The fate of the sons of the saltychikha. Who is Saltychikha. Historical reference. General search in Troitskoye

Daria Saltykova or as she was called among the people Saltychikha went down in the history of the country as the "Bloody Lady". She became famous as a real sadist who did not spare the life and health of her serfs, mocking people for her own pleasure.

The real story of Saltychikha became very interested in society thanks to the historical series, which was shown by the TV channel "Russia-1". However, the story of the "Bloody Lady" on the screen looks rather soft, compared to what actually happened in the life of a famous woman.

The creators of the series tried in an artistic way to convey the suffering of a woman who could not cope with her own outbursts of rage and explained the cruelty of the noblewoman to misfortune in her personal life. Nevertheless, how the matter actually happened is not fully known, since all they tried to destroy the existing documents and even her portraits, considering her "a disgrace of the human race."

The true story of Satychikha - who is she and when she lived

Daria Saltykova was born on March 11 (22), 1730 in Moscow, and the “bloody lady” died on November 27 (December 9), 1801. Her father was a columnar nobleman Nikolai Avtonomovich Ivanov, her mother was Anna Ivanovna (nee Davydova). Grandfather - Avtonom Ivanov - was a prominent figure in the times of Tsarevna Sophia and Peter I.

Daria received a good education at home, spoke foreign languages, played musical instruments. Since she grew up in a pious family, she was also very pious in her youth.

Daria married the captain of the Life Guards Cavalry Regiment Gleb Alekseevich Saltykov (died around 1755) and bore him two sons: Fedor (01.19.1750 - 06.25.1801) and Nikolai (died 07/27/1775), who immediately after birth were enrolled in the Guards regiments.
At the age of 26, Saltychikha became a widow.

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

The rich landowner entered the history of the Russian state as one of the most cruel housewives.

Saltykova severely beat her servants, beat them to death and tortured them for the slightest offenses, and sometimes for no apparent reason. Basically, young girls and married women became victims of Saltychikha, which once again indicates that Saltykova really went crazy after her husband's death.

According to official data, fifty people became victims of the landowner's excesses, and according to unofficial data, she managed to torture more than hundreds of serfs.

As a rule, it all started with complaints about the servants. The lady might not like how the floor was washed or the laundry was washed. For this, the angry hostess began to beat the negligent servant, mostly with a log, but in the absence of such an iron, a rolling pin, that is, everything that was at hand, was used.

Initially, the serfs of Daria Saltykova were not very worried about the behavior of the lady, since this kind of thing happened everywhere. The first murders did not frighten them either.

But since 1757, the killings have become systematic. The victims of torture were subsequently killed and buried, and the official cause of the death of a person was called some kind of illness, or he was declared wanted as an escaped serf.

In the end, the servants could not stand such treatment and reported the landowner herself to Empress Catherine II. She listened to the words of the serfs and ordered an investigation.

The investigation lasted over 6 years. Catherine personally checked all the documents and could not believe that her noblewoman was capable of such acts.
The punishment for the lady was personally chosen by the empress. She did not dare to publicly execute a respected person, but she could not forgive the widow's deeds. Darya Saltykova was chained to a pillory with a sign "Murderer" for an hour. She was also stripped of all noble titles and was even forbidden to be called a woman because of her cruelty towards people.

After that, Saltykova was sent to a monastery, where she was imprisoned in an underground cell. She did not see daylight at all, and she was allowed to light a candle very rarely. Saltykova spent 11 years in the underground, after which she was transferred to a cell above the ground. It is noteworthy that people were allowed to visit Saltychikha, but neither sons nor friends ever came to her.

Daria Saltykova spent more than 30 years in captivity. She died at the age of 71, never repenting of her actions.

Channel "Russia 1" continues showing the series "Bloody Lady" about the first of the famous serial killers in Russia, landowner Daria Saltykova, who brutally killed about a hundred of her peasants. Since only a sentence remained in the documents of the 18th century about this lady (Catherine II ordered to destroy other evidence), the authors of the series were free to think of the image of Saltychikha and her biography. The result is a melodrama with a very metered element of sadism.

