Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova was a wealthy Moscow widow whose serfs died in large numbers in the six years after her husband's death in 1756. Most were young women of her household. More than 20 complaints about the deaths reached the Moscow authorities between 1757 and 1762, and none led anywhere. In the summer of 1762 two of her serfs carried a petition to St. Petersburg and put it before the new empress, Catherine II. The Justice College in Moscow then spent years questioning witnesses and going through her household accounts. It found her responsible for the deaths of dozens of serfs. On October 2, 1768, Catherine signed the decree that took away her noble rank and her family names, exposed her for an hour on a scaffold in Red Square, and shut her in a Moscow convent for the rest of her life.
Russian has called her Saltychikha ever since. The historian Yerofei Moriakov of the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, who has worked through the archival record of the case, believes the nickname dates from the time of her sentence. He describes the case as the first in which a landowner was arrested and punished on the strength of her own serfs' testimony.
She was born Darya Nikolayevna Ivanova in March 1730, into a Moscow family of old nobility, according to the legal news site Pravo.ru, which lists the Davydovs, the Musin-Pushkins, the Stroganovs and the Tolstoys among her parents' relatives. Her grandfather, Avtonom Ivanov, was a state secretary in the old Muscovite government offices, and Moriakov writes that he built up estates with some 16,000 serfs.
She married Gleb Alekseyevich Saltykov, a cavalry captain in the Life Guards Horse Regiment. It was her only marriage. They had two sons, Fyodor, born in 1750, and Nikolai, born about 1751. Gleb Saltykov died in 1756, and at 26 she was a widow with two small boys and a large fortune drawn from her husband's estate and from her own family.
Moriakov puts her among the thousand or so richest landowners in the Russian Empire. By the third national census of taxable souls she controlled more than 4,000 serfs on estates in the Moscow, Kaluga, Smolensk and Arkhangelsk provinces, with her sons as co-owners. In Moscow district alone she held 487 male serfs. She kept a large house in central Moscow and an estate at the village of Troitskoye outside the city. Pravo.ru, describing her life before 1756, writes that she gave money to churches and the poor and went on a pilgrimage every year.
The killings began after her husband died. Moriakov reports that 138 peasant women were brought from her estates to the Moscow house and to Troitskoye, and that most of them had died or disappeared by 1762. Pravo.ru, drawing on the investigators' tally, breaks the same 138 deaths and disappearances down this way: 50 people were entered in the household records as dead "of illness," 72 were listed as missing, and 16 were recorded as having left to join their husbands or as having run away.
The serfs' testimony credited her and the household servants who acted on her orders with 75 killings. Most of the dead were unmarried young women of the household. Moriakov counts three men among the known victims, and the Parliamentary Gazette, the newspaper of Russia's Federal Assembly, gives the same figure. The pretexts were trivial: a house badly cleaned, a dress left creased.
Some of the dead are known by name. Ermolai Ilyin, one of her serfs, lost three wives in turn. Ekaterina Semenova, who washed floors in the house, died in 1759. Fedosya Artamonova, another household servant, died in the spring of 1761. Aksinya Yakovleva, whom Pravo.ru describes as quiet and pretty, died at the end of February 1762. Fekla Gerasimova, a young maid, died in the summer of 1762. Khrisanf Andreev, the nephew of one of the house servants, died in November 1759. Lukyan Mikheev, a boy, died in September 1761. Moriakov's list of the dead also includes Anisya Grigorieva, Pelageya Petrova, Ekaterina Timofeeva, Anna Petrova and Darya Dementieva, whose bodies were examined after their deaths; Marina Fedorova, Anna Rodionova and Ustinya Prokofieva, whose deaths were recorded as suicides; and the wives of several serfs, among them Matryona Ivanova and Ustinya Nikitina. The village headman, Nikifor Grigoriev, was killed in 1761. Little more is known of these people than their names, their places in the household and the years they died.
The deaths did not go unreported. Moriakov counts at least 22 cases opened in Moscow offices between 1757 and 1762, and more than 60 people who complained in all, counting joint petitions. The Russian state broadcaster's news site Vesti.Ru, reporting in 2018, gave the number of serfs' complaints as 21 and said each one was dismissed through bribes and patronage, and the complainants handed back to her.
The first came in December 1757, when a woman of the household went to the Moscow police and reported that her mistress had killed a serf girl. The case passed to the Detective Office, the old investigative department for serious crime. The woman who complained was flogged, and the matter was dropped. That same month a police captain examined the body of a servant woman, Anisya, whose husband blamed their mistress; in February 1758 the husband, Trofim Stepanov, ran away and raised the alarm again. Witnesses would not back him, and he was returned to the household. Years later the Justice College found Saltykova guilty in his wife's death.
In May 1759 a servant named Fyodor Somin went to the police and reported the deaths of six girls that spring. Again witnesses failed to support him, and he was flogged and sent back. In November 1759 another house servant, Fedot Bogomolov, told a patrol that his nephew, Khrisanf Andreev, had been killed on her orders. The case went to the Detective Office in 1760, the village headman withdrew his support, and Bogomolov too was returned to her. The headman confirmed the account only in 1763, before the Justice College.
