فصل 7

THE TORMENTOR

Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova

Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova liked the ritual of church: the liturgy, the tithing, the regular pilgrimages. She was, in a way, a creature of habit. Predictable. Ticking through life like a clock. Once a year, for example, she’d head out of town to visit the sacred reliquaries and cathedrals of the Russian Orthodox Church. At home, she maintained an almost meditative torture practice, beating her servants for hours and killing the ones who bothered her most. Even her torture was predictable: she beat the ones who failed to clean her house properly. Tick. Tock.

Some might look at her behavior and see the worst sort of religious hypocrisy: paying lip service to good while worshiping evil. But Darya saw nothing duplicitous about her behavior. She was merely acting out of a message she’d internalized: that she was legitimately better than others, and as such could act as she pleased. Why should she wring her bloody hands and pray for forgiveness? She was the one who chose to forgive—or not. She felt as untouchable as a god.

The Young Widow

Darya’s world was a privileged one. She was a wealthy Russian noblewoman, she was related to statesmen and princes, she had an army of servants at her disposal, and the law was firmly on her side. She could expect to be treated with dignity and given the benefit of the doubt no matter what she did—because even if the law didn’t technically support all of her actions, her fellow Russian nobles certainly would. These aristocrats didn’t like to set precedents they couldn’t take back—like, say, the risky precedent of holding nobles accountable. No. They liked life as it was: safe for them, and dangerous for everyone else.

Darya was born in March 1730, the third of five daughters. She married well: her husband, Gleb Alexandrovich Saltykov, was the captain of the Cavalry Regiment of the Russian Imperial Guard. The Saltykov family was famous and well connected, related to a veritable who’s who of other noble families: Stroganovs, Tolstoys, Tatishchevs, Shakhovskies, Musin-Pushkins, Golitsyns, and Naryshkins. Surely this marriage brought with it a considerable amount of social pressure and even stress for Darya, as she mingled with future statesmen and the grandchildren of ancient tsaritsas. And Darya wasn’t an educated woman. She never learned how to read.

Darya and Saltykov had two sons—Theodore and Nicholas—but their marriage didn’t last long, as Saltykov died in 1756. Darya was suddenly a widow at the age of twenty-five. We can imagine that she felt, at some level, both overwhelmed and abandoned. She had her young boys to take care of, and she was suddenly in charge of two very sizable estates. Her dead husband had owned a mansion in Moscow on Kuznetskaya Street and a summer estate that presided over the village of Troitskoye. Immediately, unexpectedly, both of them were Darya’s.

When she wasn’t running her new estates, Darya was taking her annual pilgrimage to one Orthodox shrine or another. She liked the city of Kiev, famous for its religious architecture, and she sometimes traveled to see the beloved icon Our Lady of Kazan, one of the most sacred relics in the entire country. The gilded portrait featured a pensive close-up of the Virgin Mary with a tiny Christ standing solemnly on her lap.

Perhaps Darya enjoyed the grave, almost foreboding look in their eyes. Maybe she liked the thought of a Christ who never smiled. At the very least, she probably relished being away from home, because as soon as she returned, her responsibilities came closing in on her. Both the Moscow and the Troitskoye estates came with souls. Hundreds of souls. And Darya owned them all.

Souls

Darya lived during a time when a nobleman’s wealth and influence weren’t measured by how much land he owned, or how much money he possessed, but how many serfs worked for him. Serfs were Russian peasants who lived and labored on their proprietors’ land. They owed the proprietor toil, money, or a combination of both, but they weren’t technically slaves because they could hypothetically save up to buy their freedom. You know, the way Sisyphus could hypothetically rig some sort of structure to keep his boulder from rolling back down the hill for all eternity. Serfs had existed in Russia for centuries, but by the mid-1700s, Russia was approaching what you might call peak serfdom. Serf owning had turned into a form of conspicuous consumption, and it was totally out of control. For example, during Catherine the Great’s reign, the richest noblemen prided themselves on their serf orchestras and serf ballets.

But this was an awkward time for Russia to be conspicuously consuming millions of peasants. Catherine the Great was about to take over the throne, and she wanted to show the world that Russia was an enlightened country and that she was a humane and modern ruler. And yet—the serfs! Somehow the issue of serfs’ rights never quite caught up with Catherine’s vision for a shiny new Westernized country. Even in the most liberal circles, the sight of serfs working in the gardens and plowing the fields would have been a constant visual reminder that it was never possible to leave human cruelty entirely behind, no matter how modern your world had become.