But what was the case in reality? We propose to recall the life of the real Saltychikha - "a freak of the human race." Whom the legendary landowner really loved, hated and killed.

As soon as contemporaries and descendants did not call Daria Saltykova, who went down in history under the name of Saltychikha: “black widow” and “black villainess”, “Satan in a skirt”, “noblewoman-sadistic”, “serial killer”, “bloody landowner”, “ trinity cannibal "," Marquis de Sade in a female guise "... Her name was pronounced with a shudder for many decades, and Empress Catherine the Great in her sentence to the villainess, which she personally rewrote several times, even avoided calling this monster woman" she ".

The story told by the director Yegor Anashkin in the new series "Bloody Lady" is close to what happened in real life, but in many ways softer than the harsh reality. Because if the director filmed the most terrible atrocities that Saltychikha is said to have committed, the film would most likely simply be banned.

A devout girl from a good family

On March 11, 1730, a girl was born in the family of a pillar nobleman Nikolai Ivanov, who was named Daria. Daria's grandfather, Avtonom Ivanov, was a prominent statesman of the era of Peter the Great and left a rich legacy to his descendants.

How the real childhood of Dasha Saltykova went is not known for certain. According to the version shown in the film, it was unhappy. After the death of his wife Anna, Nikolai Ivanov sent his daughter to be raised in a monastery with the wording "possessed by demons."

François Hubert Drouet, "Portrait of Countess Daria Chernyshova-Saltykova", 1762. This portrait has long been considered a portrait of Saltychikha

In her youth, a girl from a prominent noble family was reputed to be the first beauty, and besides that, she was distinguished by extreme piety. Although the real appearance of Saltychikha is a secret sealed with seven seals. What she looked like is not known for certain, but those portraits that for many years were considered to be Saltychikha's portraits actually depict other women.

Most often, the portraits of Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova were taken for numerous portraits of her namesake and relative by husband, Daria Petrovna Saltykova, nee Chernysheva, the wife of Field Marshal Ivan Petrovich Saltykov, who was 9 years younger than the landowner.

At the age of 20, Daria married Gleb Alekseevich Saltykov, captain of the Life Guards Horse Regiment. The Saltykov family was even more noble than the Ivanov family - the nephew of Gleb Saltykov, Nikolai Saltykov, will become the Most Serene Prince, Field Marshal and will be a prominent courtier in the era of Catherine the Great, Paul I and Alexander I.

Soon Daria gave birth to her wife two sons - Fyodor and Nikolai, who, as it should have been then, were enlisted from birth to serve in the Guards regiments.

Fyodor Lavrov in the image of Gleb Saltykov in the TV series "Bloody Lady" (no real images of Saltychikha's husband have survived)

It was a typical marriage for its time - two noble families united to increase wealth. Historians have not come across any special evidence of hatred of her husband, as well as of adultery on the part of a young wife, plausibly shown in the film "The Bloody Lady". Likewise, it remains unknown why the head of the family died after six years of marriage, leaving a 26-year-old widow with two sons in her arms - and a lot of money. Subsequently, versions arose that Saltykova herself got rid of her husband, but they seem to historians to be groundless.

Rich widow

After the death of her husband, Daria Saltykova became fabulously rich. The reason was also that her mother (who, unlike the serial version, was not at all a maniac killer) and grandmother lived in a monastery and abandoned the family fortune.

So at the age of 26, a young mother of two sons became the sole owner of six hundred peasants in estates near Moscow, located on the territory of the current village of Mosrentgen and the capital district of Teply Stan. Saltychikha's town house in Moscow was located at the corner of Bolshaya Lubyanka and Kuznetsky Most. The lady also had remote estates in the Vologda and Kostroma provinces.