The parish priest, Ivan Ivanov, refused to bury women from the house who had died without the last rites, and from 1760 he reported the deaths to the church authorities. In December 1760 the Moscow consistory asked the police to investigate. He reported again in April 1762. Each time, Moriakov writes, the police sent the case back without result.
Moriakov finds three reasons for the failure. Under the law inherited from Muscovy, serfs had no standing to testify against their owners in a criminal case. Officials were bribed; he names a councillor of the Moscow police, A. I. Molchanov, as one who took money to send complaining serfs back to the house. And Saltykova had connections, which she used. Some petitions simply sank in overloaded offices: the secretary of the Moscow governor's chancellery had more than 800 cases on his hands in 1762.
In the spring of 1762 a landowner, Nikolai Andreyevich Tyutchev, complained to the courts that her serfs had attacked him. Pravo.ru describes Tyutchev as a former lover of Saltykova's. He withdrew the complaint after he married Pelageya Panyutina in April 1762. The Justice College later found the attack itself unproven but treated Tyutchev's complaint and other evidence as proof that she had plotted against the couple. Both survived.
In the spring of 1762 a group of her serfs fled. Some declared that they had state secrets to report, invoking a decree of February 1762 that protected people who reported political crimes; they were taken to the Senate office in Moscow in April, and six of them were then held for months by the Detective Office. Two others, Savely Martynov and Ermolai Ilyin, whose three wives had died, reached St. Petersburg in July 1762. Catherine II had taken the throne that summer. They handed her a petition. Moriakov writes that Martynov, who could read and write and had kept his mistress's expense book, probably wrote it.
On October 1, 1762, an imperial decree ordered the Justice College in Moscow to take up the matter, call the witnesses and report to the Senate. The Parliamentary Gazette reports that the empress told the Senate to investigate the case with the utmost rigor. On October 9, 1762, Saltykova was placed under house arrest in Moscow.
Pravo.ru names the official in charge as Stepan Volkov, a man of non-noble birth with no family or business ties to the nobility, assisted by Prince Dmitry Tsitsianov. The investigators' most useful evidence came from the house itself. Moriakov writes that the household expense ledger was used to trace what had happened to the missing serfs, and Pravo.ru reports that by November 1763 the investigators had concluded from the account books that most of the dead had not died naturally. About 40 serfs were kept at the Justice College as witnesses for years. Guards posted at the house reported that the abuse went on. In November and December 1762 and again in May 1763 serfs petitioned again, complaining that the inquiry was slow and that officials were calling at the house to take her side.
She was removed from managing her estates, which were placed under a guardian, Senator Saburov. Questioned point by point in 1763, she denied everything and never confessed. A priest spent a month urging her to repent, without result. On December 24, 1763, after reading a report on the case, Catherine ordered that Saltykova be told she faced torture. Moriakov writes that on May 3, 1764, the empress directed instead that the case be decided on witness testimony and a general inquest of the neighborhood. Pravo.ru dates the decree forbidding torture of Saltykova or her servants to May 17, 1764.
The general inquest was held in June 1764. According to Pravo.ru, about 130 people were questioned around her Moscow house and more than 300 at Troitskoye. The investigation was finished in the spring of 1765 and sent to the Senate.
Accounts differ on what the inquiry proved. According to Pravo.ru, the investigators concluded that she was guilty of 38 deaths and suspected her in 26 more, and they cleared her in 11 cases, judging that in those the serfs were trying to slander their mistress. The Parliamentary Gazette gives the same 38 and 26. Moriakov, working from the archive, writes that in February 1767 the Justice College, in its formal opinion, found her guilty in the case of 45 serfs and of plotting against Pelageya Panyutina and Nikolai Tyutchev.
The Justice College recommended death. The Senate, noting that capital punishment had not been carried out in Russia since 1754, proposed penal servitude instead. Pravo.ru reports that the Senate found her guilty but left the sentence to the empress, and that eight drafts of the sentence in Catherine's hand are known.
Catherine's decree of October 2, 1768, stripped Saltykova of her nobility and forbade anyone to call her by her father's or her husband's family name. The Parliamentary Gazette writes that she was to be known simply as Darya Nikolaeva. Pravo.ru quotes the decree's language for her: an "inhuman widow" and a "freak of the human race" (urod roda chelovecheskago). She was to stand for an hour on a scaffold in Moscow, chained to a post, under a placard that read "Tormentor and murderess," and then to be confined for life in an underground cell in the Ivanovsky Convent. Pravo.ru writes that she was to have light only while she ate and to speak with no one but the head of her guard and a nun. Her estates and property passed to her two sons.
The public part of the sentence was carried out in Red Square, on October 17, 1768, according to Pravo.ru, or October 18, according to Moriakov. Moriakov quotes an eyewitness who wrote that hardly a seat was left free on any of the market stalls. In November 1768 the decree was printed in 4,577 copies and sent across the empire to be made known to all.