These serfs were referred to as “souls,” and a nobleman’s power over his souls was practically unlimited. A few years before Darya’s birth, one imperial decree noted that nobles were under no obligation to treat their souls like humans, but that “the proprietors sell their peasants and domestic servants not even in families, but one by one, like cattle.” Nobles would physically punish their serfs all the time, often using a thick Russian leather whip called the knout. This was considered more than acceptable, although the nobles weren’t allowed to actually kill the serfs. Catherine the Great noted in her memoirs that many households in Moscow kept a selection of “iron collars, chains and other instruments of torture for those who commit the slightest infraction.” She’d been struck by one particularly bizarre case: an aging noblewoman kept her hairdresser locked in a cage in her bedroom, because the noblewoman didn’t want society to know she wore fake hair—and the serf was the only one who could have exposed her.

To add insult to injury, serfs had no way to defend themselves under the law. The authorities, forever paranoid about a murderous uprising, were convinced that legal protection for serfs would lead to feelings of safety, and feelings of safety would lead to insubordination. So not only could their masters send them off to Siberia without a trial, or force them to work in the mines for the rest of their lives, but if any serf dared complain about this to the authorities, that in and of itself was reason for punishment. Even Catherine the Great, who prided herself on her humanity, published an imperial degree saying that if a serf tried to present a petition against his master, he would be whipped and transported to the mines of Nerchinsk for life.

Therefore, as a serf, your quality of life was entirely dependent on the whims of your master or mistress in all their odd, distrustful, spoiled glory. Granted, there were plenty of benevolent landowners in Russia during those days, and their serfs enjoyed peace, prosperity, support, and copious free time in which to cultivate their own land. But Darya wasn’t one of them. There was blood on the walls and the stairs of her estates.

“I Am My Own Mistress”

Darya was obsessed with cleanliness, and liked her floors the way she liked her Orthodox icons: immaculate. She also had a hair-trigger temper, and the resulting combination was bad news for the female servants who cleaned her house. The sight of an improperly washed floor or an imperfect batch of laundry would send Darya flying into a vicious rage. She’d grab the nearest stick, rolling pin, or whip, and begin to beat whatever quivering girl was responsible for the botched job.

All around the country, nobles were whipping their serfs for similarly trite infractions—but Darya didn’t know when to stop. It wasn’t long before her neighbors in Moscow began to hear horrible rumors about the Saltykova serfs: Darya locked her maidservants in an empty hut and starved them for days, Darya’s girls had bloodstains on their clothes. The villagers of Troitskoye were whispering, too. Something was wrong at Darya’s summer home, they said. Once, they heard that a cart coming out of the estate was carrying the body of a servant girl. When they peered inside, they saw that the girl’s skin was flayed, her hair ripped out.

The fatal beatings, or at least the bulk of them, started in 1756, the same year Darya became a widow. The first official complaint against Darya was registered in 1757, and it concerned the murder of a pregnant woman named Anisya Grigorieva. It was a double murder, really: first, Darya beat Grigorieva with a rolling pin until Grigorieva suffered a miscarriage. Then, religious Darya called a nearby priest to come and give the dying woman her last rites, but Grigorieva passed away before the priest showed up. Once the priest appeared, he took one horrified look at the body and refused to bury it without a police inspection.

The police arrived, took the abused corpse to the hospital for an autopsy, and—didn’t do a thing about it. The dead woman had a deep wound by her heart, and her entire back was blue and swollen. Clearly she hadn’t died of natural causes. But what were they going to do, arrest a noblewoman? Absurd!

When Grigorieva’s frantic husband went ahead and filed a complaint with the police, Darya found out right away. She filed a counterpetition asking the police not to believe the husband’s testimony, but instead to punish him and then send him back to her. Perhaps money exchanged hands at that point. Either way, the police listened to Darya and did nothing about the husband’s complaint. When they returned him to the estate, Darya sent him into exile, where he soon died.