The widowed Daria Saltykova, of course, has not lost interest in the opposite sex. There is evidence that she played tricks with her husband's relative, Sergei Saltykov. In the TV series "Bloody Lady" his role was played by Pyotr Rykov. I must say that Sergei later really became one of the favorites of Catherine II. In addition, some historians suggest that he was the biological father of Paul I.

Saltychikha's lover Sergei Saltykov / Pyotr Rykov as Sergei Saltykov in the TV series "Bloody Lady"

The widow led a secular life and at the same time was reputed to be very pious - several times a year she made a pilgrimage to shrines, did not spare money for church needs. About the terrible "fun" Saltychikha became known only a few years later. In the meantime, returning home after the service, she sat in an armchair in the middle of the yard to administer a "righteous judgment" over the serfs.

Mysterious passion

According to witnesses, Saltychikha began to show her sadistic inclinations about six months after her husband's death. The film "The Bloody Lady" shows that the first signs of mental illness appeared in the landowner in her early childhood - but historians have not found such evidence. However, the director notes that he did not set himself the goal of making a historical film, "The Bloody Lady" is, rather, a terrible fairy tale.

Apparently, Daria Saltykova began to "get under way" just after the death of her husband. According to modern psychiatry, she had epileptoid psychopathy - a mental disorder in which a person often has bouts of sadism and unmotivated aggression.

Augustine Christian Ritt, "Portrait of Countess Darya Petrovna Saltykova", 1794, another portrait of allegedly Saltychikha

The first complaints about her atrocities, which were no longer isolated, date back to 1757. Every year Saltychikha became more and more cruel and sophisticated. According to the serfs, she whipped them to death - and if she got tired, handed the whip or the whip to the assistants - haiduk, pulled out the hair on the head of the women or set it on fire, branded the ears of the young with a hot iron, scalded them with boiling water, froze them to death in the cold or in an ice pond in winter, even buried alive.

"Saltychikha", Pchelin V.N.

In particular, Saltychikha loved to torture and torment brides who were preparing for the wedding. She arranged whole bloody performances, always ending with the death of young girls, excised with a whip. The coachman, the groom and a couple of henchmen, under the strict gaze of the bloody lady, tried tirelessly. After all, it is well known that one's own skin is more expensive. Fear and horror reigned in the noble house: the short night seemed paradise to the serfs. And each of them waited with bated breath for the morning. And the awakened Saltychikha always gets up on the wrong foot and will definitely find a reason to pull out a lock of hair from a girl passing by or burn her face with a hot iron or hot tongs.

Alexandra Ursulyak as Saltychikha in the series “Ekaterina. Takeoff"

Once, in September 1761, a cannibal, as a "prelude" to the next execution of her subjects, beat the boy Lukyan Mikheev to death with a log. Beautiful girls aroused special hatred in Saltychikha. For example, she strove to beat pregnant women in the stomach, poured boiling water over them and pulled out ears from her victims with hot tongs. Sometimes this seemed to her not enough: somehow Saltychikha ordered the serf Thekla to bury her alive in the ground. A small but indicative touch to the portrait of the murderer: all the victims were necessarily buried by the landowner's priest. What he felt during this ceremony is unknown ...

Illustration of Kurdyumov's work for the encyclopedic edition "Great Reform", which depicts Saltychikha's torture "as soft as possible"

Peasants weren't the only ones who suffered from psychopaths

Once a famous nobleman almost fell under the hot hand of a landowner. Land surveyor Nikolai Tyutchev - the grandfather of the poet Fyodor Tyutchev - was her lover for a long time, but then decided to marry another. For which he paid ...

Vlad Sokolovsky as Nikolai Tyutchev in the series "The Bloody Lady" (no real portraits of the land surveyor have survived)

This story took place early in 1762. The landowner had an affair with the engineer Nikolai Tyutchev. As a result, the man could not stand the violent temper of Saltychikha and decided to leave. He wooed Pelageya Tyutcheva, she agreed. The young began to think about the wedding, and Saltykov - about the murder.

