On the sexual exploitation of female serfs. Wild landowners

“Serfdom is the best and brightest thing, it is the wisdom of the people and patriotism.”

Is that what Nikita Mikhalkov was saying?

When you read this, you don’t just want to swear, but you have a desire to shoot this scum.

Oh, you brute!

Our people rotted for four centuries in the shame of slavery, washed themselves in their blood - and you, Pharisee, decided to mock people's grief, over his shame and humiliation! You decided to assure us that it was all very good! You, creature, are pouring yourself like a nightingale, proving how wonderful and excellent it was - that ninety percent of the people could be bought and sold like cattle!

And, apparently, you are not against this “grace” returning again. You probably wouldn’t mind receiving two or three thousand serfs like your great-grandfathers, the landowners, and raising them “in a fatherly way” with the help of whips, sticks or your own fist. Well, you would enroll their wives and daughters, whoever is more beautiful, into your personal serf harem, as was customary among the noble landowner class.

By the way, if the landowners whipped and kicked the peasants in the teeth exclusively in a fatherly way, then it would be interesting to know - did they also corrupt and rape their serf concubines “in a fatherly way”?

And having said all this to the scoundrel, we would invite him to read the material that fell into our hands. This is an article about the debauchery of landowners, about their concubines and harems, about their extravagance, extravagance and wastefulness, about their cruelty, about the brutal and sadistic reprisals against their serf slaves, about the constant humiliation in which “baptized property” lived.

When you read this, your eyes darken and your fists clench with anger. And from hatred of this corrupt scoundrel, who is now a hypocrite and sings hymns to serfdom. And most importantly, from the desire for this system to be destroyed, in which the Mikhalkovs have the opportunity to lie and be hypocrites, pleasing the rich, denigrating socialism and glorifying serfdom. And so that all such bourgeois lackeys answer for their meanness!

Fatima Bikmetova

Noble pastimes: hunts, serf harems, serf theater

The entire system of serfdom, the entire system of economic and everyday relationships between masters and peasants and courtyard servants were subordinated to the goal of providing the landowner and his family with the means for a comfortable and convenient life. Even concern for the morality of their slaves was dictated on the part of the nobility by the desire to protect themselves from any surprises that could disrupt the usual routine. Russian soul owners could sincerely regret that serfs cannot be completely deprived of human feelings and turned into soulless and voiceless working machines.

At the same time, the nobles themselves did not at all constrain themselves with moral restrictions. A. V. Nikitenko, a former serf who managed to achieve freedom and make a brilliant government career, very accurately noted this characteristic feature landowner way of life, saying that the Russian “noble” gentlemen, owning hundreds of obedient slaves, were themselves enslaved by their own bad inclinations. Confirming this observation, another contemporary wrote: “What was left to do for the uneducated, financially secure, elevated by law above all other classes, before whom everyone bowed, to whom every movement was warned and to whom every desire was fulfilled - the master? Theatre, club, cards, music, kennels, revelry and tyranny of all kinds should be natural and, indeed, were his only entertainment.”

The Russian nobility presented the world with absolutely fantastic examples of eccentricities, some of which could be considered both funny and very original. But each of them bears the stamp of popular slavery, each of these lordly quirks was possible only thanks to state system, built on slavery, and therefore it seems obvious that the memory of these tyrants cannot cause anything other than shame that all this happened in Russia, and except surprise that this happened over the course of two centuries. But there were before and today in large numbers there are people who consider it possible, on the contrary, to nostalgically admire these “magical eccentricities of serf Russia” - in the words of Baron Nikolai Wrangel, the author of a pre-revolutionary book about Russian estates.

One way or another, these “eccentricities” are unlikely to ever be forgotten, regardless of whether one recognizes them as “magical” or is ashamed of them. And how can we forget the examples of barbaric luxury, when the “most serene” Prince Potemkin gave ladies saucers filled with diamonds for dessert, and Demidov fed almost half the city every day in his Moscow house. Count Razumovsky drove thousands of serfs into the spring thaw only so that they would build a colossal embankment across the river and give the count the opportunity to drive to the other side to listen to the nightingales... The son of a merchant and a successful tax farmer who received the nobility under Catherine, Pyotr Sobakin, collected from his huge in the estate courtyard on Trinity Day, up to ten thousand serfs from the surrounding villages and hamlets - and each of them had to kiss the master’s hand in turn, for which the men were treated to vodka and beer from oversized vats, and the women and girls were presented with money and scarves. To the sounds of the orchestra, a choir of singers (both the orchestra and choir, of course, were “our own”, that is, from Sobakin’s own serfs) sang many years to the owner, and “their” artillery team fired 101 deafening volleys from cannons. The famous rich man, music lover, theatergoer and organizer of luxurious feasts, Alexei Aleksandrovich Pleshcheev, did not lag behind his noble competitors in terms of the ingenuity of his lordly undertakings. His guests will long remember the celebration in honor of the birthday of Alexei Alexandrovich’s wife, née Countess Chernysheva. The guests gathered for a walk were amazed to see how, in a previously treeless place, a branchy green grove grew overnight, as if by magic! But surprise gave way to shock and then delight when the hero of the occasion stepped forward, and the whole grove bowed before her in an instant! It turned out that these were freshly cut branches that were held in front of hundreds of serfs. In the newly opened place, there stood an altar decorated with flowers and arranged according to the Greek model, next to which stood an ancient “goddess” who greeted the birthday girl with solemn verses. After this, both the goddess and the altar disappeared and in their place a luxuriously decorated table appeared, laden with all kinds of drinks and snacks.

I can talk about this holiday for a long time. In addition to being treated to delicious dishes, the feasters were entertained with music, theatrical performances, and magnificent fireworks. But among other things, there was a funny detail - a camera obscura stood in a prominent place, and a brightly dressed young man invited everyone to look into it. Those who agreed saw a small miracle - in the inner space of the chamber there was a beautifully executed portrait of the birthday girl. But the most amazing thing was that live cupids were jumping and circling around him!

In fact, the trick was arranged both intricately and simply at the same time: a circle was drawn in a distant meadow opposite the camera, and peasant children, dressed up as cupids, danced around it all day in the hot sun, and the portrait was placed in the cell itself so that it occupied the space circle. But the craving for original inventions took some landowners much further. Thus, on the estate of a wealthy count, the park was decorated with beautiful statues of ancient gods and goddesses. Once visitors, arriving at an inopportune hour, were surprised to see that all the pedestals were empty. When asked where the statues had gone, the count's butler calmly answered that they were working in the fields - they say, there was not enough labor and labor... Shocked at first by such an answer, the guests realized that it turned out that serfs served as “statues” in the count’s park and women stripped naked and painted white paint, the color of marble. The count himself loved to walk along the alleys, and if one of the “statues” happened to tremble at the same time, immediate retribution awaited him in the stables, under the rods of the coachmen.

Firing cannons, organizing impromptu military parades of their own serfs, driving them in thousands onto the field in front of the estate and forcing them to march in front of the guests, in the manner of regular troops, dressing up peasant women as nymphs and naiads - there were many ideas and entertainments of this kind. But they all retreated before the main passion of the local nobility - hunting.

For wealthy landowners, going to the “departure field” resembled a military campaign both in the number of participants with dogs and horses, and in the strict order within the detachment, and in the deafening sounds of trumpets and horns heard over the surrounding fields, as well as in the devastation that the hunters left after myself. Village priest, who saw the hunting train of the landowner Arapov, could not find any other comparison than to say that his trips to the field - “these were Donskoy’s trips to Mamaia; he himself, how Grand Duke, with a huge army, and appanage hovering around him - small fry, some with one pack, some with two... Next come the huntsmen, two in a row in patent coats and caps, with daggers in their belts and whips, each with a pack in their hands... For The gentlemen themselves followed the huntsmen in the most varied and fantastic costumes: there were Hungarians, Poles, Cossacks, and outfits of peoples who had never existed... Next were simple carts, vans and trucks harnessed to one, two, three horses with a kitchen, drawers , tents... All the horsemen, in all likelihood, were more than a hundred.”

The owner's beloved pack was accommodated with special comfort and care. In general, the passionate love of nobles for their hunting dogs occupies a special place in the life of the serf era. General Lev Izmailov kept about 700 dogs in his kennel in just one estate, near the village of Khitrovshchina. And they lived in immeasurably better conditions than the general's servants. Each dog had a separate room, excellent food and care, while the serfs were crowded together in stinking, cramped rooms, ate stale food and wore clothes worn out from time to time for years, because the master did not order new ones to be issued.

