the same day were whipped, 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 loved to be visited by ordinary people. Everyone wanted to look at the Trinity Monster.
...Two boys approached the Ivanovo Monastery. One is red, the other is blond. Both are barefoot and grimy.
"Do you know who you can see here?" - the red-haired man asked his friend, he shook his head negatively. - “The famous Saltychikha... You see that window with bars and green curtains... She’s there.”
The blond man widened his eyes in surprise and followed his friend in intrigue. The boy heard that this old woman tortured many people to death. What kind of monster is this? She probably looks like a witch. Let's take a look. But it’s somehow scary to go there! The boy slowed down...
His friend, noticing the blond man’s indecisiveness, exclaimed defiantly: “What are you afraid of?”
The blond man again shook his head negatively and, so as not to be considered a coward, followed his friend. Red, like the bravest, parted the curtains...
Here she is! She sits behind bars... She really is an old woman and really looks like a witch. Gray long hair, a yellowed face, an evil, scary look. Seeing the boys, she became furious, and, throwing a black scarf over her head, screamed in good obscenities:
"You sons of bitches, get out! Let the devils take you away! Get out!"
The stick jumped out of the window and almost hit Red in the forehead. He deftly dodged. The prisoner threw herself at the bars in a frenzy.
"I'll ask you!" - the captive splashed with saliva.
How she wanted to get them, hit them, hurt them. But there’s no way she can get to them, there’s just no way. The boys, realizing that they were out of reach, began to tease her:
"Saltychikha is a fool! Saltychikha is a fool! Witch!"
Other onlookers appeared. They laughed and made fun of her. And she raged in impotent anger, shouting some threats and curses, and shook the bars. Then, having let off steam, she closed the curtains and hid...
Someone sang a daring song composed about the famous prisoner:
Saltychikha-talkykha,
And a supreme sex worker!
Vlasevna Dmitrovna Savivsha,
Davishna young lady!
And our pies are hot, hot!
With a fish, with a tongue
With beef and eggs!
Welcome to our place
Just right for you!
In our shop there is an atlas,
Kanifas,
Hairpins, pins,
Boils and warts!
Saltychikha again burst out with abuse at those gathered, 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.
Daria Nikolaevna lived in the monastery for 33 years, gave birth to a child from one of the guards, and once a week on Sundays she was released to look at the domes of the Vladimir Church - the murderer was not allowed to the altar.
The sinful tormentor died at the age of 81 and was buried in the Donskoy Monastery cemetery. Her marble sarcophagus is still there.
One day, participants in the program “Battle of Psychics” were brought to Teply Stan to the place where Saltykova’s mansion used to be located, and were asked to present a picture of the events that once took place. And one of the psychics, closing his eyes, began to tell:
“Here stood the owner’s house, and there the pond has become shallow - it used to be deeper... And here’s 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 groom, and they wanted to have a fun wedding, maybe she had cherished girlish dreams, and dreamed about her feminine happiness. Who knows. Everything was ahead of her. She was young and 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 pleasure I. And how many innocently murdered souls are flying here in this ominous place - it’s impossible to count! Strangled, tortured, drowned. And the Trinity monster, Saltychikha, is to blame for everything.
Not having found female happiness, the sadistic maniac took out her anger and disappointment on other people, depriving them forever of the right to happiness.
For many decades, Daria Saltykova remained in people's memory as an example of the most inhuman sadism. Rumor accused the hated “Saltychikha” even of 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
Name: Daria Saltykova (Saltychikha) Daria Saltykova
Date of Birth: 1730
Age: 71 years old
Place of Birth: Russian empire
A place of death: Moscow
Activity: Russian landowner
Family status: Was married
Daria Saltykova - biography
Investigators working on the case of Daria Saltykova seriously verified rumors that the landowner ate her victims, and that one of her favorite delicacies was women’s breasts. The rumors were not confirmed - Saltychikha liked the process of torture itself.
Saltychikha is a terrible fairy tale of Russian history. The name of the landowner who tortured and killed her serfs has not been forgotten to this day, although the details of the bloody deeds in her biography have already been erased from people's memory.
Residents of Teply Stan and the village of Mosrentgen, located on the other side of the ring road, do not even realize that the villainess Saltychikha committed atrocities here two and a half centuries ago.
Why did the ordinary noblewoman Daria Saltykova become a monster in human form? What made her one of the most famous mass murderers in history? Saltychikha’s plump investigative file, stored in the Russian Historical Archive in St. Petersburg, does not provide answers to these questions. The actions in her biography cannot be explained even by bad heredity: Daria's ancestors were completely normal people.
Grandfather, Duma clerk Avtomon Ivanov, headed the Local Prikaz under Peter the Great. During the Streltsy revolt, he took the side of the young tsar at the right time, for which he was awarded ranks and estates. His son Nikolai, having served several years in the tsarist fleet, returned to his native Moscow region, where he rebuilt a manor house in the village of Troitskoye. In the year of Peter's death, he married Anna Tyutcheva - her parents' estate was located next door. Nikolai and Anna had three daughters - Agrafena, Marfa and Daria. Soon after the birth of the youngest - Daria was born in March 1730 - Anna Ivanovna died.
The Ivanovs did not belong to those landowners who enthusiastically listened to the ideas of the European Enlightenment. In their house, everything was arranged as before: long sleep, abundant food and boredom. The daughters were not taught literacy, but they were taught what the future mistress needed - to run the house and keep the slaves in strict order.