This could have been the moment Darya was brought to justice. She had just killed a pregnant woman, and there were multiple witnesses to both the crime and the aftermath: the husband, a serf who’d been forced to beat Grigorieva too, another serf who buried the baby, the priest, the police, and the doctor(s) who performed the autopsy. If this complaint had been properly investigated, tens—or possibly hundreds—of lives would have been saved. But no one bothered. These were serfs, after all. Nobles were already selling them “like cattle.” So Darya killed and killed again, confident in her impregnability and furious at her serfs for each petty mistake, for getting in her way, for being her responsibility, for existing. If she was a god, then her serfs were her pitiful playthings. She could make them clean; she could make them cook; she could make them scream and bleed and beg. Typically, she would force another servant to begin the beating, and then she’d take over until the victim died. Sometimes she commanded her male serfs to beat their wives or relatives in front of her. In Troitskoye, she threw boiling water onto a peasant girl and then beat her to death. Villagers remembered seeing the body: the scalded skin had actually begun to peel off the bones.

Mostly, Darya killed women, but occasionally she’d turn on a man. One of her male serfs, Chrisanthos Andreev, was in charge of overseeing the unfortunate housemaids, and when Darya became convinced he was doing an inadequate job, she beat him and threw him outdoors to stand in the cold for the entire night. The next morning, Andreev was brought back inside, nearly frozen, where Darya clamped a pair of red-hot tongs over his ears. She then proceeded to pour boiling water over his body and, when he fell to the floor, she kicked and punched him. When she’d finally had enough, she asked another manservant to drag the bleeding man away from her. As soon as the poor peasant was out of Darya’s sight, he died.

It went on and on, a litany of horrors. Darya lit one woman’s hair on fire and pushed an eleven-year-old girl down a stone staircase. She fed her servants once a day so they were perpetually weak. She would grab logs of wood—tucked in every room, meant for fireplaces—and use them as makeshift clubs. Neighbors heard her screaming, “Beat more!” When one of her male serfs dared to insult her, Darya grabbed his hair and began smashing his head against a nearby wall.

Though her stablemen and housemaids repeatedly escaped and cried murder to the local authorities, they were captured and brought right back to Darya, where they would be beaten and shackled, or even sent into exile. “You will not do anything to me!” Darya scoffed at one stableman who attempted to report her. “No matter how much you report or complain about me, the authorities will not do anything to me. They would not trade me for you.” Her fearlessness wasn’t irrational bravado. As Grigorieva’s death proved, the system supported Darya, and by this point Darya had been falsifying evidence and bribing key authority figures for years. If the priests refused to bury one of her victims, then her superintendent, Martian, would file counterfeit papers about the death, saying the girl died suddenly of sickness and didn’t have a chance to make her confession, or the priest was late, or the girl was so sick she couldn’t speak, making a final confession impossible. Sometimes the papers would claim that the victim had run away, when in truth she was buried right there in the graveyard. The paper describing the death of the eleven-year-old girl that Darya pushed down the staircase said that the girl had simply . . . stumbled.

If the complaints reached the officials, Darya bribed the officials. She kept a ledger of the gifts she sent to these powerful men: food, money, even serfs themselves. In fact, one official was so accommodating that he would actually visit Darya and teach her how to deal with the denunciations that kept popping up against her. “Had Saltykova not been sheltered and helped by her protectors, there would have been fewer beatings and deaths,” raged one of her stablemen, who had seen the atrocities go on, unchecked, for years.

At one point, while watching yet another girl get beaten to death, Darya started to scream. “I am my own mistress,” she cried. “I am not afraid of anyone.” This belief that she was superior, unassailable, and even consecrated by the law was integral to her sense of self. Perhaps she killed to prove one simple point: that she could.

Love and Gunpowder

Today, in the dark corners of the Internet, you can find people attempting to pin Darya’s many crimes onto something kind of melodramatic, palatable, and easy to understand: a broken heart.

After her husband’s death, Darya took up with her handsome young neighbor, Captain Nikolai Andreyevich Tyutchev, whose Troitskoye estate brushed right up against hers. All their serfs knew they were having an affair. But their love didn’t last, and the couple broke up just before the Lent of 1762, when Darya was about to turn thirty-two.

The captain didn’t stay single for long, and Darya took great offense to this fact. Then she learned that not only was the new woman younger than her, but the captain was planning to marry this beautiful upstart. Darya couldn’t take it. She paced around, determined to enact some sort of horrible revenge on them both, and finally hit upon a deranged plan: she was simply going to have to blow them up.