Izmailov once asked the old valet who was serving him at dinner: “Who is better: a dog or a man?” The valet, to his misfortune, replied that one cannot even compare a person with a dumb, unreasonable creature, for which the master, in anger, immediately pierced his hand with a fork, and, turning to the yard boy standing next to him, repeated his question. The boy whispered out of fear that the dog better than man. The softened general awarded him a silver ruble. This yard servant's name was Lev Khoroshevsky, and he was the illegitimate son of Izmailov himself, which both the landowner and everyone in the estate knew very well.

True, one day Izmailov nevertheless somewhat changed his conviction in the superiority of dogs over people, equating them to each other. This happened when he exchanged four greyhounds from his neighbor, the landowner Shebyakin, giving for them the same number of courtyard servants - a coachman, a groom, a valet and a cook.

The big master's departure to hunt was a restless time for the surrounding residents, both peasants and small landowners, those who for some reason did not join the master's retinue. Dashing hunters, enjoying their impunity behind the back of their all-powerful patron, did not stand on ceremony with other people's property. Horsemen trampled fields, destroyed crops, dogs attacked poultry and livestock. Anyone who was nearby could not consider themselves safe. A contemporary who saw such a hunt recalled: “When the hounds and kennels are put in their places, then no longer pass through the field occupied by them and no one will pass - they will flog them with whips... This was no longer a company of noble people, noble hunters, but a raging gang of scoffers and robbers.” .

For successful baiting of an animal, the master could generously reward. But mistakes and blunders were met with immediate punishment. For a lost hare or fox, they flogged them right there in the field, and a rare hunt went without severe punishments - “for the most part, all the servants wiped their eyes with their fists and sighed.”

Animal persecution was not always the main goal of the landowner, who went to the “away field” at the head of his servants and hangers-on. Often the hunt ended with the robbery of passers-by on the roads, the destruction of peasant households or the pogrom of the estates of unwanted neighbors, and violence against their household, including their wives. P. Melnikov-Pechersky, in his essay “Old Years,” cites the story of a servant about his service with one prince:

“Twenty versts from Zaborye, there, beyond the Undolsky pine forest, there is the village of Krutikino. It was in those days of the retired corporal Solonitsyn: due to injury and wounds, that corporal was dismissed from service and lived in his Krutikhin with his young wife, and he took her out of Lithuania, or from Poland... Prince Alexei Yurich liked Solonichikha... We left one day in the summer They hunted the red beast in the Undolsky forest, hunted about a dozen foxes, and made a halt near Krutikhin. They laid out a poisoned animal from toroks in front of Prince Alexei Yuryich, we stand...

And Prince Alexey Yuryich sits, does not look at the red beast, looks at the village of Krutikhin, and, it seems, with his eyes, he wants to eat it. What kind of fox is this, he says, what kind of red beast is this? Just like if someone hunted down a Krutikhinsky fox to me, I wouldn’t even know what I would have given to that person.

I whooped in Krutikino. And there the lady is walking around in the raspberry patch in the garden, playing with the berries. I grabbed the beauty across the belly, threw it over the saddle and back. He galloped up to Prince Alexei Yuryich and laid the little fox at his feet.

“Have fun, your Excellency, but we are not averse to service.” We look, the corporal is galloping; I almost jumped on the prince himself... I can’t really tell you how it happened, but the corporal was gone, and the Lithuanian girl began to live in the outbuilding in Zaborye...”

There were many cases when a noble wife or daughter, who was forcibly taken away from her husband, ended up as a concubine of a large landowner in the era of serfdom. The reason for the very possibility of this state of affairs is precisely explained in her notes by E. Vodovozova. According to her, in Russia the main and almost the only thing that mattered was wealth - “the rich could do anything.”

But it is obvious that if the wives of minor nobles were subjected to gross violence from a more influential neighbor, then peasant girls and women were completely defenseless against the arbitrariness of the landowners. A.P. Zablotsky-Desyatovsky, who, on behalf of the Minister of State Property, collected detailed information about the situation of serfs, noted in his report: “In general, reprehensible connections between landowners and their peasant women are not at all uncommon. In every province, in almost every district, examples will be shown to you... The essence of all these cases is the same: debauchery combined with greater or lesser violence. The details are extremely varied. Another landowner forces him to satisfy his bestial impulses simply by the force of power and, seeing no limit, reaches the point of frenzy, raping young children... another comes to the village temporarily to have fun with his friends and first gives the peasant women drink and then forces him to satisfy both his own bestial passions and his friends.”

The principle that justified the master’s violence against serf women was: “If you have a slave, you must go!” Compulsion to debauchery was so widespread on landowner estates that some researchers were inclined to single out a separate duty from other peasant duties - a kind of “corvee labor for women.”

One memoirist told about a landowner he knew that on his estate he was “a real rooster, and the entire female half - from young to old - were his chickens. It would happen that he would walk through the village late in the evening, stop in front of some hut, look out the window and lightly knock on the glass with his finger - and that very minute the most beautiful of the family would come out to him...”

On other estates, violence was systematically ordered. After finishing work in the field, the master's servant, one of the trusted ones, goes to the courtyard of one or another peasant, depending on the established “queue,” and takes the girl - daughter or daughter-in-law - to the master for the night. Moreover, on the way, he goes into a neighboring hut and announces to the owner there: “Tomorrow go winnow the wheat, and send Arina (wife) to the master”...

V.I. Semevsky wrote that often the entire female population of some estate was forcibly corrupted to satisfy the master’s lust. Some landowners who did not live on their estates, but spent their lives abroad or in the capital, specially came to their estates only for a short time for nefarious purposes. On the day of arrival, the manager had to provide the landowner with a complete list of all the peasant girls who had grown up during the master’s absence, and he took each of them for himself for several days: “... when the list was exhausted, he left for other villages and came again the next year.”

All this was not something exceptional, out of the ordinary, but, on the contrary, was in the nature of an ordinary phenomenon, not at all condemned among the nobility. A.I. Koshelev wrote about his neighbor: “A young landowner S., a passionate hunter of women and especially fresh girls, settled in the village of Smykovo. He did not allow the wedding otherwise than for a personal actual test of the bride’s merits. The parents of one girl did not agree to this condition. He ordered both the girl and her parents to be brought to him; chained the latter to the wall and raped their daughter in front of them. There was a lot of talk about this in the district, but the leader of the nobility did not lose his Olympian calm, and he got away with the matter happily.”

The state authorities and landowners acted and felt like conquerors in a conquered country, given to them “to be poured out and plundered.” Any attempts by peasants to complain about the intolerable oppression by the owners according to the laws Russian Empire were subject to punishment as a riot, and the “rebels” were dealt with in accordance with legal regulations.

Moreover, the view of serfs as powerless slaves turned out to be so strongly rooted in the consciousness of the ruling class and government that any violence against them, including sexual violence, in most cases was not legally considered a crime. For example, the peasants of the landowner Kosheleva repeatedly complained about the estate manager, who not only burdened them with work beyond measure, but also separated them from their wives, “having sexual intercourse with them.” There was no response from government agencies, and the people, driven to despair, “nailed” the manager themselves. And here the authorities reacted instantly! Despite the fact that after an investigation, accusations against the manager of violence against peasant women were confirmed, he did not suffer any punishment and remained in his previous position with complete freedom to act as before. But the peasants who attacked him, defending the honor of their wives, were flogged and imprisoned in a restraining house.

The managers appointed by landowners to their estates turned out to be no less cruel and depraved than the legal owners. Having absolutely no formal obligations to the peasants and not feeling the need to take care of future relations, these gentlemen, also often from among the nobles, only poor or completely without place, received unlimited power over the serfs. To characterize their behavior on the estates, we can cite an excerpt from a letter from a noblewoman to her brother, over whose estate such a manager ruled, although in this case he was a German.