Many gentlemen, in the old fashioned way, called serfs, who by law were considered the full property of the owner. In the end, even noble nobles signed petitions to the tsar “Your Majesty’s servant” - what can we say about the peasants? In those years, Empress Anna Ioannovna and her favorite Biron could beat any nobleman with batogs, “cut off” his tongue and send him to Siberia. Russian life in the 18th century was saturated with cruelty, to which Daria had become accustomed since childhood.
According to custom, daughters were married off early. At the age of 19, it was Daria’s turn - she became the wife of 35-year-old captain Gleb Saltykov, a descendant of a rich and noble family. Thanks to this marriage, Daria acquired possessions in the Vologda and Kostroma provinces, as well as a house in Moscow, on the corner of Kuznetsky Most and Bolshaya Lubyanka. A year later, in 1750, she gave birth to a son, Fyodor, and two years later, Nikolai. Daria did little with the children, leaving them in the care of wet nurses and nannies. The husband spent almost all his time at work and often traveled to St. Petersburg on errands. During one of these trips he caught a cold and died in the spring of 1756.
After this, Daria almost completely abandoned the city house and returned to the Moscow region. By that time, her father had also died, leaving his beloved youngest daughter Troitskoye and the neighboring village of Teply Stan - once there was an inn where coachmen warmed up with tea or something stronger. About five hundred peasants lived in both villages - mostly women and children, since half of the men were taken to the unequal war with Prussia.
We don’t know exactly what 26-year-old Daria Saltykova, young in modern times, looked like. One source describes her as “a small, bony and pale person,” others write about “a woman of heroic build with a masculine voice.” However, everyone mentions her hot and fiery disposition. Languishing without male love, after a year of widowhood she found a replacement for her late husband. According to legend, one fine day she heard shots in the forest and ordered the haiduks (that is, servants) to catch the daring trespasser of her property.
Soon a handsome young man in simple clothes was brought to her. Mistaking him for a peasant, Daria habitually ordered him to be whipped, but he knocked the nearest haiduk to the floor with a blow of his fist and shouted: “How dare you? I am captain Nikolai Tyutchev!” Having learned that a distant relative of her mother had stopped by her forest by mistake, carried away by hunting, Saltychikha softened and invited the uninvited guest to the table. And soon he found himself in her bed.
This “neighborhood” romance lasted for more than one year. Tyutchev was five years younger than Saltykova, but still tired of her violent temperament. In addition, he was a nobleman of the new generation, received a good education and felt uncomfortable next to his rude and illiterate roommate - there was nothing to talk about with her. Therefore, he visited Troitskoe no more than once or twice a week, making the excuse of being busy with his job - he worked in the Land Survey Department. During these short visits, he could not help but notice with what fear the servants looked at their mistress. Although, of course, Daria hid the worst thing from “Svet Nikolenka” - she was afraid that she would leave.
But there was plenty of horror in the estate. In those same years, marked by her love for Tyutchev, Daria Saltykova killed dozens of her peasants. Almost all of them were young women - among the victims there were only two men and five girls aged 11-15. The landowner did not punish her serfs for crimes or any serious offenses. It was quite enough for a peasant woman to not wash the floors in the estate very clean or to wash the lady’s dresses poorly.
Saltykova beat the unfortunate people with everything she could get her hands on - a rolling pin, logs, even a hot iron. The screams and pleas of the victims brought the sadist into wild excitement. Tired, she called the haiduks, who beat the women themselves or forced the husbands of the peasant women to do it - if they refused, the same fate awaited them. Saltychikha watched the execution from a chair, shouting: “Stronger, stronger! Beat me to death!” Often obedient servants carried out this order. Then the dead women were carried to the basement, and at night they were buried at the edge of the forest. A paper about the “escape” of another peasant woman was sent to the treasury chamber. To avoid unnecessary questions, a five-ruble bill was usually attached to this document.
But more often it happened differently - after the torture the victim remained alive. Then she was again forced to wash the floors, although she could barely stand on her feet. Then with a cry: “Oh, you rubbish, you decided to be lazy!” - Saltychikha again took up the task of “reasoning.” Women were exposed naked in the cold, starved, and their bodies were torn with hot tongs. These scenes were repeated over and over again - the tormentor’s imagination was rather meager.
She beat the peasant woman Agrafena Agafonov with a rolling pin, and the grooms with “sticks and a batog, which is why her arms and legs were broken.” After beating Akulina Maksimova “without any mercy with a rolling pin and a roller on the head,” the lady burned her hair with a candle. She “taught” the 11-year-old daughter of the courtyard Antonov, Elena, with the same rolling pin, and then pushed her off the stone porch of the estate.
The same scenes took place in the Moscow house of Saltychikha, next to the fashionable shops of Kuznetsky Most. The maid Praskovya Larionova died there - first the sadist beat her herself, and then gave her to the haiduks, shouting at the same time: “Beat her to death! I am responsible myself and am not afraid of anyone!” Praskovya, beaten to death, was taken to Troitskoye, throwing her infant child, who froze on the way, into the sleigh. Katerina Ivanova was transported along the same road, whose groom Davyd “saw swollen legs from the battle and blood flowing from the seat.”
Over the years, Saltychikha became more inventive and used, as the investigation noted, “torture unknown to Christians.” For example, “pulling his ears with hot baking tongs and pouring hot water from a kettle over his head.” And in November, peasant woman Marya Petrova was driven into a pond, where she was kept neck-deep in ice water for a quarter of an hour, and then beaten to death. Her corpse looked so terrible that even the Trinity priest refused to perform her funeral service. Then, according to long-standing habit, the body was buried in the forest.