The historian Mikhail Korobko told Vesti.Ru in 2018 that the punishment had been devised for her alone, to the point that she was not even to be called or regarded as a woman.
Several people were punished with her. The priest Stepan Petrov, who had helped bury the dead, was stripped of his orders and exiled to Nerchinsk in eastern Siberia. Household serfs who had carried out her orders were sent to penal labor at Nerchinsk; Moriakov names among them the headman Ivan Mikhailov, Martyan Zotov, Roman Ivanov, Aksinya Stepanova and Vasilisa Matveeva. A clerk, Ivan Pafnutyev, lost his rank and was barred from government service.
The Ivanovsky Convent is the Convent of St. John the Baptist in Moscow. Vesti.Ru reported that she spent 33 years there, the first 11 of them in an earthen pit without daylight and the rest in a small building with a single window. Pravo.ru gives the same 11 years before her move to a stone annex, where a small barred window let visitors speak with her. Moriakov writes that from 1779 to 1800 she was kept in a cell built against the south wall of the convent's cathedral, where visitors could look at her through a curtained window. A Frenchman who taught in Moscow, P. D. de Passenan, described seeing her there as a woman of about 70.
Pravo.ru dates her death to November 27, 1801, and the Parliamentary Gazette also gives November 1801. Moriakov gives her dates as 1730 to 1800. Vesti.Ru reported in 2018 that her grave is in the cemetery of the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow. Her son Fyodor died in 1801, Moriakov writes; Nikolai had died in 1775.
The number of her victims is the most disputed point in the case. The figure of 138 counts the women who died or disappeared from her household between 1756 and 1762, not deaths proven against her. The serfs' testimony accused her of 75 killings. The investigators, as Pravo.ru and the Parliamentary Gazette report, found her guilty of 38 deaths and suspected her in 26 more; Moriakov writes that the Justice College's opinion of February 1767 found her guilty in the case of 45 serfs. The lower figures are the ones the inquiry upheld.
The dates of the public sentence (October 17 or 18, 1768) and of her death (1800, or November 27, 1801) are also recorded differently. Pravo.ru mentions unconfirmed rumors that she had a child by a guard after 1779, and Moriakov records a legend that she met the rebel Pugachev in the convent; neither story has been confirmed. Pravo.ru also reports that criminologists and historians have put forward psychological explanations for her behavior, without naming them, and presents those as hypotheses.
Moriakov treats the case as a landmark in the prosecution of Russian landowners for cruelty to their serfs. In his reading the inquiry began because serfs kept petitioning and because the empress took personal control, not because the gentry's opinion turned against her; and it took so long because the law denied serfs a voice against their owners, because the complainants had not found the right channel earlier, and because officials and neighbors were indifferent or complicit.
Her name has become shorthand in Russian for the cruelty of serf owners. In February 2018 the state channel Russia 1 broadcast Krovavaya Barynya (The Bloody Mistress), a 16-episode series about her directed and produced by Yegor Anashkin, with Yulia Snigir in the title role.
March 1730: Darya Nikolayevna Ivanova is born into a Moscow noble family.
About 1750 and 1751: her sons Fyodor and Nikolai are born.
1756: her husband, Gleb Saltykov, dies; the deaths in her household begin.
December 1757: the first complaint to the Moscow police; the complainant is flogged.
1758 to 1760: complaints by Trofim Stepanov, Fyodor Somin and Fedot Bogomolov fail; the parish priest begins reporting deaths.
1759: Ekaterina Semenova and Khrisanf Andreev die.
1761: Fedosya Artamonova, the boy Lukyan Mikheev and the headman Nikifor Grigoriev die.
February 1762: Aksinya Yakovleva dies.
Spring 1762: Nikolai Tyutchev complains of an attack, then withdraws after his marriage in April.
Summer 1762: Fekla Gerasimova dies.
July 1762: Savely Martynov and Ermolai Ilyin petition Catherine II in St. Petersburg.
October 1, 1762: Catherine orders the Justice College to investigate.
October 9, 1762: Saltykova is placed under house arrest.
November 1763: the household accounts show most of the dead did not die naturally.
December 24, 1763: Catherine orders that Saltykova be told she faces torture.
May 1764: the empress orders the case decided on witness evidence and a general inquest; torture is ruled out.
June 1764: general inquest at her Moscow house and at Troitskoye.
Spring 1765: the investigation goes to the Senate.
February 1767: the Justice College finds her guilty and recommends death; the Senate proposes penal servitude.
October 2, 1768: Catherine's decree strips her of nobility and her names and orders life confinement.
October 17 or 18, 1768: an hour on the scaffold in Red Square.
November 1768: the decree is printed in 4,577 copies.
1775: her son Nikolai dies.
About 1779: moved from the underground cell to a cell against the convent cathedral.
1800 or November 27, 1801: she dies in the Ivanovsky Convent; buried at the Donskoy Monastery.
1801: her son Fyodor dies.
February 19, 2018: Russia 1 begins broadcasting Krovavaya Barynya.