“My most precious brother, revered with all my soul and heart!.. Many of our landowners are very considerable libertines: in addition to their legal wives, they have concubines from serfs, they organize dirty brawls, they often flog their peasants, but they are not angry with them to such an extent, not They corrupt their wives and children to such filth... All your peasants are completely ruined, exhausted, completely tortured and crippled by none other than your manager, the German Karl, nicknamed among us "Karla", who is a fierce beast, a tormentor... This unclean animal has been corrupted all the girls of your villages and demands every pretty bride to come to him for the first night. If the girl herself or her mother or groom do not like this, and they dare to beg him not to touch her, then all of them, according to routine, are punished with a whip, and the girl-bride is put on the neck for a week, or even two, as a hindrance. I'll sleep the slingshot. The slingshot locks, and Karl hides the key in his pocket. The peasant, the young husband, who showed resistance to Karla molesting the girl who had just married him, has a dog chain wrapped around his neck and secured at the gate of the house, the same house in which we, my half-brother and half-brother, were born with you... "

However, the author of this letter, although she speaks impartially about the way of life of Russian landowners, is still inclined to somewhat elevate them in front of the “unclean animal Karla.” A study of the life of the serf era shows that this intention is hardly fair. In the cynical debauchery that the Russian nobles demonstrated towards forced people, it was difficult to compete with them, and any foreigner could only imitate the “natural” masters.

So, after spending several years in revelry and all kinds of pleasures, one guards officer K. suddenly discovered that out of his once considerable fortune, he had only one village left, inhabited by several dozen peasant “souls”. This unpleasant discovery had such an impact on the officer and his lifestyle that his former friends could not recognize the former reveler and drinking companion. He began to avoid noisy gatherings and sat for long hours at the table in his office, sorting out some papers. He disappeared one day from St. Petersburg, and only later it turned out that he went to his estate and spent a lot of time there.

Everyone decided that the glorious guardsman had decided to turn into a provincial landowner and take up agriculture. However, it soon became known that K. had sold the entire male population of the estate - some to be taken to neighbors, others to become recruits. Only women remained in the village, and K.’s friends were completely unclear how he was going to run the household with such strength. They did not give him any questions and finally forced him to tell them his plan. The guardsman said to his friends: “As you know, I sold the men from my village, only women and pretty girls remained there. I’m only 25 years old, I’m very strong, I’m going there as if to a harem, and I’ll start populating my land...

In just ten years I'll be true father several hundred of my serfs, and in fifteen I’ll put them on sale. No horse breeding will give such an accurate and sure profit.”

If we treat this story as an anecdote, although based on real events, then in any case, Russian soul owners had many opportunities to make money from corrupting their serfs, and they used them with success. Some released the “girls” on rent in the cities, knowing full well that they would engage in prostitution there, and even deliberately sending them by force to brothel houses. Others acted less rudely and sometimes with greater benefit for themselves. The Frenchman Charles Masson says in his notes: “One St. Petersburg widow, Madame Pozdnyakova, had an estate with quite a large number of souls not far from the capital. Every year, on her orders, the most beautiful and slender girls who had reached ten to twelve years of age were brought from there. They were brought up in her house under the supervision of a special governess and were taught useful and pleasant arts. They were simultaneously taught dancing, music, sewing, embroidery, combing, etc., so that her house, always filled with a dozen young girls, seemed like a boarding house for well-bred girls. At the age of fifteen, she sold them: the most dexterous ones ended up as maids for ladies, the most beautiful ones - as mistresses for secular libertines. And since she took up to 500 rubles apiece, this gave her a certain annual income.”

Baron N.E. Wrangel recalled his neighbor on the estate, Count Vizanur, who led a completely exotic lifestyle. His father was a Hindu or Afghan and ended up in Russia as part of his country's embassy during the reign of Catherine II. Here this ambassador died, and his son, for some reason, stayed in St. Petersburg and was surrounded by the favorable attention of the government. He was sent to study in the cadet corps, and upon graduation, he was endowed with estates and elevated to the dignity of a count of the Russian Empire.

On Russian soil the newly-minted count had no intention of abandoning the customs of his homeland, especially since no one thought of forcing him to do so. He did not build a large manor house on his estate, but instead built several small cozy houses, all in different styles, mostly oriental - Turkish, Indian, Chinese. In them he settled peasant girls forcibly taken from families, dressed up in accordance with the style of the house in which they lived - Chinese, Indian and Turkish girls, respectively. Having arranged his harem in this way, the count enjoyed life by “traveling” - that is, visiting alternately with some concubines and then with others. Wrangel recalled that he was middle-aged, ugly, but amiable and excellent well-mannered person. When visiting his Russian slaves, he also dressed, as a rule, in an outfit corresponding to the style of the house - either a Chinese mandarin or a Turkish pasha.

But it was not only people from Asian countries who started serf harems on their estates - they had a lot to learn in this sense from Russian landowners, who approached the matter without unnecessary exoticism, practically. A harem of serf “girls” in a noble estate of the 18th-19th centuries is as integral a sign of “noble” life as hound hunting or a club.

In the original author’s version of the story “Dubrovsky,” which was not passed by the imperial censor and is still little known, Pushkin wrote about the habits of his Kirill Petrovich Troekurov: “A rare girl from the courtyard avoided the voluptuous attempts of a fifty-year-old man. Moreover, sixteen maids lived in one of the outbuildings of his house... The windows in the outbuilding were blocked by bars, the doors were locked with locks, the keys to which were kept by Kirill Petrovich. The young hermits went to the garden at the appointed hours and walked under the supervision of two old women. From time to time, Kirill Petrovich gave some of them in marriage, and new ones took their place...” (Semevsky V.I. Peasant question in the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries. T. 2. St. Petersburg, 1888, p. 258 .)

Big and small Troekurovs inhabited noble estates, caroused, raped and hurried to satisfy their every whim, without thinking at all about those whose destinies they ruined. One of these countless types is the Ryazan landowner Prince Gagarin, about whom the leader of the nobility himself said in his report that the prince’s lifestyle consists “solely in hound hunting, with which he, with his friends, travels through the fields and forests day and night and places all his happiness and well-being in it.” At the same time, Gagarin’s serf peasants were the poorest in the entire district, since the prince forced them to work on the master’s arable land all days of the week, including holidays and even Holy Easter, but without transferring them to the month. But, as if from a cornucopia, corporal punishment rained down on the peasants’ backs, and the prince himself personally dealt blows with a whip, whip, arapnik or fist - whatever happened.

Gagarin also started his own harem: “In his house there are two gypsies and seven girls; he corrupted the latter without their consent, and lives with them; the first were obliged to teach the girls dance and songs. When visiting guests, they form a choir and amuse those present. Prince Gagarin treats the girls just as cruelly as he treats others, often punishing them with an arapnik. Out of jealousy, so that they would not see anyone, he locks them in a special room; I once spanked a girl because she was looking out the window.” It is noteworthy that the nobles of the district, Gagarin’s landowner neighbors, spoke of him in highest degree positively. As one declared that the prince not only “has not been noticed in actions contrary to noble honor,” but, moreover, leads his life and manages his estate “in accordance with other noble nobles”! The last statement, in essence, was absolutely correct.

Unlike the whims of the exotic Count Vizanur, the harem of an ordinary landowner was devoid of any theatricality or costume, since it was intended, as a rule, to satisfy the very specific needs of the master. Gagarin, in general, is still too “artistic” - he teaches his unwitting concubines singing and music with the help of hired gypsies. The life of the other owner, Pyotr Alekseevich Koshkarov, is completely different.

He was an elderly, fairly wealthy landowner, about seventy years old. Y. Neverov recalled: “The life of the female servants in his house had a purely harem structure... If in any family the daughter was distinguished by her beautiful appearance, then she was taken into the master’s harem.”

About 15 young girls made up Koshkarov’s female oprichnina. They served him at table, accompanied him to bed, and kept watch at his bedside at night. This duty had a peculiar character: after dinner, one of the girls loudly announced to the whole house that “the master wants to rest.” This was a signal for all the household to go to their rooms, and the living room turned into Koshkarov’s bedroom. A wooden bed for the master and mattresses for his “odalisques” were brought there, placing them around the master’s bed. The master himself was doing evening prayer at this time. The girl, whose turn it was then, undressed the old man and put him to bed. However, what happened next was completely innocent, but was explained solely by the old age of the owner - the attendant sat on a chair next to the master’s headboard and had to tell fairy tales until the master fell asleep, while she herself was not allowed to sleep the whole night no matter what! In the morning she rose from her seat, opened the doors of the living room, locked at night, and announced, also to the whole house: “The master ordered the shutters to be opened!” After that, she retired to sleep, and the new attendant who took her place lifted the master from the bed and dressed him.

With all this, the life of the old tyrant is still not without a certain amount of perverted eroticism. Neverov writes: “Once a week Koshkarov went to the bathhouse, and all the inhabitants of his harem had to accompany him there, and often those of them who had not yet had time, due to their recent presence in this environment, to assimilate all her views, tried in the bathhouse to hide out of modesty - they returned from there beaten.”