More often than not, such problems did not arise: the dying victim was taken to the “back chamber” and given wine to drink, so that during the dying confession she would have the strength to at least mutter something. If this did not happen, she was confessed “deafly” and buried in a rural cemetery. This happened to the groom’s wife Stepanida, who, on Saltychikha’s orders, was beaten by her own husband with rod butts - the thick ends of rods. At the funeral, the groom stood under the supervision of the haiduks - so that he would not run to inform. True, such denunciations led to nothing - her husband’s noble surname and generous gifts to the authorities reliably protected Saltychikha. The complainants were put in a punishment cell, and then returned to the lady so that she could get even with them.
At times, the divergent Saltychikha organized real mass executions. In October 1762, already under investigation, she ordered her servants to beat four girls, including 12-year-old Praskovya Nikitina, again for unclean mopping. As a result, Fekla Gerasimova was barely alive: “her hair was torn out, her head was broken, and her back was rotting from the beatings.” She, along with the others, was thrown in the garden in her shirt, and then they dragged her into the house and continued beating her. As a result, three of the four victims died. Occasionally, Saltychikha also killed men. In April 1761, the elder Grigoriev did not protect Haiduk Ivanov, who was placed under his supervision, and who had done something wrong. The careless jailer was brought to Troitskoye and handed over to the grooms for punishment, who alternately beat him with their fists and whips. By morning the elder died.
Grooms and haiduks were Saltychikha’s constant executioners, and they also had to kill their loved ones. One of them, Ermolai Ilyin, at the whim of the landowner, beat three of his wives to death - one after the other. During the investigation, he testified that “by order of the landowner, he beat many girls and wives taken from different villages into the courtyard, who soon died from those beatings...” He, Ilyin, did not announce this anywhere and did not report it, for fear this landowner, and moreover, that the previous informers were punished with a whip; then if he, Ilyin, began to inform, he would also be tortured or even sent into exile.” The last wife, Fedosya Artamonova, was finished off with a rolling pin by the lady herself, who forced her husband to bury her, warning: “Even though you will denounce, you will not find anything.”
But this time Saltychikha’s confidence in her permissiveness was not justified. The groom Ermolai nevertheless went to denounce, taking another serf Savely Martynov into the company. They chose a good moment - July 1762, when Catherine II had just ascended the throne. The new queen, who overthrew her husband Peter III, wanted to appear before Russia and the whole world as the defender of her subjects. The Saltychikha case turned out to be very opportune - the peasants’ complaint was transferred to the Justits College, and it began an investigation.
Another event coincided with this - Saltykova’s breakup with her lover Tyutchev. Tired of his girlfriend’s difficult character, the young officer announced before Lent that he was going to marry the daughter of a Bryansk landowner, Pelageya Panyutina. Saltychikha was furious - on her orders, the treacherous Tyutchev was locked in a barn, but one of the courtyard girls helped him escape. In May, she and Panyutina got married and settled in Moscow, on Prechistenka. But Saltychikha did not calm down - on her orders, the groom Alexei Savelyev bought five pounds of gunpowder at the artillery warehouse to blow up the house of the young couple. At the decisive moment, the groom got cold feet and announced that the gunpowder was damp and did not explode.
A month later, Saltychikha learned that the newlyweds would go to the Bryansk province past Teply Stan, and set up an ambush on the road. She was unlucky again - one of the guides, who had previously been friends with Tyutchev, warned him, and he canceled the trip. After this, the landowner left her former lover alone, but he seemed to be seriously scared, which is why he refused to testify against her. The investigation was already progressing with difficulty: Saltychikha herself denied all the accusations, and the court could not take into account the complaints of the peasants. But Catherine, who personally kept the matter under control, was determined to see it through to the end. At the end of 1763, the College of Justice proposed that Saltykov be subjected to torture “in the search for the truth.”
However, the empress decided that torture was not European. She decided to assign “a skilled priest to Saltychikha for a month, who would exhort her to confess, and if this still does not make her feel remorse in her conscience, then he should prepare her for the inevitable torture, and then show her the cruelty of the search for a convicted criminal " In other words, the criminal was taken to a dungeon and shown how others were tortured. But she was still silent. The priest’s admonitions did not help either: four months later he announced that “this lady is mired in sin” and it is impossible to get repentance from her.
In May 1764, a criminal case was opened against Daria Saltykova. She was put under house arrest, and investigators sent from the capital began to search not only the estate, but the entire Trinity. Only then did the peasants become bolder and show the authorities the “back chamber”, where traces of blood were still visible on the floor, and the pond in which the women were frozen, and fresh graves in the forest.
Old cases about Saltykova, closed for bribes, were brought up in the archives. In April 1768, the College of Justice issued a verdict according to which Saltychikha “killed a considerable number of her people, male and female, inhumanely and painfully to death.”
She was found guilty of 38 murders, although the actual number of victims ranged from 64 to 79 people. Later, a much larger number of 139 killed came from somewhere, which is still repeated by many authors. Encyclopedias prefer a more cautious estimate - “more than 100 people.” Apparently, no one will know the true number of victims. On the one hand, a considerable part of the missing serfs could actually go on the run so as not to become victims of Saltychikha. On the other hand, some of the dead could go unnoticed: it is unlikely that the authorities showed great zeal in counting the killed peasants.