Blinded by vengeance, Darya sent one of her men to purchase five pounds of gunpowder, which she then mixed with sulfur and wrapped in hemp cloth. She commanded her serf to hide the flammable mixture around the new woman’s house, and then to lie in wait until the captain arrived. Once the lovers were ensconced inside, the servant was instructed to set the house on fire, blowing them up in flagrante delicto.

This scheme was too crazy, even for Darya’s hardened male servants. The first servant she sent over simply refused to burn the house down, so Darya beat him to a pulp when he returned. She then sent him back, along with another servant, but they claimed that their attempts to start the fire had failed. Frustrated, Darya changed her approach. If bombing wasn’t going to work, maybe assault was the ticket. She commanded a new crew of serfs to lay in wait along the roadside until the couple drove by in their carriage, and then to leap out and beat them both to death.

At this point, the serfs decided that their only way out of this unhinged revenge fantasy was to secretly inform the captain that Darya was plotting against him. So they did, and the captain immediately strode to the police and filed an accusation against his ex.

Darya was unflappable when the police questioned her about it. “I did not send the peasants Roman Ivanov and Leontiev to set fire to the house of Ms. Panyutina, nor did I commanded others to beat them,” she responded coldly. She claimed that during the time of the alleged assassination attempts, she’d been sick, holed up in her Moscow estate with a priest nearby. In other words, she was a good religious woman who would never dream of revenging herself on a single soul, no matter how horribly he’d betrayed her.

Clearly, Darya was a bit upset with the captain. But this broken heart was in no way the wound that turned her into a vicious serial killer. She had been murdering serfs long before any of this happened. The event simply serves as a neat hook on which to hang the hat of our speculation: that in order for Darya to be able to commit such atrocities, she must have been driven half mad by something else.

“Madness,” in fact, is a common explanation for Darya’s crimes. When the people of Moscow found out about them, they thought she was insane, and people today still wonder the same thing. (Surely every serial killer in history has been thought insane at one point or another. How else to explain the repetitive, horrible, practiced violence?) But rather than insane, Darya comes across as horribly logical. The drama with the captain demonstrates her terrible ability to plot and outline and rationalize: she purchased the correct materials, revised her plan as necessary, and smoothly denied her guilt. Even the logic behind her serf killings was pretty consistent. If a servant did not clean properly, she deserved to die. If a servant complained to the authorities, he deserved to die. The serfs were her property, and she was allowed to give them performance reviews. It was all perfectly reasonable to Darya.

Anyway, madness and logic have always been cousins. The writer G. K. Chesterton once spoke of the “exhaustive and logical theory of the lunatic,” saying that the madman “is not hampered by a sense of humor or by charity.” Darya certainly wasn’t hampered by charity, or by anything at all. If she occasionally wanted to blow up an ex-boyfriend, she didn’t want to hear that she was being “crazy.” She simply wanted to know that the naked bodies of her former lover and her rival were sizzling like pigs on a spit. If she told her serfs to do something, she wanted the act done, no questions asked. God in heaven! Was no one listening to her?

The Escape of the Husbands

Nobody knew about Darya’s reign of terror better than Yermolai Ilyin, the man who took care of her horses. Ilyin had been married three times, to three hardworking women, each of whom had the terrible misfortune of being “employed” by Darya. They had beautiful names: Katerina, Theodosia, Aksinya. And Darya slaughtered them all.

Darya knew Ilyin loathed her because of what she’d done to his wives, but warned that if he ever attempted to report her, she would whip him to death herself. Ilyin knew her well enough to know she wasn’t making empty threats—but there’s only so much cruelty that the human psyche can take. Finally, desperate and reckless, Ilyin decided to fling himself on the mercy of a system that didn’t care whether he lived or died.

In April 1762, Ilyin and his fellow serf Savely Martynov showed up in the city of St. Petersburg, ready to make their case against Darya. They clutched a letter containing an almost inconceivable accusation: that over the past six years, Darya had killed more than one hundred people. The two were convinced that if only they could get their letter into the hands of the brand-new empress, Catherine the Great, she would do something about it.