The beatings were given to the Koshkari "oprichnitsa" just like that, especially in the mornings, between waking up and before drinking tea with the invariable pipe of tobacco, when the elderly master was most often in a bad mood. Neverov emphasizes that it was the girls from the nearby servants who were most often punished in Koshkarov’s house, and there were significantly fewer punishments for the men of the courtyard: “Poor girls especially got it. If there were no executions with rods, then many received slaps in the face, and loud abuse was heard all morning, sometimes without any reason.”

This is how the depraved landowner spent the days of his powerless old age. But one can imagine what orgies his young years were filled with - and masters like him, who had complete control over the destinies and bodies of serf slaves.

From childhood, the future master, observing the lifestyle of his parents, relatives and neighbors, grew up in an atmosphere of such perverted relationships that their depravity was no longer fully realized by their participants. The anonymous author of notes from the life of a landowner recalled: “After dinner, all the gentlemen will go to bed. All the time while they sleep, the girls stand by the beds and brush away flies with green branches, standing and not moving from their place... For boys-children: one girl brushed away flies with a branch, another told fairy tales, the third stroked their heels. It’s amazing how widespread this was - both fairy tales and heels - and passed on from century to century!

When the barchuks grew up, they were assigned only storytellers. A girl sits on the edge of the bed and says: I-va-n tsa-re-vich... And the barchuk lies and does tricks with her... Finally, the young master began to sniffle. The girl stopped talking and quietly stood up. Barchuk will jump up and bang in the face!.. “Do you think I fell asleep?” “The girl, in tears, will chant again: I-va-n tsa-re-vich...”

Another author, A. Panaeva, left only a brief sketch of just a few types of “ordinary” nobles and their everyday life, but this is quite enough to imagine the environment in which the little barchuk grew up and which formed the child’s personality in such a way as to turn him into another Koshkarov.

Close and distant relatives gathered at the noble estate mentioned in the previous chapter to divide the property after the deceased landowner. The boy's uncle arrived. This an old man having significant social weight and influence. He is a bachelor, but maintains a large harem; built a two-story building on his estate stone house, where he placed the serf girls. He did not hesitate to come to the division with some of them; they accompany him day and night. It doesn’t even occur to anyone around you to be embarrassed by this circumstance; it seems natural and normal to everyone. True, in a few years the government will still be forced to take custody of this respected man’s estate, as stated in the official definition: “for outrageous acts of a flagrantly immoral nature”...

And here younger brother libertine, he is the boy's father. Panaeva says about him that he is “good-natured,” and this is probably true. His wife, the boy's mother, is a respectable woman, a good housewife. She brought with her several courtyard “girls” for services. But not a day passed without her, in front of her son, beating and pinching them for any mistake. This lady wanted to see her child as a hussar officer and, in order to accustom him to the necessary bearing, every morning for a quarter of an hour she put him in a specially constructed wooden form, forcing him to stand at attention without moving. Then the boy “out of boredom amused himself by spitting in the face and biting the hands of the courtyard girl, who was obliged to hold his hands,” writes Panaeva, who observed these scenes.

In order to develop team skills in the boy, the mother herded peasant children onto the lawn, and the barchuk mercilessly beat those who marched poorly in front of him with a long rod. How common the picture described was is confirmed by many eyewitness accounts and even unwitting participants. The serf F. Bobkov recalled the entertainment of the gentlemen when they came to the estate: “I remember how the lady, sitting on the windowsill, smoked a pipe and laughed, looking at the game of her son, who made horses out of us and urged us on with a whip...”.

This rather “innocent” at first glance lordly amusement actually carried in itself important inoculating a noble child with certain social skills and behavioral stereotypes in relation to the surrounding slaves.

The moral savagery of Russian landowners reached an extreme degree. In the manor house, among the courtyard people, no different from the servants, lived the illegitimate children of the owner or his guests and relatives, who left such a “memory” after their visit. The nobles did not find anything strange in the fact that their own, albeit illegitimate, nephews and nieces, cousins, were in the position of slaves, doing the most menial work, being subjected to cruel punishments, and on occasion they were sold to the side.

General Izmailov organized colossal drinking parties for the nobles of the entire district, to which he brought peasant girls and women belonging to him to entertain the guests. The general's servants traveled around the villages and forcibly took women directly from their homes. Once, having started such a “game” in his village of Zhmurovo, it seemed to Izmailov that not enough “girls” had been brought, and he sent carts for replenishment to the neighboring village. But the peasants there unexpectedly showed resistance - they did not give up their women and, in addition, in the dark they beat the Izmailovo “oprichnik” - Guska.

The enraged general, without delaying revenge until the morning, at night, at the head of his servants and hangers-on, raided the rebellious village. Having scattered the peasants' huts over logs and started a fire, the landowner went to a distant mowing, where most of the village's population spent the night. There, unsuspecting people were tied up and crossed.

When welcoming guests at his estate, the general, in his own way understanding the duties of a hospitable host, certainly provided each of them with a courtyard girl for the night for “whimsical connections,” as it is delicately stated in the investigation materials. By order of the landowner, very young girls of twelve to thirteen years old were given over to the most important visitors to the general's house for molestation.

In Izmailov’s main residence, the village of Khitrovshchina, next to the manor house there were two outbuildings. One of them housed the patrimonial office and the prisoner's office, the other housed the landowner's harem. The rooms in this building had access to the street only through the premises occupied by the landowner himself. There were iron bars on the windows.

The number of Izmailov’s concubines was constant and, at his whim, was always thirty, although the composition itself was constantly updated. Girls of 10-12 years old were often recruited into the harem and grew up for some time before the eyes of the master. Subsequently, the fate of all of them was more or less the same - Lyubov Kamenskaya became a concubine at the age of 13, Akulina Gorokhova at 14, Avdotya Chernyshova at 16.

One of the general’s recluses, Afrosinya Khomyakova, taken to the manor house at the age of thirteen, told how two lackeys in broad daylight took her from the rooms where she served Izmailov’s daughters, and almost dragged her to the general, covering her mouth and beating her along the way. so as not to resist. From that time on, the girl was Izmailov’s concubine for several years. But when she dared to ask permission to see her relatives, she was punished for such “insolence” with fifty lashes.

The maintenance of the inhabitants of the general's harem was extremely strict. For a walk, they were given the opportunity only for a short time and under watchful supervision to go into the garden adjacent to the outbuilding, never leaving its territory. If it happened to accompany their master on trips, then the girls were transported in tightly closed vans. They did not have the right to see even their parents, and all peasants and servants in general were strictly forbidden to pass near the harem building. Those who not only dared to pass under the windows of the slaves, but also simply bow to them from afar, were severely punished.

The life of the general's estate is not just strict and morally corrupt - it is defiantly, militantly depraved. The landowner takes advantage of the physical availability of forced women, but first of all tries to corrupt them internally, trample and destroy spiritual barriers, and does this with demonic persistence. Taking two peasant women—his own sisters—into his harem, Izmailov forces them together, in front of each other, to “endure their shame.” And he punishes his concubines not for actual misconduct, not even for resistance to his advances, but for attempts to resist spiritual violence. He personally beats Avdotya Konopleva for “reluctance to go to the master’s table when the master was speaking obscene speeches here.” Olga Shelupenkova was also pulled by the hair because she did not want to listen to the master’s “indecent speeches.” And Marya Khomyakova was flogged only because she “blushed from the master’s shameful words”...

Izmailov subjected his concubines to more serious punishments. They were brutally flogged with a whip, a slingshot was placed around their necks, they were sent to hard labor, and so on. He molested Nymphodora Khoroshevskaya, or, as Izmailov called her, Nymph, when she was less than 14 years old. Moreover, having become angry for something, he subjected the girl to a whole series of cruel punishments: “... first they flogged her with a whip, then with a whip, and over the course of two days they flogged her seven times. After these punishments, she was still in the locked harem of the estate for three months and during all this time she was the master’s concubine...” Finally, half of her head was shaved and she was sent to a potash factory, where she spent seven years in hard labor.

But the investigators discovered a circumstance that completely shocked them: Nymphodora was born while her mother herself was a concubine and kept locked up in the general’s harem. Thus, this unfortunate girl also turns out to be Izmailov’s illegitimate daughter! And her brother, also the illegitimate son of a general, Lev Khoroshevsky, served in the “Cossacks” in the master’s household.

How many children Izmailov actually had has not been established. Some of them immediately after birth were lost among the faceless servants. In other cases, a woman pregnant by a landowner was given in marriage to some peasant.