Saltychikha is not a unique phenomenon in world history. We know the names of no less terrible criminals. For example, Gilles de Rais - “Bluebeard” - killed more than 600 children in the 15th century, and the Hungarian Countess Erzsebet Bathory tortured almost 300 people already in the 17th century. In the latter case, the coincidence is almost literal - the countess also took up atrocities after the death of her husband, and her victims were also mainly women and girls. True, she, according to rumors, bathed in their blood, wanting to preserve her beauty, and in addition made sacrifices to the devil. With Saltychikha everything was different - every Sunday she went to church and zealously atone for her sins.
The Senate demanded the death penalty for the criminal. But she was still a noblewoman, so Catherine II, by decree of June 12, 1768, ordered to save her life, depriving her of all property, family name, maternal rights and even gender - it was ordered to “from now on call this monster a man.” The empress’s decree said: “This monster of the human race could not cause that great murder of his own servants with one first movement of rage, but it must be assumed that she, especially compared to many other murderers in the world, has a soul that is completely apostate and extremely tormenting.”
In other words, the murders were not committed out of rage, but out of a natural tendency to violence. The word “sadism” was not yet known at that time, and the Marquis de Sade himself, as they say, walked under the table. However, the Trinity lady was a classic sadist. However, torture and murder of serfs were commonplace in Russia at that time (albeit not on such a scale), and Saltykova’s case did not cause either horror or particular surprise in society.
On November 17, 1768, Saltychikha was subjected to “civil execution” - she was placed in a pillory on Red Square with the sign “torturer and murderer” on her chest. The punishment lasted only an hour, after which the former landowner was taken to the Ivanovsky Monastery on Solyanka and put in a semi-basement dungeon. Food was served to her through a barred window without opening the door. Once a day she was taken out of her cell so that she could listen to the service in the temple - but from the outside, without going inside. The serf haiduks who participated in the beatings and murders, and the priest who confessed “deafly” to the victims of Saltychikha, also had a hard time - they were beaten with a whip, their nostrils were torn out and they were exiled to Nerchinsk for eternal hard labor.
Surprisingly, the criminal did not lose heart. She decided that the punishment would be reduced if she gave birth to a child, and took up the case. In 1778, she managed, if not to seduce, then to pity the guard soldier, and she became pregnant. But “Mother” Catherine knew how to show firmness in the right cases. Saltychikha was not pardoned, but was only transferred from the basement to a stone outbuilding with a window. The child she gave birth to was sent to an orphanage, and traces of the compassionate soldier were lost in Siberia.
Saltykova’s calculation did not come true - on the contrary, her punishment became even more painful. The monastery was besieged by crowds of onlookers who looked into the prisoner’s window and mocked her. In response, she cursed with the last words and tried to reach the daredevils with a stick. Eyewitnesses recall that at that time she was ugly fat and dirty, with disheveled hair and “a face as pale as a sauerkraut.”
Meanwhile, Saltychikha's estate went to her brother-in-law Ivan Tyutchev. Soon he sold it to a distant relative - the same Nikolai Tyutchev, for whom the estate seemed to awaken not only terrible memories. He built a new house in Troitsky, laid out a park and equipped a pond with swans. Today, not a trace remains of all this - only an abandoned church has been preserved, where the victims of Saltychikha were once buried.
Nikolai Andreevich died in 1797, and twenty years later his grandson, the famous poet Fyodor Tyutchev, came to Troitskoye. He liked it on the estate - together with his teacher Amphitheater, they “left the house, stocking up on Horace or Virgil, and, sitting down in the grove, drowned in the pure pleasures of the beauties of poetry.” As for Saltychikha’s own children, Fyodor died childless, and Nikolai, who died early, left a son, who also did not live long. Thus, the Ivanov family came to an end.
Daria Saltykova no longer cared about this. She grew old in her cage room, accustomed to an inviolable routine and no longer trying to change it. In recent years, her legs became swollen and she could no longer go to church.
In November 1801, when the prisoner had not gotten out of bed or taken food all day, the monks entered the cell and found her dead. She was 71 years old, of which she spent almost half in captivity. There was no cemetery in the Ivanovsky Monastery, and Saltychikha was buried in the Donskoy Monastery. Her tombstone has survived to this day, but the chamber, along with the monastery, burned down during the Great Fire of 1812. The Moscow house of the Saltykovs suffered the same fate - today in its place is Vorovsky Square.
They tried to quickly forget about the atrocities in the biography of the Trinity lady. Everything in this story was disgusting - the ferocity of Saltychikha herself, the slavish obedience of her victims, and the long inaction of the authorities. It did not inspire writers, did not give rise to sonorous legends, like the story of Gilles de Rais or Count Dracula. All that remained were the terrible tales about the tormenting lady, in the reality of which even those who told them did not really believe.
I live in Moscow, and this was my first time in the necropolis of the Donskoy Monastery. Of course, I came there not only to look at it, I wanted to see the necropolis as a whole.
I once read Akunin’s “Cemetery Stories”, one chapter is dedicated to the Donskoye Cemetery. It was put off that I should stop by on occasion. Suddenly the event finally happened. I would like to search the net in more detail in advance about the tombstone of Saltychikha (Saltykova Daria Nikolaevna), otherwise... I remembered the photo in his book, I came to that “stone stake”, but in vain, although I remembered that this was just an artistic guess. I searched through the information afterwards and chose what to me seemed closer to...