So, on the night of February 12-13, she bought gunpowder and sulfur and sent groom Roman Ivanov to set fire to the house of her former lover. She only demanded to see that the couple was at home and burned to death. The man did not obey the orders, being afraid to kill the nobleman. For this he was severely beaten. The second time, the landowner sent two: Ivanov and a certain Leontiev. However, this time they did not dare, returning to Saltychikha. The men were beaten with batogs, but they did not kill them.

The third time, she sent three serfs at once. The Tyutchevs went to the Bryansk district to the bride's estate Ovstug. Their path lay along the Great Kaluga road, where an ambush was set up. The serfs had to first shoot at them, and then finish them off with sticks. But someone warned the young people about the ambush, and in the end they fled at night in a roundabout way.

The case of the lost souls

Complaints rained down on the fierce landowner, but Saltychikha belonged to a well-known noble family, whose representatives, moreover, were the governor-general of Moscow. All cases of atrocities were resolved in her favor. Moreover, the opposite often happened - the complainants returned to the estate, where they were beaten with whips and exiled to Siberia.

Only two peasants, Savely Martynov and Ermolai Ilyin, whose wives were brutally killed by Saltychikha, were lucky. In 1762, they managed to convey a complaint to Catherine II, who had just ascended the throne, who decided to use the sadist's case as a show trial. It marked a new era of legality and demonstrated to the entire Moscow nobility the authorities' readiness to combat local abuses.

Catherine II / Severia Janushauskaite as Catherine II in the TV series "Bloody Lady"

The investigation into the Saltychikha case lasted six years. It turned out that she tortured and killed at least 38 people. The remaining cases of missing more than a hundred peasants could not be attributed to the landowner. But this was enough for the empress to personally sign the verdict to Daria Saltykova. The Senate, which was required by law to pass a sentence, refused to do so.

The most terrible rumor that was spread about the landowner Saltykova was that she drank the blood of young girls and was a cannibal. This, they say, explained the fact that the bodies or burials of the majority of souls, who were listed as missing without a trace, were never found during the investigation, which lasted more than five years. The whole thing was based on the stories of the serfs.

Shot from the TV series "Bloody Lady"

There is a version that the high-profile case of Saltychikha was beneficial to Catherine the Great and her supporters - in order to morally weaken the Saltykovs and prevent even a hypothetical possibility of occupying the Russian throne for representatives of the German dynasty of Welfs, to which three tragically dead Russian emperors belonged (Peter II, Peter III and Ivan VI ) and which was related to the Saltykovs. Therefore, it is quite possible that the history of the landowner's crimes could have been inflated.

Unrepentant

Numerous influential relatives of Darya Saltykova, including the governor of Moscow and the field marshal, did their best to ensure that she avoided the death penalty. Nevertheless, the empress's decision was harsh. By her decree, she decided henceforth "to call this monster Muschina."

In September 1768, Catherine II rewrote the sentence several times. Four of her handwritten sketches of the document have survived. In the final version, Saltychikha was stripped of her noble rank and sentenced to life imprisonment in an underground prison without light and human communication.

Saltychikha was taken to the square, on the scaffold they tied her with chains to a pillar of shame and read the tsar's paper. And before that, the executioner mercilessly whipped the priest and two handy Darya Saltykova. After a while she was put in a black cart and taken to the John the Baptist Convent. Here a "penitential" chamber was waiting for her - almost a hole, where not even a ray of light penetrated. Only in the minutes when food was brought to the prisoner was light allowed - a candle stub was placed next to the bowl for the duration of the meal.

Actress Yulia Snigir as Saltychikha in the TV series "Bloody Lady"

After more than a dozen years, Saltychikha was transferred to the stone annex of the cathedral church, where there was a small barred window. It was rumored that Daria Saltykova somehow managed to seduce the soldier who guarded the dungeon, and at the age of 50 gave birth to a child from him. And, they say, the accidental lover was publicly flogged and sent to a penal company. Note that not once - neither during the investigation, nor on the scaffold - does Saltychikha admit her guilt and will not repent. And on her face, frightening even experienced jailers, there will be a calm and triumphant smile.