Since the second half of the 18th century, theater has become one of the most widespread entertainments of noble society. Having begun as fun, very soon the passion for theatrical performances takes on the character of a real passion. However, as in all noble life of the era of serfdom, here too the concept of property, the definition of “one’s own” is of decisive importance.

A home theater was started so that it served primarily as entertainment for the owner himself. Some were looking for honor, others wanted to amaze guests with generous meals and rich decorations, a large troupe, and some owners satisfied an unrealized desire for literary fame. Others were simply fooling around for the amusement of themselves and everyone else.

Here is a description of one such theatergoer:

“Field Marshal Count Kamensky personally sold tickets for the performances of his theater, without entrusting this responsible matter to anyone and keeping strict records of income to the box office, as well as the names of those to whom the tickets were donated.”

“In the theater hall, whips hung on the wall of the personal box of the eccentric Count Kamensky. During the performance, Kamensky wrote down the mistakes he noted that were made by the performers, and during the intermission he went backstage, taking with him one of the whips. The reprisal against the perpetrators took place right there, immediately, and the cries of the flogged artists were heard by the spectators, who were greatly amused by this additional entertainment.”

Prince N. G. Shakhovskoy is even more inventive in his measures of physical influence on his artists. They are flogged with rods, flogged with whips, their necks are locked in a slingshot, or they are put on a chair secured in the wall with an iron chain, and a collar is put on their necks, forcing them to sit like that for several days with almost no movement, without food or sleep. The gentleman does not like the performance of the main character, and without hesitation, right in his dressing gown and nightcap, jumps out from behind the scenes and hits the woman backhand in the face with a hysterical triumphant cry: “I told you I would catch you at this! After the performance, go to the stables for your well-deserved reward.” And the actress, wincing for a moment, immediately takes on her former proud appearance, required by the role, and continues the game...

Another gentleman is equally emotional - the Penza “theater” Gladkov-Buyanov. Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky had the opportunity to become acquainted with his creative activity, and wrote about it unforgettable experience a few lines in my diary. Gladkov, according to him, takes out his unsuccessful hunts on the actors and beats them to death. “While some hero in the person of the serf Grishka roared at one of his subjects, Gladkov, without any hesitation, spewed thunder at this hero. “Fool, brute,” curses rushed from the audience at the actors.” And after that, the temperamental landowner could not stand it, ran up to the stage and carried out manual punishment there.

Another gentleman enters backstage during the intermission and makes a remark in a delicate, fatherly tone: “You, Sasha, did not quite deftly carry out your role: the countess should behave with great dignity.” And the 15-20 minutes of intermission were dear to Sasha, the memoirist writes, “the coachman flogged her with all his dignity. Then the same Sasha had to either play in vaudeville or dance in ballet.”

Rods, slaps, kicks, slingshots and iron collars - these are the usual measures of punishment and at the same time means for nurturing talents in the noble landowner theaters. The life of serf artists there was not much different from the situation of animated dolls.

An eyewitness to the life of serf owners and their serf “dolls” wrote in bitter surprise:

“No matter how hard you try, you just can’t imagine that people, and even girls, after the rods, and even the coachman’s rods, forgetting both pain and shame, could instantly either turn into important countesses, or jump and laugh with all their hearts , be nice, fly in the ballet, but meanwhile they had to do and did, because they learned from experience that if they don’t immediately spin from under the rods, have fun, laugh, jump, then they’ll be coachmen again... They know from bitter experience that for the slightest sign of coercion they will be flogged again and flogged terribly. It is impossible to clearly imagine such a situation, but nevertheless all this happened... Just as organ grinders make dogs dance with sticks and whips, so landowners used rods and whips to make people laugh and dance...”

Physical punishment did not exhaust the circle of humiliation and torment of serf artists.

De Passenance describes the life of a Russian theater landowner as follows: “His cooks, his lackeys, grooms became musicians when necessary... his maids and maids became actresses. They are at the same time his concubines, wet nurses and nannies of the children born to them from the master...”

Serf actresses are almost always the unwitting mistresses of their master. In fact, this is another harem, only public, a source of obvious pride for the owner. The good-natured owner “treats” his friends with actresses. In a house where a home theater is set up, the performance often ends with a feast, and the feast ends with an orgy. Prince Shalikov prefaces his enthusiastic description of one estate, “Buda”, in Little Russia with the following exclamation: “Those who are bored with life and do not know how to enjoy the benefits of fortune, go to “Buda”!” The owner of the estate, it seems, was really not used to being stingy and understood a lot about entertainment: musical concerts, theatrical performances, fireworks, gypsy dances, dancers in the light of sparklers - all this abundance of entertainment was offered completely disinterestedly welcome guests. In addition, an ingenious labyrinth was built in the estate, leading into the depths of the garden, where the “island of love”, accessible only to selected visitors, was hidden, inhabited by “nymphs” and “naiads”, and the way to which was indicated by charming “cupids”. These were all actresses who had recently entertained the landowner’s guests with performances and dances, and who were now forced by the will of the master to lavish their affections on his friends. Their children acted as “cupids”.

“Praskovya Ivanovna Kovalevskaya was taken from a kind and honest family who lived in our house from time immemorial,” Count N.P. Sheremetev tells in such a solemn tone in his “Testamentary Letter to his Son” about the history of his passion for the serf actress Parasha. People have not tired of being touched by the story of this love for the past two centuries, and yet there is little attractive in it if you look at it without excessive sentimentality.

Count Nikolai Sheremetev, owner of 140,000 serfs and vast estates, is as rich as a crowned monarch.

One of the count’s favorite pastimes is his theater, or rather, three home theaters that he inherited from his father, Count Pyotr Borisovich Sheremetev, who was also no stranger to the love of beauty. The most favorite of them is in the village of Kuskovo. Despite the fame of the best home theater and the visits of crowned guests, life there is not too sweet for actors and musicians. It was the dancers, or “dancing women,” as they were usually designated in the troupe’s lists, who had the hardest time. They were valued less than others, the cramped room in which they lived was even heated rarely and sparingly, usually by special order and in the event of illness of one of them.

In a better position were the “comedians” – the actual prima dancers of the count’s troupe. They were fed with exquisite dishes, dressed in “lordly” clothes, special teachers taught them French, good manners, and necessary knowledge from the field of literature, art, history. But at the same time, they were all concubines of the bored Count Nikolai Petrovich, who behaved with them exactly like a sultan in his harem. Sheremetev had a playful amusement - leaving a silk handkerchief in the room of the next chosen one - this was a sign that this time it was she who would receive the favor of the master. And sure enough, by nightfall his Excellency appeared for his scarf, and remained there until the morning.

Against this background, the following enthusiastic review of one art historian about the Count’s unexpectedly flared passion for P. Kovaleva sounds not only ambiguous, but simply ridiculous: “The Count fell in love with Parasha, finding in her the “one” in search of which he wasted himself so much”... And Indeed, Nikolai Petrovich did not take care of himself in the ways of serving his pleasures. He did not even take care of the honor of his slave actresses, destroying their destinies and without even thinking about it. And if Parasha Kovaleva could consider herself rewarded for her humiliation with an unexpected marriage to a master, then the rest of the girls, like her, forcibly taken “from good and honest families,” faced oblivion or impoverished old age as hangers-on in the back rooms. When the master got bored with their beauty, he exiled them to the backyard of his magnificent house to eat scraps or married them “with a body” to the first man he came across, who hated the freeloader born under his roof and gloomily beat the unfortunate wife, guilty only of the fact that She lived her entire youth “dishonestly,” playing in the master’s “kiyatra,” serving the master’s amusement, and did not learn how to milk a cow, spin and weave.”

About what existed in Russia serfdom, everyone knows. But today almost no one knows what it really was.
The entire system of serfdom, the entire system of economic and everyday relationships between masters and peasants and courtyard servants were subordinated to the goal of providing the landowner and his family with the means for a comfortable and convenient life. Even concern for the morality of their slaves was dictated on the part of the nobility by the desire to protect themselves from any surprises that could disrupt the usual routine. Russian soul owners could sincerely regret that serfs cannot be completely deprived of human feelings and turned into soulless and voiceless working machines.

In the era of serfdom, there were many cases when a large landowner had a noble wife or daughter forcibly taken away from her husband as a concubine. The reason for the very possibility of this state of affairs is precisely explained in her notes by E. Vodovozova. According to her, in Russia the main and almost only importance was wealth - “everything was possible for the rich.”

