In 1768 a Moscow crowd came to stare at a noblewoman chained for an hour on a public platform with a sign around her neck that read "This woman has tortured and murdered." She was Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova, known in Russian as Saltychikha, and a six-year investigation by Catherine II's Collegium of Justice had just found her guilty of beating and torturing thirty-eight of her own serfs to death. The investigating official counted as many as 138 suspicious deaths on her estates and attributed the great majority of them to her.
She was born Darya Nikolayevna Ivanova in 1730 into an old and rich noble family, one of five daughters of Nikolai Avtonomovich Ivanov and his wife, Anna Ivanovna Davydova. Her birthday is given variously as March 11, March 17 and November 3. She married Gleb Alexeyevich Saltykov, of the powerful Saltykov family and an uncle of the future field marshal Nikolai Saltykov, and had two sons, Theodore and Nicholas. In 1755, at twenty-five, she was widowed, and she inherited a large estate with a great number of serfs, where she lived with her two small boys.
Almost all of the people she killed were women and girls among her serfs. Early complaints to the authorities about the deaths on her estate were ignored, and some of those who complained were punished for it; she had friends at court and among the nobility. In the end relatives of the dead got a petition in front of the new empress, and Catherine, who wanted to show that the law applied to the powerful, chose to have her tried in public. Saltykova was arrested in 1762.
She was held for six years while the Collegium questioned many witnesses and went through the records of the Saltykov estate. Several of the people who had done her beatings were convicted with her and sentenced to public flogging and hard labor. What to do with Saltykova herself was harder. Russia had abolished the death penalty in 1754, and Catherine, newly on the throne, needed the goodwill of the nobility. Some accounts date the sentence to October 2, 1768. It began with the hour on the platform in Moscow.
Then she was taken to the Ivanovsky Convent in Moscow, which had long served as a prison for women of royal and noble birth, and shut in its cellar for life. She was kept in a cell apart from the main building, where she could hear the services but not attend them, and after about eleven years she was moved into one of the convent's main buildings. She died there in 1801, aged seventy-one, after some thirty-three years in confinement; the date is given as December 9 in some sources and as November 27 or December 27 in others. She was buried beside her relatives in the necropolis of the Donskoy Monastery.
Her name became a byword in Russian for the abuse of serfs by their owners, and she has often been compared with Elizabeth Báthory. In 2022 a sixteen-episode series inspired by her life, The Bloody Duchess, was released on streaming platforms.