It is stated, and more than one source, that her grave is lower, in the center, that there is even an inscription visible there, on the other side it looks like it was closed by a sarcophagus that had fallen nearby not so long ago. In the video below the post, the monk said that this is the tombstone of her eldest son, who died the same year.
If I had found it in advance, I would have climbed in to look or try to feel the inscription)
Quotes from various sources:
“I had previously seen photographs of this particular grave, but at that time the monument had not yet fallen and the inscription was visible.”
“Those whose relatives are in prison or under investigation come to Saltychikha’s grave. It is believed (by someone) that Saltychikha is a defender of prisoners.”
Quote incl. - art historian M. Yu. Korobko, Russian historian, writer, archivist, Moscow expert, toponymist, publicist, journalist. In the photo below is a link to his LiveJournal.
“However, Saltychikha also has a folk tombstone, the one under which she is buried according to secret folk knowledge passed down from generation to generation! The touching flowers and the inscription made with a felt-tip pen are touching, in it Saltychikha is mistakenly called Ekaterina.”
Landmark from here- the real tombstone of Saltychikha with a tombstone lying nearby, on the territory of the monastery (entrance with a large bell tower) - from the entrance - to the right wall of the monastery. In the photo - in the background near the tower, a little further than the white cross, there is also a sculpture of a girl with a flowerpot. Although.. I still didn’t look at the inscription. 
There are inscriptions on the stone in front and on the right, I forgot.. it seemed like there were on the left too.. or not.. I don’t remember..
And on the list of those buried in the necropolis of the Donskoy Monastery are the Baskakovs:
Baskakov Vasily Vasilievich (1765-1794) - second major
Baskakov Ivan Egorovich (1753-1798) - court councilor, grandfather of the poet N. P. Ogarev
Baskakova (ur. Khitrovo) Vera Petrovna (1743-1827) - his wife
Baskakov Petr Vasilievich (born 1794) - lieutenant
Baskakov Alexey (b. 1761)
Baskakova Anna Filippovna (1817-1889) - maiden 
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Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova 1730 - 1801.
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About portraits. More often she is confused with Daria Petrovna Saltykova, and me at first..
Completely different in the portrait representative of the extensive Saltykov family. Moreover, nee Chernysheva, Daria Petrovna, sister of Pushkin’s “Queen of Spades” Natalya Petrovna Golitsyna. Daria Petrovna was married to Field Marshal Ivan Petrovich Saltykov, the son of the hero of the Seven Years' War, Pyotr Semenovich Saltykov. So she is Saltykova not by birth, but through her husband. These Saltykovs, close to the court, had a very distant relationship with “that same” Saltychikha, the seventh water on jelly. And this portrait is a miniature by A.H. Ritt, 1790s, from the Hermitage. There is a paired portrait of her husband. But the images of Saltychikha are still unknown, alas.
So we can only imagine her villainous appearance. Daria Petrovna in her youth. In Paris, her portrait was painted by Francois Drouet, he is in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. So this Saltykova was good and did not act out. Just in case, you can trust me, I already wrote a book on these Chernyshevs.
(quote from av4)
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So, portraits Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova did not survive, and there are a huge number of publications...
"..Daria Saltykova killed dozens of her peasants. Almost all of them were young women - among the victims there were only two men and five girls aged 11-15..."
"...the maid Praskovya Larionova - at first the sadist beat her herself, and then gave her to the haiduks, shouting at the same time: “Beat her to death! I myself am responsible and I’m not afraid of anyone!” Praskovya, beaten to death, was taken to Troitskoye, throwing her infant child into the sleigh, who froze to death on the way. Katerina Ivanova, whose groom Davyd “saw swollen legs from the battle and blood was flowing from the seat”, was taken along the same road..."
etc.
For example, one of the publications:
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Landowner Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova. Female murderer
In 1768, next to the Execution Place, the landowner Daria Saltykova, the famous Saltychikha, who tortured to death at least 138 of her serfs, stood at the pillory. While the clerk read out the crimes she had committed from a sheet of paper, Saltychikha stood with her head uncovered, and on her chest hung a plaque with the inscription “Tormentor and Murderer.” After that, she was sent to eternal imprisonment in the Ivanovo Monastery...
Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova (nee Ivanova), daughter of a Duma clerk close to Peter I, who was related to the Davydovs, Musins-Pushkins, Stroganovs and Tolstoys. She was born in 1730 in the village of Troitskoye near Moscow (now the village of the Mosrentgen plant, adjacent to Moscow in the Teply Stan area). Her grandfather, Avtonom Ivanov, was a major figure in the times of Princess Sophia and Peter I. She married the captain of the Life Guards Cavalry Regiment, Gleb Alekseevich Saltykov (d. about 1755), uncle of Nikolai Ivanovich Saltykov, the future His Serene Highness Prince. They had two sons, Fedor (1750-1801) and Nikolai (d. 1775), who were enlisted in the guards regiments.
Having become a widow at the age of twenty-six, she received full ownership of about six hundred peasants on estates located in the Moscow, Vologda and Kostroma provinces. The investigator in the case of the widow Saltykova, court councilor Volkov, based on the data from the house books of the suspect herself, compiled a list of 138 names of serfs whose fate was to be clarified. According to official records, 50 people were considered to have “died of disease,” 72 people were “unknown,” and 16 were considered to have “gone to their husbands” or “gone on the run.” According to the testimony of serfs, obtained during “wide searches” in the estate and villages of the landowner, Saltykova killed 75 people, mostly women and girls.
publication of the island "Friends of Children"..