“In general, reprehensible connections between landowners and their peasant women are not at all uncommon. In every province, in almost every district, examples will be shown to you... The essence of all these cases is the same: debauchery combined with greater or lesser violence. The details are extremely varied. Another landowner forces him to satisfy his bestial urges simply by the force of power, and seeing no limit, he goes into a frenzy, raping young children... another comes to the village temporarily to have fun with his friends, and first gives the peasant women drink and then forces him to satisfy both his own bestial passions and his friends.” .

The principle that justified the master's violence against serf women was:

“You must go if you have a slave!”

Compulsion to debauchery was so widespread on landowner estates that some researchers were inclined to single out a separate duty from other peasant duties - a kind of “corvée for women.”

The violence was systematically ordered. After finishing work in the field, the master's servant, one of the trusted ones, goes to the courtyard of one or another peasant, depending on the established "queue", and takes the girl - daughter or daughter-in-law - to the master for the night. Moreover, on the way he goes into a neighboring hut and announces to the owner there:

“Tomorrow go winnow the wheat, and send Arina (wife) to the master”...

IN AND. Semevsky wrote that often the entire female population of some estate was forcibly corrupted to satisfy the master's lust. Some landowners who did not live on their estates, but spent their lives abroad or in the capital, specially came to their estates only for a short time for nefarious purposes. On the day of arrival, the manager had to provide the landowner with a complete list of all the peasant girls who had grown up during the master’s absence, and he took each of them for himself for several days:

“When the list was exhausted, he left for other villages, and came again the next year.”

A.I. Koshelev wrote about his neighbor:

“A young landowner S., a passionate hunter of women and especially fresh girls, settled in the village of Smykovo. He did not allow the wedding otherwise than for a personal actual test of the bride’s merits. The parents of one girl did not agree to this condition. He ordered both the girl and her parents to be brought to him; chained the latter to the wall and raped their daughter in front of them. There was a lot of talk about this in the district, but the leader of the nobility did not lose his Olympian calm, and he got away with the matter happily.”

It is noteworthy that in the original author’s version of the story “Dubrovsky,” which was not passed by the imperial censor and is still little known, Pushkin wrote about the habits of his Kirill Petrovich Troekurov:

“It was a rare girl from the courtyard who escaped the voluptuous attempts of a fifty-year-old man. Moreover, sixteen maids lived in one of the outbuildings of his house... The windows in the outbuilding were blocked by bars, the doors were locked with locks, the keys to which were kept by Kirill Petrovich. The young hermits went to the garden at the appointed hours and walked under the supervision of two old women. From time to time, Kirill Petrovich married off some of them, and new ones took their place..."

Gagarin started his own harem:

“In his house there are two gypsies and seven girls; he corrupted the latter without their consent, and lives with them; the first were obliged to teach the girls dance and songs. When visiting guests, they form a choir and amuse those present. Prince Gagarin treats the girls just as cruelly as he treats others, often punishing them with an arapnik. Out of jealousy, so that they would not see anyone, he locks them in a special room; I once spanked a girl because she was looking out the window.”

It gives an idea and description of life on the estate of General Lev Izmailov about the morals of the landowners.

Information about the unfortunate situation of the general's servants was preserved thanks to the documents of the criminal investigation launched on Izmailov's estate after cases of violence and debauchery that were occurring there, somewhat unusual even for that time, became known.

Izmailov arranged colossal drinking parties for the nobles of the entire district, to which he brought peasant girls and women belonging to him to entertain the guests. The general's servants traveled around the villages and forcibly took women directly from their homes. Once, having started such a “game” in his village of Zhmurovo, it seemed to Izmailov that not enough “girls” had been brought, and he sent carts for replenishment to the neighboring village. But the peasants there unexpectedly put up resistance - they did not give up their women and, in addition, in the dark they beat the Izmailovo “oprichnik” - Guska.

The enraged general, without delaying revenge until the morning, at night, at the head of his servants and hangers-on, raided the rebellious village. Having scattered the peasants' huts over logs and started a fire, the landowner went to the distant mowing, where most of the village's population spent the night. There, unsuspecting people were tied up and crossed.

The number of Izmailov’s concubines was constant and, at his whim, was always thirty, although the composition itself was constantly updated. Girls 10–12 years old were often recruited into the harem and grew up for some time before the eyes of the master. Subsequently, the fate of all of them was more or less the same - Lyubov Kamenskaya became a concubine at the age of 13, Akulina Gorokhova at 14, Avdotya Chernyshova at the age of 16.

One of the general’s hermits, Afrosinya Khomyakova, taken to the manor’s house at the age of thirteen, told how two lackeys in broad daylight took her from the rooms where she served Izmailov’s daughters, and almost dragged her to the general, covering her mouth and beating her along the way. so as not to resist. From that time on, the girl was Izmailov’s concubine for several years. But when she dared to ask permission to see her relatives, she was punished for such “insolence” with fifty lashes.

He molested Nymphodora Khoroshevskaya, or, as Izmailov called her, Nymph, when she was less than 14 years old. Moreover, being angry for something, he subjected the girl to a number of cruel punishments:

“First they flogged her with a whip, then with a whip, and over the course of two days they flogged her seven times. After these punishments, she was still in the locked harem of the estate for three months, and during all this time she was the master’s concubine...”

Finally, half of her head was shaved and she was sent to a potash factory, where she spent seven years in hard labor.

But investigators discovered a circumstance that completely shocked them: Nymphodora was born while her mother herself was a concubine and kept locked up in the general’s harem. Thus, this unfortunate girl also turns out to be Izmailov’s illegitimate daughter! And her brother, also the illegitimate son of a general, Lev Khoroshevsky, served in the “Cossacks” in the master’s household.

How many children Izmailov actually had has not been established. Some of them immediately after birth were lost among the faceless servants. In other cases, a woman pregnant with the landowner's child was given in marriage to some peasant

VIRTUALITY

Serf girl.
This story happened when serfdom existed in Rus'. This right belonged to people who were awarded the title of nobleman from the day of their birth. This group of people, on whom the king’s power rested, enjoyed his special honors, including the right to dispose of the lives of their subjects, who were given over to his power for life.

But my story will be about an honest and free man named Ivan Zakharov. Ivan came to the big city as a poor man. Unlike other people of his level, who, having caught fire, immediately go out, had an iron character and perseverance. Having become an apprentice to a jeweler, he worked with great diligence. The owner noticed him and made him a master. Ivan increased his diligence and tried to adopt the techniques of his craft everywhere. Then he began to come up with more skillful techniques himself, and independently began to make many discoveries in the art of jewelry.

He worked hard and tirelessly. Until late at night, the light from the lamp burned in the window of his workshop. Ivan diligently hammered, sharpened, filed, cut, bent, turned, soldered.
Need gave birth to work. Labor gave rise to high diligence. Diligence created wealth.
He built his own house. He set up a workshop and a small store in the house, where he began selling his wonderful products. Many townspeople became its frequent visitors and customers.

Despite the temptations of the big city, our Ivan lived modestly. Even in the blooming time of his youth, he never succumbed to the temptations of life that was seething around him.
Ivan was a simple man with the most ingenuous concepts. He was afraid of God, then of thieves, of nobles of every level, but most of all he was afraid of all sorts of troubles and worries.
Over time, he learned to go his own way. Don't run about other people's business. Don't lend your clothes yourself, and don't lend money to your neighbor.

Keep your ears open, don't let yourself be fooled, don't talk about what you're doing. There's no point in even throwing out the water. Don’t be forgetful, don’t trust anyone with your worries or your wallet.

All these simple everyday rules allowed him to trade to his advantage, which he did without offending anyone.

People said about him that Ivan was created as if with one blow, hewn from one piece. Such people are always superior to those they were created several times.
That’s how virtuous Ivan Zakharov was. Why did our master remain as lonely as a finger, when his natural properties could be appreciated by everyone?

If you begin to criticize our hero, the question arises: do you know what love is? I'm afraid you don't know completely...
A lover is supposed to go somewhere, return from somewhere, listen, lie in wait, be silent, speak. Then shrink, then turn around. It grows, it shrinks. To please, to strum some instrument, to repent, to trudge to distant lands.

Go out of your way to get bird's milk, caress her cat or dog, be friends with her friends. Find out what her family likes, don’t step on anyone’s feet, don’t break dishes. Take the moon out of the sky, pour it from empty to empty. Talk nonsense, jump into fire and water. Admire the outfits of your beloved, and repeat this a thousand times. Dress up like a peacock yourself. Make jokes aptly, sharply. Overcome suffering with laughter. Curb your temper.