John the Baptist Convent, in which Daria Saltykova was imprisoned

Surprisingly, the gas chamber, which was distinguished by excellent health, lived to be 71 years old. In the last years of her life, the prisoner already behaved like a real crazy - she scolded loudly, spat, tried to poke onlookers with a stick. They buried Daria Saltykova at the cemetery of the Donskoy Monastery, next to her relatives.

The noble Russian nobility bashfully closed their eyes to the deeds of the followers of Saltychikha. For example, the landowner Vera Sokolova in September 1842 beat the courtyard girl Nastasya to death, and in the Tambov province the peasants were afraid of the wife of the nobleman Koshkarov like fire. This secular lady, shining at balls, simply adored on her estate personally whipping "rude men" and "stupid women" with a whip. And a certain Saltykova, Saltychikha's namesake, kept for three years in a cage near the bed of the yard hairdresser. However, these are just a few documented cases, how many there actually were - it's scary to imagine.

SALTYCHIKHA (SALTYKOVA DARYA NIKOLAEVNA)

(born in 1730 - died in 1801)

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

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

Today it is difficult to surprise with the killings of women and children, torture, and the scale of executions. It is unlikely that in the time of Saltychikha this was an unusual thing. Nevertheless, the torturer near Moscow can be put on the level of the notorious Count Dracula. If in the case of the latter it amazes, paralyzes the scale and real otherworldliness of atrocities, absolute evil is evil in its purest form, then in the case of Saltychikha, absolute filth and stupidity evoke horror. In a patriarchal estate near Moscow, blessed and hospitable, in a Moscow lordly house with samovars, noodles and going to church, a young, healthy, stupid lady who can neither read nor write, with the complete connivance of others, she killed innocent young women out of boredom , girls and girls.

The torture lasted a long time, death had to wait for hours, sometimes for several days. One peasant woman was driven up to her throat into the pond after the beatings (in November). A few hours later she was taken out and finished off, and the corpse was thrown under the windows of Saltychikha. The "accomplices" threw a living baby on the mother's corpse. The child also did not die immediately. Modern psychotherapists and psychiatrists, if they had a little more information about Saltychikha's childhood and adolescence, would certainly have found the reasons for her pathological behavior, explaining it by some kind of illness. However, the facts say that Saltychikha, and today's fanatics like Chikatilo, and investigators of the NKVD of Stalin's time, and simply executioners have, as a rule, rare health, live to a ripe old age, even in prisons, and until their deaths retain a clear mind and not in than do not repent. And before the moratorium on the death penalty, serial killers were not executed, and Saltychikha was not executed either. It seems that they all knew they would live long.

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

But it's not that simple. Researchers of Saltychikha's atrocities usually assigned her serfs the role of wordless victims, but this is not entirely true. Both before Stepan Razin and after Pugachev, the peasants sent their landowners to the next world, burned and plundered their estates, and went on the run. Serf Russia was ruled not by landowners or even by their managers, but by village elders, who were themselves serfs. There was practically no headman without a standard set of sins - damage to girls, extortion in their favor, theft, sending unwanted soldiers into the army, letting the disobedient around the world. And Troitsky was ruled not by the cannibal Saltychikha, but by the serf head Mikhailov.

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

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

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

While Saltychikha was engaged in torture, the courtyard accomplices robbed her. Headman Mikhailov blackmailed the peasants, he could always send a woman from an unwanted house to wash the floors to a lady. Even the landlord neighbors, willingly or unwillingly, benefited from Saltychikha. Against her background, they were just angels for their serfs. The blood of innocent victims was directly or indirectly on many. This was understood by the investigators involved in the Saltychikha case.

