The story is always told the same way. For about thirty years, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, a woman in Russia known only as Madame Popova ran a service for wives whose husbands beat them. She charged little or nothing. Sometimes she used arsenic, slipped into a man's food or drink when she invited him in to talk; sometimes a hired man did the work. In the end one of her clients, overcome with remorse, went to the police. Popova confessed to about three hundred killings, said she regretted nothing and was glad to have helped so many women, insisted she had never killed a woman, and was shot by firing squad before a crowd in March 1909.
Russian-language websites have repeated the account since at least 2020, adding that she was a native of Samara and that her victims were peasant men who beat their wives, sometimes to death. The details are the same as in the English-language true-crime encyclopedias, and none of the versions cites a document.
No contemporary source for any of it has been found. There is no trial record, no arrest record, no first name, no town beyond the late attribution to Samara, and no account in the Russian press of 1909 of an execution that would have been one of the largest crime stories of the era.
Something real may lie underneath the legend. Rural Russia at the turn of the century had a genuine, documented pattern of peasant women poisoning violent husbands, and there were prosecutions for it. But the figure of three hundred, the murder-for-hire business and the execution are not supported by any source that has been produced, and the story should be read as folklore until one is.