It was a suicide mission—but it worked. Their story sounded just outrageous enough to catch the attention of the St. Petersburg authorities, who forwarded it to the Justice Board along with a note asking the board to begin an investigation into the life of Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova—the noblewoman, the mother, the widow of a fine man, the upstanding churchgoer.

“I Do Not Know Anything; I Did Not Do Anything”

If Darya flew into rages over unclean floors and ex-lovers, we can only imagine her wrath when she found out that two of her serfs had managed to turn the authorities against her. But she couldn’t make good on her threats to beat them to death, because the great eye of Empress Catherine was slowly turning toward her, and life as she knew it was about to change forever.

In a way, this case surfaced at the perfect time for Catherine the Great. See, Catherine was trying to show the world that this was a new era for Russia—a humane and enlightened era, when having noble blood was no longer an excuse to do whatever you wanted—and so she needed to make an example of someone. Because before the law, everyone was equal!

Well, sort of. The truth was that Catherine was also under a lot of pressure to handle the case diplomatically. Since Darya belonged to a prestigious family, other aristocrats were taking particular interest in this, ahem, unfortunate situation. They wanted to make sure Catherine didn’t set any precedents she couldn’t take back. (Surely they, too, had blood on their hands: serfs whose beatings had gone a little too far, stories of bribes and hasty burials.) Still, the accusations against Darya were far too serious for Catherine to sweep under the rug with a wink at Moscow’s noblest families. By now, the number of deaths attributed to Darya had skyrocketed to 138. Like it or not, the Justice Board was dealing with one of the worst serial killers in history, male or female.

Due to Catherine’s personal interest in the case, the investigation against Darya was incredibly methodical. This was no semi-shady Báthory trial: investigators talked to hundreds of witnesses in both Moscow and Troitskoye, carefully confirming and reconfirming each allegation against the noblewoman. These witnesses were as knowledgeable and precise as an investigating officer could wish. They remembered the names of the dead peasants and the dates on which they died; they corroborated each other’s stories. If the slightest shadow of a doubt were cast on any witness—contradicting testimonies, qualms about the witness’s veracity, or facts that couldn’t be proven—the Justice Board interpreted that particular case in Darya’s favor. They also threw out multiple cases for lack of evidence. Darya’s stance on the 138 deaths was short and sweet: “I do not know anything; I did not do anything,” she said, over and over.

Despite all this, the Board still found her guilty of thirty-eight murders, and under suspicion of murder in twenty-six more cases. The fact that Darya refused to confess, however, caused Catherine a great deal of anxiety, and her concern is demonstrated in the sheer number of letters she wrote about the case. On principle, Catherine strongly disapproved of torture—writing, famously, “All punishments by which the human body might be maimed are barbarism,”—but she wanted Darya to admit to at least something. At one point, she wrote to the Board, “Explain to Saltykova that the testimonies and facts of the case mean that official torture will have to be performed if, frankly, she does not confess her involvement in the crimes. Therefore send her a priest and make him accompany and exhort her for a month. And if she does not repent, then prepare her for torture.” Catherine didn’t really intend for Darya to be tortured, but she hoped the idea of torture would scare her into acknowledging her crimes. “Show her the torture chamber,” Catherine wrote, “so that she will know what awaits her. Give her one last chance for admission and repentance.” At the same time, Catherine was anxiously re-reminding the authorities that no matter what happened, Darya wasn’t to be harmed. Establishing a precedent of torture or executing members of the aristocracy was deeply unpopular and far too risky. “Carefully observe that there be no unnecessary bloodshed,” she wrote, “and all those involved in these crimes be properly questioned, and all the facts be collected and recorded. After that give it all to me.” Darya never confessed to a thing.

“A Completely Godless Soul”

“Here is the decree we give to our Senate,” ran Catherine’s imperial verdict on October 2, 1768. “Having considered the report provided to us by the Senate on the crimes committed by the inhuman widow Darya, the daughter of Nicholas, we have found that she does not deserve to be called a human being, as she is actually worse than the most famous murderers, extremely hard-hearted and cruel, not able to curb her rage.” The decree laid out her punishment: First, Darya would be led to a scaffold in Moscow’s central square, where she would hear the Justice Board’s sentence, which was to be read without ever mentioning Darya’s family name or her husband’s name—erasing her identity as a social human, effectively shattering all the familial ties she had in the world. Then, she would be locked underground for the rest of her life.