Before the death of her husband, Saltychikha had no particular tendency to violence. But about six months after her widowhood, she began regularly beating the servants. The main reasons for punishment were dishonesty in cleaning floors or doing laundry. The torture began with her striking the offending peasant woman with an object that came to hand (most often it was a log). The guilty one was then flogged by grooms and haiduks, sometimes to death. Saltychikha could pour boiling water over the victim or singe the hair on her head. Saltychikha also used hot curling irons for torture, with which she grabbed the victim by the ears. She often pulled people by the hair and slammed their heads against the wall for a long time. Many of those killed by her, according to witnesses, had no hair on their heads; Saltychikha tore her hair with her fingers, which indicates her considerable physical strength. The victims were starved and tied naked in the cold. Saltychikha did not love and broke up loving couples who were about to get married.
In one episode, the nobleman Nikolai Tyutchev, the grandfather of the poet Fyodor Tyutchev, also suffered from Saltychikha. The young captain, who in 1760 was engaged in reconciling the boundaries of Saltykova’s possessions near Moscow with the records in the land cadastre, became the lover of the young widow. Everything was fine at first, but in January 1762 Tyutchev was going to marry the girl Panyutina.
(Saltykova was 32 at the time, he was 42, and somewhere it is mentioned that he is supposedly younger than her)
Saltykova decided to destroy her unfaithful lover, and to do it in the most literal sense. Groom Savelyev purchased 2 kg in two steps. gunpowder, which, after adding sulfur and tinder, was wrapped in highly flammable hemp. The result was 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 the sent serfs were afraid of retribution. The timid grooms - Ivanov and Savelyev - were severely flogged, 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. 10-12 men from Saltykova’s estates near Moscow were to participate in the ambush. The matter was turning out to be serious: an attack on a nobleman while he was performing a state task no longer amounted to robbery, but to conspiracy! This threatened the men not even with hard labor, but with beheading. Saltykova’s serfs gave the captain an “anonymous letter” in which they warned him about the impending attempt on his life. Tyutchev officially notified the authorities of a possible attack and received 12 soldiers as guards while traveling to Tambov. Saltykova, having learned about the captain’s security, canceled the attack at the last moment.
Complaint to the Empress
There were always many complaints about the cruel landowner both under Elizaveta Petrovna and under Peter III, but all cases of cruelty were resolved in her favor. Informers were punished with whips and exiled to Siberia. She did not skimp on gifts to the authorities, and, on the other hand, her family name was respected.
At the same time, Saltychikha led an outwardly pious lifestyle. She made donations to the church and made annual pilgrimages to Orthodox shrines such as the Kiev Pechersk Lavra.
Initial complaints from the peasants only led to punishments for the complainants, since Saltychikha had many influential relatives and was able to bribe officials. But two peasants, Savely Martynov and Ermolai Ilyin, whose wives she killed, still managed to convey a complaint to Catherine II, who had just ascended the throne, in 1762.
Consequence
Although Saltychikha belonged to a noble family, Catherine II used her case as a show trial that would mark a new era of legality.
The Moscow College of Justice carried out an investigation that lasted six years. The investigation was carried out by the rootless official Stepan Volkov and his assistant, court adviser, Prince Dmitry Tsitsianov. They analyzed Saltychikha’s account books, which made it possible to establish the circle of bribed officials. Investigators also studied records of the movement of serf souls, which noted which peasants were sold, who was sent to work and who died.
Many suspicious death records have been identified. For example, a twenty-year-old girl could go to work as a servant and die within a few weeks. According to the records, Ermolai Ilyin (one of the complainants, who served as a groom) had three wives die in a row. Some peasant women were allegedly released to their native villages, after which they immediately died or went missing.
A study of the archives of the office of the Moscow civil governor, the Moscow police chief and the Detective Order revealed 21 complaints filed against Saltychikha by her serfs. All the complainants were returned to the landowner, who held their own trial.
Saltychikha was taken into custody. During the interrogations, the threat of torture was used (permission to torture was not obtained), but she did not confess to anything. The torture of the famous robber in the presence of Saltychikha with the notification that she would be next was also ineffective. It is possible that she was aware that torture would not be used against her. The persuasion of the priest of the Moscow Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, Dmitry Vasiliev, to repent did not work either.
Then a general search was carried out in the Moscow house of Saltychikha and in Troitsky, accompanied by the interview of hundreds of witnesses. Accounting books were discovered containing information about bribes to officials of the Moscow administration, and those interviewed spoke about the murders, giving the dates and names of the victims.
The bribes were received by the head of the police chief's office Molchanov, the prosecutor of the Detective Prikaz Khvoshchinsky, those present at the Detective Prikaz Velyaminov-Zernov and Mikhailovsky, the secretary of the Secret Office Yarov, and the actuary of the Detective Prikaz Pafnutyev.
Black and white illustration. An image of the reprisal of the landowner of the Podolsk district D.N. Saltykova against the peasants. (Great Reform. T. 1 - M., 1911) (author P.V. Kurdyumov)
In the spring of 1765, the investigation at the Moscow College of Justice was formally completed and sent for further consideration to the 6th Department of the Governing Senate.
As a result of the investigation, Volkov came to the conclusion that Daria Saltykova was “undoubtedly guilty” of the deaths of 38 people and was “left in suspicion” regarding the culpability of the deaths of another 26 people.