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

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

On May 17, 1764, a criminal case was opened against Saltychikha. For a whole year, two investigators worked in Troitskoye and Sretenka. Complaints and testimonies of peasants were raised from the hiding places of the Search Order. They became a verdict for many bribe-taking officials. Catherine II spared no effort or money to fully investigate the case. This was important to her for many reasons. The Saltychikha case was a good reason for carrying out personnel purges and reshuffles in the police and the state apparatus as a whole. On this wave, it was possible to carry out a number of progressive reforms and transformations, while simultaneously demonstrating to the world the best qualities of the new empress. There was one more reason that lay on the surface. It is not hard to imagine how patriarchal Moscow treated the new capital, its Western innovations, ideas, and all the inhabitants of St. Petersburg. The Saltychikha case gave a legitimate reason to replace the "old guard" with loyal managers. At the same time, Catherine II won the sympathy of Muscovites, showing in practice the ability to fight bribery, cruelty, and routine. Mother Queen showed concern for the people and their rights.

The investigation lasted 6 years. Saltychikha was found guilty and sentenced to death. All the bribery officials who covered up the murderer were stripped of their titles, property and sent into exile. Saltychikha's accomplices - peasants, courtyard people and "priest" - were punished by a whip with cutting out their nostrils by the verdict of the Justic Collegium and sent to Nerchinsk for eternal hard labor.

"1. To deprive her of her noble rank and prohibit her throughout our empire, so that she would never be named by anyone by the name of her family, either her father or her husband.

2. To order in Moscow to take her out to the square and chained her to a post and fasten on her neck a sheet with the inscription in large words: "Tormentor and murderer."

3. When she stands an hour on this reproachful spectacle, then, enclosed in glands, take to one of the women's monasteries, located in the White or Earthen City, and there, near which there is no church, to put in a deliberately made underground prison, in which she will be kept after death so that it has no light from anywhere in it. "

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

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19 februarythe premiere of the historical series directed by Yegor Anashkin will take place on the TV channel "Russia" "Bloody lady" based on the biography of the landowner Daria Saltykova. The role of a woman, whose name became in Russia the personification of cruelty and inhumanity, played Yulia Snigir.

Historical reference

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

True, the life of the peasants, who, with their back-breaking labor, provided all this idyll, was completely different. Absolutely powerless, they often became victims of violence and tyranny of their masters.

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

"Saltychikha". Hood. Pchelin V.N.

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

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

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

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

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

The relatives of the victims tried to complain, but due to the greed of officials, their names were immediately reported to Saltychikha. It is clear that the lady punished the "informers" with particular cruelty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She was held in the underground prison of Saltykov for 11 years. Then she was transferred to a stone annex to the cathedral church of the Ivanovsky monastery.

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

The chronicles of the beginning of the reign of Catherine II are rich in descriptions of criminal processes that are associated with mass torture and murder of their serfs by landowners. A special place in these processes is occupied by the "Case of Saltychikha" - a Moscow noblewoman who killed about 140 people. She killed Saltychikha of any motivation, with “special”, as they would say now, “cruelty”, just like that, out of love for this business, not yielding, and in many ways surpassing the most notorious monsters of the human race.

Daria Nikolaevna Ivanova was born in 1730. She was the third daughter of a simple nobleman, many of whom served the sovereign and the fatherland in the vast Russian expanses. At the age of 20, she married Gleb Alekseevich Saltykov, captain of the Life Guards Cavalry Regiment. The married life of the Saltykovs did not differ in any way from the life of other high-born families of those times. Daria gave birth to her husband two sons - Fyodor and Nikolai, who, as was then customary, were immediately signed up from birth to serve in the Guards regiments.

However, after six years, in 1756, her husband unexpectedly dies. The loss of her husband, who left the young widow a house in the center of Moscow, a dozen estates in the Moscow region and 600 serfs, negatively affected her mental state: the widow began to experience uncontrollable bouts of severe anger, which she poured, usually on the slaves around her.