Walk from morning to night with a sweet smile. But it is known that it is difficult to please nice people - they wag their tail and say goodbye, even without explaining the reasons! She herself doesn’t really know the reasons, but she demands from her lover that he knows!

Some men in such circumstances become gloomy, angry, go crazy, and do all sorts of stupid things. This is what distinguishes a man, for example, from a dog. This explains that dogs have no soul. Do not want? – she sniffed it one last time and ran on.
A lover must be a jack of all trades: he is a magician and a warrior, a king, a slacker, a simpleton reveler, a liar, a braggart, an informer, a windbag, a heir, a red tape, a spendthrift, a fool, a holy fool.

After listening to all this, a prudent person will neglect love. And indeed. Indulging in this activity, self-respecting men, first of all, are forced to spend: time, life, blood, cherished words, not counting the heart, soul, brain. It is precisely these human qualities that beauties crave beyond measure. Chatting nicely among themselves, they say to each other: “If a man didn’t give me everything he has, then he didn’t give me anything!” And some, frowning their brows, are still not happy that the man is hurting himself for her sake: “What nonsense, he’s trying hard!”

And respected Ivan Zakharov, you know, melted silver and gold. Looking at the bustle around him, he could not ignite the fantastic patterns of love in his heart, so as to decorate it, be reflected in it, play out in intricate inventions. Everything was explained simply; nowhere did he find a living model for this mystery of the soul.

You understand that in no country do virgins fall out of the blue into the arms of a man, just as fried chicken does not fall from the sky. So our goldsmith remained chaste.

It cannot be said that Ivan Zakharov was colder than ice, no, that's not true. He could not see the delights that nature generously bestowed on some of his customers. But, having listened to their amusing chatter, behind which sly thoughts were hidden, he understood that by flirting with him, they were simply trying to achieve a reduction in the price of jewelry.

But still. The beauties achieved their goal, but in a completely different area - he walked home after work, dreamy like a poet, yearning like a cuckoo without a nest. In these dreams, a kind and hardworking wife already appeared. And approaching his house, he already mentally had a dozen children from this imaginary wife.

He embodied his yearning dreams in beautiful trinkets, and the delighted buyers did not know how many wives and children were hidden in these beautiful little things!
So our talented jeweler would have passed into another world as a bachelor, but in the forty-first year of his life this is what happened! One fine day, our hero was walking outside the city. Unbeknownst to himself, he entered the field owned by the nobleman Prince K.

In the middle of the meadow, he met a young girl dragging a little cow behind her. Passing by the jeweler, the girl bowed warmly to him, smiled and said, “Good day, my lord!”

Either the innocent beauty of a pretty girl’s face, or a friendly voice, or maybe thoughts about marriage that haunted him, but Ivan fell in love instantly and passionately.
- Dear girl, you must be poor if you don’t know rest from work on Sunday?
- I am the prince’s serf girl. Out of his kindness, he allows our cow to graze in his meadow, but after lunch.
- Is your cow so dear to you?
- Yes, my lord, she is the nurse and drinker of my entire family.
- Such a beauty and alone in the field?! There are probably a lot of willing young men out there to win your heart?
- No, that's not true at all. Everyone knows that I am a serf girl. If someone marries me, he automatically becomes the prince's serf. It’s especially offensive that when the prince pleases, I will be married to the same serf man.

Talking so leisurely, they walked to the girl’s house. The jeweler admired the girl’s beautiful face and her slender figure. Although he was a virgin with a pure heart and thoughts, he could not bring himself not to guess the lovely snow-white breasts that the girl hid with charming bashfulness, under a rough scarf.

All this excited him, aroused thirst, like a bowl of cold water seduces a tired traveler.
In a word, walking next to this wonderful creature, our Ivan languished with sudden love. The stricter the ban on this fruit, the more the jeweler languished.

Suddenly the girl offered to milk him with cow's milk, since the day was hot. Ivan refused and, unexpectedly for himself, burst out with a passionate declaration of love.

I don't want milk, but I want you. If you don't mind, I want to ransom you from the prince!
- This is impossible! For many unfortunate generations my ancestors belonged to the prince. And the grandfathers lived this way, and the grandchildren will live this way. I am destined to forever be a serf to the prince. And my children will be serfs. The prince wants all the people who belong to him to have offspring.
- Wasn’t there a fine fellow who would dare to buy such a beauty back to freedom?
- Will is too expensive. Those who liked me leave as quickly as they appear.
- And you can’t run away?
- Oh, you can't. At the prince's Long hands, and the royal law on serfs is very strict. If I am caught, I will be shackled, and my darling may lose not only his freedom, but also all his property. I'm not worth such sacrifices! So I live in complete obedience, apparently this is my fate.
- What’s your name, dear girl?
- Masha.
- And my name is Ivan. Ivan Zakharov, goldsmith. And here's what I'll tell you, my dear. Never in my life have I liked any woman as much as you. Do you also know...? I walked along this field with thoughts of choosing a girlfriend, and I met you. In this I see an indication from heaven. If you don’t hate me, if you’re ready to forget that I’m already many years old, consider me your friend, and then... maybe even your husband!

Hearing such sweet words for a woman’s heart with a declaration of love, the girl blushed wonderfully, lowered her happy eyes, and burst into tears:
- My dear Ivanushka! I do not want to become the cause of many of your griefs as soon as you begin to ask the prince to ransom my will. A few kind words are enough for me.
- Dear Mashenka! You don't know anything about me yet. I'm a fairly rich man. I will spare nothing to gain freedom for my future wife.
- Ivanushka! Give up these thoughts. - The girl said, shedding tears - I will love you all my life and so on. Without these strict conditions.
- Come on Mashenka, let’s agree this way. Next Sunday, I will come to this field again.
- My good lord! I will definitely be waiting here for you. If I am severely punished after this, it doesn’t matter. I'm not afraid. Come, my dear.
- The girl returned home late in the evening, for which she received a strong beating, but did not feel the beating.

Good-natured Ivan has lost his appetite. He even closed his workshop and store, so he fell in love with this wonderful serf girl. I thought about her, saw only her everywhere. When a man is in such a stage of falling in love, it is quite decent to begin to act, and actively.
The jeweler was a careful man.

Therefore, to talk with the prince, I decided to resort to the help of a respectable patron. He did not have any difficulties in this matter, since many illustrious ladies were ready to assist in such a pleasant issue for women as love!
Princess M., who had great weight in the royal court, volunteered to accompany the jeweler and help in his efforts to ransom the serf maiden.

The prince received the guest and the jeweler accompanying her with great respect. The princess took the trouble to start the conversation:
- Illustrious prince! I am here on a very pleasant matter for me. I want to help unite two hearts of lovers.
- Princess! I'd be happy to be of assistance, but I don't know what you're talking about.
- Here is our court jeweler, who is inflamed with love for the girl who, unfortunately, is your serf. Therefore, I petition you for freedom for this girl. On our part, you can count on fulfilling any of your wishes.
- Who is she?
- The girl's name is Masha.
- Ah, ah! They told me something, but I didn’t attach any importance to it. In any case, we will have to discuss the terms of the buyout. Are you ready for this conversation?
- Your Excellency! - our loving jeweler entered the conversation - I decided to make for you a wonderful golden vase strewn with precious stones. I am sure that you will not find one like this in Russia.
- Of course, I won’t refuse such a gift. But... - the prince looked expressively at the princess - I am not free to change the royal decree.
- What decree?
- When the tsar granted estates to me and other high-ranking persons, his decree established that all peasants became our serfs. And their children, and their children's children. It was especially stated that a person from outside, if he marries my serf, becomes a serf for the rest of his life. This is the royal decree! - the prince threw up his hands - It’s not in my power to correct the king! So, only a person who has lost his mind can decide to do this.
- Illustrious prince! I am such a person. I lost my mind in love with this poor girl. I am more touched by her tender and kind heart than by her bodily perfections. But what strikes me most is your hard-heartedness, for there is a way out of any situation. You just have to want it. In a word, my fate is in your hands, and excuse my words. So! Even if all my property becomes your property, and I become your serf, your power still has a limit.
“What is this,” the prince asked, angry at the impudent speeches of the commoner, “how did you put the limit?”
- This limit is in my head. Not a single most powerful force has power over my talent and all the ideas for future creations. All this is hidden in my mind!