Trial and verdict
The trial lasted more than three years. In the end, the judges found the accused “guilty without leniency” of thirty-eight proven murders and torture of street servants. However, the senators did not pass a specific verdict, shifting the burden of decision-making to the reigning monarch, Catherine II.
During September 1768, Catherine II rewrote the verdict several times. Four handwritten sketches of the empress's verdict have survived.
On October 2, 1768, Catherine II sent a decree to the Senate, in which she described in great detail both the punishment imposed on Saltykova and the procedure for its administration. In the margins of this decree, by Catherine’s hand, next to the word she is written He. The Empress wanted to say that Saltykova was unworthy to be called a woman.
Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova was convicted:
1. to deprivation of the title of nobility;
2. a lifelong ban on being named by the family of one’s father or husband (it was forbidden to indicate one’s noble origin and family ties with other noble families);
3. serving a special “disgraceful spectacle” for an hour, during which the condemned woman had to stand on the scaffold chained to a pole with the inscription above her head “torturer and murderer”;
4. to life imprisonment in an underground prison without light and human communication (light was allowed only during meals, and conversation was only allowed with the chief of the guard and a female nun).
In addition, the Empress, by her decree of October 2, 1768, decided to return to her two sons all the mother’s property, which until then had been under guardianship. It was also indicated that the accomplices of Daria Saltykova (priest of the village of Troitsky Stepan Petrov, one of the “haiduks” and the landowner’s groom) should be punished with reference to hard labor.
The punishment of the convicted Daria Nikolaeva was carried out on October 17, 1768 on Red Square in Moscow. In the Moscow Ivanovo Convent, where the condemned woman arrived after her punishment on Red Square, a special cell was prepared for her, called “repentance”. The height of the room opened in the ground did not exceed three arshins (that is, 2.1 meters); 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 a candle stub was passed to her during meals. Saltychikha was not allowed walks, she was forbidden to receive and transmit correspondence.
On major church holidays, she was taken out of her prison and taken to a small window in the wall of the church, through which she could listen to the liturgy. The strict regime of detention lasted 11 years, after which it was relaxed: the convict was transferred to a stone extension to the temple with a window. Visitors to the temple were allowed to look out the window and even talk to the prisoner. According to the historian, “Saltykova, when curious people would gather at the window behind the iron bars of her dungeon, would curse, spit and stick a stick through the window, which was open in the summer.”
Cathedral Church in the former Ivanovo Monastery.
“Saltychikha” was kept prisoner in the left annex.
After the death of the prisoner, her cell was converted into a sacristy. She spent thirty-three years in prison and died on November 27, 1801.
She was buried in the cemetery of the Donskoy Monastery, where all her relatives were buried.
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Interesting Facts
* Starting in 1764, a rumor was spread in Moscow, and then throughout the empire, that Saltykova not only killed peasants, but ate their meat. The investigation was able to reliably establish the absurdity of such accusations.
* According to some sources, in 1779 (at the age of almost 50 years) Daria Saltykova gave birth to a child from a guard soldier in prison.
* The city house of Saltychikha in Moscow was located on the corner of Bolshaya Lubyanka and Kuznetsky Most streets, that is, on the site where buildings that now belonged to the FSB of Russia were later built. The estate where, as a rule, she committed murders and tortures was located in the village of Mosrentgen (Trinity Park) near the Moscow Ring Road in the Teply Stan area.
* Saltykova was nicknamed the Russian Marquis de Sade. Or just Saltychikha.
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There were a lot of Saltychikhs in Russia
“The Second Saltychikha” was popularly called the wife of the landowner Koshkarov, who lived in the 40s of the 19th century in the Tambov province. She found special pleasure in tyranny over defenseless peasants. Koshkarova had a standard for torture, the limits of which she went beyond only in extreme cases. Men were supposed to be given 100 lashes of the whip, women - 80. 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 whipped her because there were not enough onions in the soup.
Another “Saltychikha” was discovered in Chuvashia. In September 1842, landowner Vera Sokolova beat to death the courtyard wench Nastasya, whose father said that the mistress often punished her serfs by “pulling their hair, and sometimes forced them to flog them with rods and whips.” And another maid complained that “the lady broke her nose with her fist, and from punishment with a whip there was a scar on her thigh, and in winter she was locked in a latrine in only a shirt, because of which she froze her legs”...
"text from here"
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Although the story of the noblewoman Saltykova became known, how many ruined souls remained hidden. The account is not on people - the owners of souls, like the devil.
"Reprints of ancient books"
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Saltychikha is not a unique phenomenon in world history. We know the names of no less terrible criminals. For example, Gilles de Rais - “Bluebeard” - killed more than 600 children in the 15th century, and the Hungarian Countess Erzsebet Bathory tortured almost 300 people already in the 17th century. In the latter case, the coincidence is almost literal - the countess also took up atrocities after the death of her husband, and her victims were also mainly women and girls. True, she, according to rumors, bathed in their blood, wanting to preserve her beauty, and in addition made sacrifices to the devil. With Saltychikha everything was different - every Sunday she went to church and zealously atone for her sins.
Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova is one of the most ruthless serial killers in Russian history. Considering the scale of what she did, even the life imprisonment to which the criminal was sentenced seems too lenient a punishment.
Bloody landowner
Saltychikha committed most of the atrocities on her estate near Moscow near the village of Troitskoye. Today, the Trinity Forest Park is located on this site, located in the village of Mosrentgen, a few hundred meters from the Moscow Ring Road. It is noteworthy that in the 1930s, the former Saltykova estate housed the administration of the NKVD of the USSR, and the USSR KGB building was later built on the site of the lady’s city house, located at the intersection of Kuznetsky Most and Bolshaya Lubyanka streets.