During the years of the investigation, Darya had become infamous. Now there were crazed rumors circling around Moscow that she was a cannibal, and people were dying to see this notorious killer in person. Catherine encouraged the spectacle by sending invitations to all the noble houses, demanding that they come and watch Darya’s punishment. This was also a veiled threat: she was warning the nobles that their abuses of power had real consequences. There was an Enlightenment coming, after all. They couldn’t get away with everything anymore.

October 18 was a Sunday, and the season’s first snow fell on Moscow, but that didn’t stop the crowds of people who came to Red Square to gape at the “inhuman widow.” At noon, Darya was brought outside and bound to a pole. A sign hung around her neck: THE TORMENTOR AND THE MURDERER. A guard stood next to her as her sentence was read aloud. One fascinated viewer allegedly reported that Darya’s eyes were “not of this world.” After an hour, she was taken away in shackles.

Darya’s punishment wasn’t bloody, but it was long and horribly isolated. She was put in an underground prison cell called a repentance chamber, accessed only by a nun and a custodian. Not a single beam of light was allowed inside, except for a candle during meals. She sat this way, in total darkness, for eleven years. Aside from eating and drinking, she had only one activity: every Sunday, she was allowed to stand under a ventilation tunnel that led up to a local church, so that she could hear the liturgy.

What did Darya think, Sunday after Sunday, as she heard the priest pray, “Oh holy God, who out of nothing has brought all things into being, who has created man after Thine own image and likeness, and hast adorned him with Thine every gift”? Did Darya feel anything for the bodies she’d broken, created in that “image and likeness”? When the liturgy touched on sin and evil and the need for sanctification, did she think about herself? Or did she simply stand there in the darkness, under the ventilation tunnel, with her mind far away and her otherworldly pupils dilated from lack of light?

Horrible Darya. She had internalized the conditions of serfdom so deeply that perhaps she truly believed she was virtuous in the eyes of God for disposing of these monstrous, unworthy, subhuman souls. Her entire world told her she was superior: she watched the serf orchestras, gasped at the serf ballets; she saw that serfs were punished for even attempting to criticize their masters. Even in her beloved church, she was probably never taught that serfdom was wrong. A pastoral guide published in 1776 “virtually ignored the existence of serfdom.” The historian Richard Pipes spelled it out even more forcefully when speaking of the Russian church: “No branch of Christianity has shown such callous indifference to social and political injustice.” The silence of the priests would have said it all: These serfs are nothing to us. Nothing to God. Nothing.

And so Darya simply carried this mindset to the logical extreme: if the serfs were nothing, if they were lesser life forms than she, if she were the valuable one—upheld by the law, coddled by the church—then she could do whatever she wanted to them. She felt entitled to their work, their blood, and perhaps even their very souls.

But she didn’t kill them all, of course. She wasn’t actually a god. And so, as she wasted away underground, the peasants who survived her took to calling her Saltychikha—a nickname with no real meaning, but a tiny sociolinguistic rebellion nonetheless. Aristocrats never referred to each other with diminutives like that, so the very existence of this nickname indicates that it was given to her by the serfs. “Saltychikha” suggested a simple village woman, someone who was a bit rough around the edges. It would have appalled Darya to hear her noble name so altered. The fact that the nickname stuck—even appearing a century later in the introduction to War and Peace—was a small victory for the souls.

In 1779, Darya was transferred to a chamber carved out of rock with a small barred window. Rumor has it she slept with one of the guards and gave birth to a child, but she would have been almost fifty by that point. Moscow hadn’t forgotten about her—the “monster of humankind,” they called her, the “completely godless soul”—and curious kids would sometimes peek through the window to catch a glimpse of the abominable Saltychikha. When they did, she would growl and spit at them—confirming rumors of her brutality, and convincing everyone that she still hadn’t repented of her crimes. As far as we know, she never did.

She remained imprisoned for a total of thirty-three years, until her death on November 27, 1801. The state councilor visited her once in her old age—curious, perhaps, if nobility could stay noble after decades underground. He noted that Darya had grown stout, and that “all her movements now betrayed that she went mad.” She was her own mistress no longer, after years of stumbling about in the darkness.