The picturesque, quiet, surrounded by a coniferous forest, the Saltykovs' estate in Troitskoye near Moscow soon turned into some kind of cursed place. “Like a plague has settled in those parts,” the neighbors whispered. But the inhabitants of the "creepy estate" themselves lowered their eyes and pretended that everything was as usual and nothing special was happening.

Meanwhile, the number of serfs was inexorably decreasing, and a new grave mound appeared in the village cemetery almost every day. The reason for the inexplicable plague among the Saltykov serfs was not a terrible epidemic, but a young widow, mother of two sons - Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova.

Saltykova again got up in a bad mood. She called the serf to dress her. Soon the morning toilet was finished. There was nothing to find fault with. Then Saltychikha, without any reason, pulled the girl by the hair. Then the lady went to check the rooms to see if everything was clean. In one of them, she saw a small, yellow, autumn leaf flying through the window and sticking to the floorboard. The lady burst out. She ordered in a shrill voice to bring the one who was cleaning the rooms. Agrafena entered, neither alive nor dead.

Daria Nikolaevna grabbed a weighty stick and began to beat the “guilty” mercilessly until the girl, bleeding, fell to the floor. A priest was called, but Agrafena did not even have the strength to utter a word. So she died without repentance. Such scenes in a Moscow house at the corner of Kuznetsky Most and Lubyanka took place almost every morning, and then throughout the day. Those who turned out to be stronger endured the beatings. The rest suffered the fate of Agrafena.

So, for underwear that was not well washed, in her opinion, she could easily, in a state of passion, grab the first thing that came to her hand - whether it was an iron or a stick - and beat the guilty washerwoman with it until she lost consciousness, and then call the servants and order them to beat the bloody sacrifice with sticks to death. Sometimes such murders were committed in her presence, at times - in the courtyard of the house, in front of other serfs. Those close to Saltychikha carried out the orders of their deranged mistress unquestioningly. Or they could easily turn from executioners to victims.

Carts with a suspicious load, barely covered with mat, pulled out from the estate. Those who accompanied it not really that and hid from involuntary witnesses - they say, we are taking the corpses to the police office for examination, another girl died, the kingdom of heaven to her, ran away, fool, and on the way she gave God her soul, now everything is necessary, as it should be , commit. But the matting that had accidentally slipped down revealed a terrible disfigured corpse with scalded skin, scabs instead of hair, and stab and cut wounds.

Made the Countess Bathory the servant to undress, stand in front of her, took a knife and ...

Over time, Saltychikha's cruelty took on an even more pathological character. Simple beatings and the assassinations of serfs that followed them no longer satisfied her, she began to invent more sophisticated tortures: she could set fire to her hair, tore her ears and nostrils with red-hot tongs, cut out the genitals of men and women who had been bound in advance, threw the little ones alive into cauldrons of boiling water girls.

And what about the serfs themselves? Could it be that they, like dumb cattle, were silent throughout all this time, with slavish obedience went to the slaughter?

On the contrary, dozens of complaints were written to all instances, but ... Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova belonged to the upper class, she had “noble” blood in her veins, so it was not so easy to bring her to justice: all the local nobility could stand up to her defense.

Only in 1762, when Catherine II began to reign, one of the complaints against Daria Saltykova reached its destination and was accepted for consideration. It was submitted by a serf whose name was Yermolai; Saltychikha killed three of his wives in turn.

Catherine II referred the complaint to the Moscow Justice Collegium, and she was forced to open a criminal case. In the course of the investigation, terrible details of the atrocities committed by Daria Saltykova in her house on Kuznetsky Most began to surface. According to the testimony of many witnesses, during the period from 1756 to 1762, the Bloody Lady killed 138 people with her own hands! But in the future, the investigation was able to officially establish and charge the facts of only 38 murders (Saltychikha and her henchmen knew how to hide ends in the water). But even these episodes were enough to make even seasoned judges indescribable horror.