The peasants walked around the Saltykova estate, considering this place to be cursed. The reason for this was a massive pestilence among the serfs, caused not by epidemics, but by the atrocities committed by the young widow Daria Saltykova. In six years (1756-1762), the murderer sent at least 138 of her serfs to the next world, most of whom were young girls.
Any little thing could be the reason for the landowner's fury - more often than not, poor cleaning or poor-quality washing. As usual, she punished herself: she tore out her hair, beat her with a rolling pin, and grabbed the victim with hot tongs. The execution continued with grooms and haiduks, who often beat the “offender” to death with batogs or a whip. However, many peasants died at the hands of Saltychikha herself.
There were constant complaints about the tormentor. But for a long time, thanks to influential patrons and bribery, Saltykova managed to prevent the initiation of a criminal case against her. Only in the summer of 1762, when the serfs Savely Martynov and Ermolai Ilyin, who had escaped from Saltychikha, reached St. Petersburg, did the situation move from a dead point.
The newly-crowned Empress Ekaterina Alekseevna took the landowner’s case seriously, entrusting Stepan Volkov, a rootless official of the Justice Collegium, with conducting the investigation. No matter how much Saltykova created obstacles, connecting all her connections, she could no longer stop the spinning wheel of justice. The only thing she managed to do was protect herself from the torture used during the investigation. Influential patrons still helped.
The investigation into Daria Saltykova’s crimes lasted for six years. The involvement of the bloody landowner in 38 deaths was fully proven. These cases included double murders in which the victims were a pregnant woman and her unborn child. It is obvious that dozens of Saltykova’s serfs who disappeared without a trace also suffered from her atrocities. However, the confirmed murders were more than enough to assign the most severe punishment to the murderer.
The senators did not pronounce a verdict, leaving the last word to the empress. It is known that Catherine rewrote the text of the verdict several times: four drafts have been preserved in the archives. On October 2, 1768, the final version was finally sent to the Senate, which contained both a description of the punishment itself and the procedure for its execution.
Imprison forever
The queen's verdict was as follows: Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova should be deprived of her noble title; impose a lifelong ban on being named by the family of your father or husband; prohibit indicating your noble origin and family ties with other noble families; sentenced to lifelong imprisonment in an underground prison without light and human communication (light was allowed only during meals, and communication was only allowed with the chief of the guard and the nun).
But first, the condemned woman had to take part in a “disgraceful spectacle” at the execution site on Red Square: she was chained to a pole on which a sign was attached above her head with the inscription “torturer and murderer.” After an hour of standing under the sounds of continuous swearing from Muscovites passing by, Saltykova was put in the underground prison of the St. John the Baptist Convent, which still stands on Ivanovskaya Hill in the Kitay-Gorod area.
The first 11 years of Saltychikha’s imprisonment turned out to be the most terrible. She was essentially buried alive in a “repentance pit” dug under the Cathedral Church, a little more than two meters deep and covered with a grate at the top. Ironically, this church was built in honor of Ivan the Terrible, who also received the sad fame of a murderer among the people. Only twice a day could Saltykova see the light - when the nun brought her a candle stub, which illuminated the meager food that was unusual for the landowner.
The prisoner was prohibited from walking, and she was not allowed to receive or send correspondence. Only during the main church holidays was Saltykova taken out of prison, allowing her to cling to a small window in the wall of the church and listen to the liturgy.
In 1779, the extremely harsh regime of Daria Saltykova’s detention was softened. The prisoner was transferred to a stone annex to the temple, which had a small barred window. Visitors to the temple could not only look through this window, but also talk with the prisoner; another thing is that Saltychikha was not very talkative. As historian P. Kicheev wrote in the Russian Archive magazine, when curious people gathered at Saltykova’s dungeon, the prisoner “sweared, spat and stuck a stick through the window, which was open in the summer.”
According to the testimony of State Councilor Pyotr Mikhailovich Rudin, who visited the Ivanovo Monastery during his childhood, the window in question was covered with a yellow curtain and anyone who wanted to look at the prisoner could draw it without permission. Rudin, who saw Saltykova with his own eyes, noted that “she was elderly and overweight, and from her behavior it seemed that she was deprived of reason.”
Another interesting detail of Saltychikha’s imprisonment was told to the author of the magazine “Russian Archive” Kicheev by a contemporary of the murderer, an expert on antiquities, Pavel Fedorovich Korobanov. According to him, Saltykova’s food was brought by a guard soldier; first he served it through the window, then he began to enter the door. And then one day the lady gave birth, and this happened in the fiftieth year of her life. Of course, the guard was blamed for the crime: according to rumors, the “lover” was subjected to a public flogging and sent to a penal company. Whether this actually happened or not, no one knows for sure.
Daria Saltykova died on November 27, 1801; in total, she spent 33 years in captivity. She was 71 years old at the time of her death. Saltychikha was buried in the cemetery of the Donskoy Monastery, where all her relatives were buried. The tombstone of the odious landowner with a fairly worn inscription can still be seen today.
Until the end of her days, Saltykova never showed the slightest remorse for what she had done. Modern criminologists are confident that the manically obsessed criminal suffered from mental disorders. Experts today diagnose her with “epileptoid psychopathy,” some suggest that in addition she was a “latent homosexual.” One way or another, Saltykova took the secret of her personality with her to the grave.