Even at a time when the investigation in the Saltychikha case was in full swing, torture and murder did not stop in Saltykova's house: witnesses for the prosecution who dared to complain about their mistress were destroyed. The whole nightmare of those times was that the serfs, having given evidence against their master or mistress, were forced to return to him at the end of the interrogations.

The system of judicial protection did not apply to slaves.

When the operatives burst into the house, even they, the well-worn ones, could not recover from the horror ...

The aggressiveness of the Bloody Lady was looking for a way out all the time and finally began to splash out not only on the serfs, but also on people of noble origin like her. When her lover, Count Tyutchev, told her that he wanted to marry another, Saltykova was so enraged that she ordered her servants to kill both Tyutchev and his bride, and also to burn down their houses so that nothing else could remind her about the insult inflicted. Fortunately, the henchmen, encouraged by the course of the investigation, ignored the order of Daria Saltykova, and Count Tyutchev survived.

The investigation into the Saltychikha case was conducted for 6 long years. The Bloody Lady in every possible way "greased" the lawyers, giving bribes to the right and to the left, and at social events and balls, where they did not stop inviting her, she repeatedly said that there was nothing to judge her for, first of all, since serfs are not people, and secondly, it is impossible, because she is of “blue blood”.

But, despite the many obstacles created by the investigation by Saltychikha and her high-ranking patrons, the case was finished and brought to court. The ending of the bloody drama has come.

Having considered all the circumstances of the case, the Justice Collegium passed the death sentence to Daria Saltykova, admitting that "she inhumanly, torturously killed a large number of her men and women to death."

Secret mechanisms were immediately set in motion, and the Senate in St. Petersburg made another decision - replacing the death penalty with punishment with a whip and hard labor. The patrons of the Bloody Lady were also not satisfied with this sentence, and finally Catherine II herself put an end to the matter. By a personal decree of the Empress, Saltykova was sentenced to one hour of standing in the center of Moscow at the pillar of shame and life imprisonment.

1768, October 7 - Saltychikha was brought in a canvas shroud to Execution Ground, hanging on her chest a board on which it was written: "The torturer and murderer", was given a lighted candle in her hands and tied to a post. According to contemporaries, thousands of people gathered to look at Saltykova, which the people have long been associated with the fabulous Baba Yaga and the ghoul. Red Square was crowded with people. Onlookers even climbed onto rooftops and trees. For an hour, while the Bloody Lady stood at the pillar of shame, the executioners beat her with whips, branded with a red-hot iron and cut out the nostrils of those who helped her in her atrocities at her feet. Towards the end of the "performance", the priest was also branded, who, at the behest of Saltychikha, performed the funeral service and buried those tortured by her as dead natural deaths.

The next day, all of Saltychikha's henchmen were sent by convoy to the Siberian city of Nerchinsk for eternal hard labor, and Darya Saltykova herself was sent to the Moscow Ivanovsky nunnery and lowered into a deep dark pit, called by the nuns "penitential dungeon." The fanatic spent eleven long years in that dungeon on water and bread. During these years, she saw the light only when food was brought to her: together with the food, a lighted candle was lowered into the pit.

1779 - Saltkova's sentence was commuted, and she was transferred to a brick "cage" - an extension to the monastery wall. There was a barred window in the extension. One of his contemporaries told how through this window Saltychikha spat at the curious, cursed at them and tried to hit with a stick thrust through the bars of the grate. The 11-year repentance in the pit did not lead her to repentance, it only made her even more embittered.

An amazing fact: somehow Saltychikha managed to seduce the soldier guarding her and enter into an intimate relationship with him, as a result of which she became pregnant and gave birth to a child. Then she was already 50 years old! The soldier was severely punished with gauntlets and sent to a penal company for correction, but nothing is known about the fate of the newborn. Most likely, he could have been identified in any of the monasteries, where until the end of his days he atoned for the many sins of his bloodthirsty mother.

Daria Saltykova died on November 27, 1801 at the age of 71. They buried her in the Donskoy Monastery, next to her relatives.