Listening to this angry exchange, the princess was no longer glad that she got involved in the story. She looked in fear, first at the enraged prince, then at her beloved jeweler. For all his talents, the jeweler remained an invisible figure on the surface. The prince had the power to erase this obstacle with one movement of his hand. It is not known how it would all end, but fortunately, Mashenka was brought into the hall.

The prince ordered in advance to prepare the subject of conversation, for his own examination, and as a subject of bargaining. The maids did their best. Mashenka sparkled like a silver dish, carefully wiped by a busy housewife. She was dressed in a beautiful white dress with a pink belt, her legs were shod in elegant shoes, from which beautiful legs in white stockings peeked out.

Mashenka looked royally beautiful. Seeing the girl, Ivan was stupefied with delight. Even the prince and princess admitted to themselves that they had never seen such perfect beauty.
The first to perk up was the princess, who realized that the continued presence of such a beautiful girl would threaten the jeweler with frustration and all sorts of dangers.

Therefore, she politely apologized and grabbed the stunned Ivan by the hand and led him into the carriage. All the way she tried to persuade the jeweler to renege on his word to the girl, since with her feminine instinct she guessed that the prince would not let such a charming bait out of his hands.
A short time later, the princess received a letter from the prince.

In it, he once again confirms that if he marries the girl Masha, the jeweler Ivan Zakharov must give all his goods in favor of the prince, and recognize himself and his future children as serfs. As a special favor, the prince left the young couple a home and a jewelry workshop. There they could live and work. But once a year, husband and wife are required to stay in human quarters for a week in order to confirm their state of slavery.

Ivan was in despair. He could not even kidnap Masha, since the prince ordered the girl to be especially guarded, which was immediately done. The jeweler had only one thing left to do - complain to his customers about the cruelty of the prince and his unhappy love. As a result, this story began to be widely discussed in society. Everyone, without exception, sided with the poor jeweler. This murmur even reached the king.

After listening to this sad story, the king first shed tears of pity, and then became angry with the prince. When he appeared before the eyes of the angry ruler, he asked:
- Why are you a prince, don’t you want to listen to the voice? Great love and do you not follow mercy?
- Sir, judge for yourself! All state laws are interconnected like links in a chain. Once one link falls out, everything collapses. If my serf is taken against our will, then a rebellion may soon arise in the state. They will refuse to pay duties to the treasury, and it won’t be far off that the crown will be removed from your head, sir!

The last circumstance immediately cooled the royal anger, and he, waving his hand, released the prince.

Still, the visit to the palace was not in vain for the prince. He was an experienced dignitary, and decided, out of sin and the royal anger, to defuse the situation. As a result, the jeweler was allowed to see Mashenka, under strict supervision. The girl was brought in, dressed in luxurious dresses, like a court lady. The lovers were only allowed to see each other and talk to each other. The supervision was so strict that the lovers could not even secretly exchange kisses.

The prince thereby achieved his goal. Unable to endure this slow torture, the jeweler in love decided to sign all the necessary papers and contracts.
The rumor that the famous jeweler, for the sake of his beloved, decided to part with his fortune and secure himself, voluntarily becoming the property of the prince, everyone wanted to look at him.

The store began to be crowded with court ladies, beautiful women who selected countless pieces of jewelry for themselves, just to talk longer with the jeweler. And if others could equal Mashenka’s beauty, not one of them had her kind heart.
On the eve of the final transition to slavery and love, the jeweler melted all the gold, made a crown from it, without much effort, fitted all the precious stones on it, and took it to the queen.

Your Majesty! I don’t know who to entrust my wealth to, so I’m handing it over to you. Tomorrow I will have nothing left of my own - everything will go to the prince. I know that you have repeatedly expressed words of pity towards me. Therefore, be generous and accept this crown. I dare to hope that if my children become free, and bad things happen to me, I hope for your generosity towards them.
- I accept the gift, my poor man! Sooner or later, the prince will need my help. Then, believe me, I will remember you.

The wedding of the jeweler, who deprived himself of his freedom for this purpose, attracted a countless crowd. “You will always remain a noble man, in spite of the prince!” - eminent citizens shouted to the groom.
Inspired by popular support, the newlyweds showed themselves worthy of each other in an intimate duel. Husband Ivan repeatedly won, and his beloved wife responded to him in battle, as befits a healthy peasant girl.

This lasted for the entire first month, and the newlyweds, like doves, began to build themselves a cozy nest. Mashenka enjoyed the unprecedented light and cozy home. She transferred her light of love and reassurance to the customers who crowded the store. The buyers carried away this light, enchanted by the young hostess.

After the honeymoon ended, the unexpected happened. The prince entered the house that already belonged to him. Calling the jeweler and his wife, who were frozen with surprise, to him, the prince said:
- I brought you my good decision. I don’t want to be a tyrant in the eyes of society, so I decided - you are free! This freedom will not cost you anything.

Ivan and his wife fell to their knees and cried with joy. The jeweler, with great honor and respect, escorted the prince's carriage through the entire city.

The events did not end there. One fine day, the servant reported to the prince that the jeweler wanted to see him. Entering the prince's office, the jeweler placed a mahogany casket in front of him. The prince opened the casket and closed his eyes. In the casket lay a wonderful golden cup of marvelous shape. It was all decorated with precious stones.

Remember, Prince, on my first visit I promised to create this cup for you. I am keeping my promise. Please accept it as a gift for your kindness, in memory of the happiest married couple in the world.
When the jeweler left, the prince sat in the office for a long time, looking at the goblet. True love everyone must rejoice!

(based on "Persistence in Love" by Honore de Balzac)

On the picture: To maintain his reputation at the proper level, every strong landowner acquired a harem with a decent number of his own “seraleks”

EVGENY ZHIRNOV, Kommersant

The case of the record-breaking rapist

To maintain his reputation at the proper level, every strong landowner acquired a harem with a decent number of his own “seraleks”

More than 500 women and girls were raped by nobleman Viktor Strashinsky from the Kyiv province. Moreover, many of his victims were not his own serfs, pleasures with which, before the liberation of the peasants, were considered almost the natural right of the owner of serf souls. Four lawsuits were brought against Strashinsky, but the investigation dragged on for an unprecedentedly long time even for the extremely slow Russian justice system. Almost 25 years passed from the first charges to the verdict. And the punishment chosen by Emperor Alexander II the Liberator amazed significant part Russian society.

Nature fun

In 1845, the rector of the church in the village of Mshantse, Kyiv province, Yashchinsky, told the head of the local police, the zemstvo police officer, that his flock was dissatisfied and grumbling. Moreover, he has every reason for this, since the father of the owner of the estate, Michalina Strashinskaya, Victor, constantly demands that peasant girls and wives be sent to his estate, the village of Tkhorovka, for carnal pleasures, and if the sending is for some reason delayed, he comes to Mshants himself and rapes the women , girls, even minors.

If there was anything strange in this story, it was only that Strashinsky used his daughter’s serfs for his own pleasure: in society they looked askance at those who abuse other people’s property. However, they did not find anything strange in the way the landowner treated the peasant women, since it was a rare wealthy landowner in the 18th and early 19th centuries who did not use his position to satisfy love passions. Memoirists claimed that in the villages of “Arap Peter the Great” - Abram Petrovich Hannibal - there were many very dark-skinned and African-curly-haired serfs. Almost every noble owner of souls considered it his duty to have his own harem of two or three dozen serf beauties. For example, they wrote about the State Chancellor, His Serene Highness Prince A. A. Bezborodko, that he shunned secular society and ladies because “the true “romance” of his life was a harem, always replete with concubines and often renewed.”

And some landowners, carried away by the harem, forgot not only about society, but also about any other affairs, estates and family. Pushkin’s friend A. N. Wulf wrote about his uncle Ivan Ivanovich Wulf:

“Having married a rich and pretty girl very early, he spent several years living in St. Petersburg ruining his estate. Having settled in the village, he left his wife and started a harem of serf girls, in which he lived with a dozen children, leaving care of his legal wife. Such a life made him completely sensual, incapable of anything else."

The Decembrists, fighters for the happiness of the people, were no exception to the rule. For example, in the certificate on the case of December 14, 1825, about O. Yu. Gorsky, a participant in the uprising, it was said:

“At first he supported several (precisely three) peasant women, bought by him in the Podolsk province. With this seraglio, three years ago he lived in Varvarin’s house. Vile debauchery and bad treatment forced the unfortunate girls to flee from him and seek protection from the government - but the matter hushed up with Count Miloradovich."

The whole difference between the owners of the seraglios lay in how exactly they treated those for whom the almost official name “seraglios” appeared in that era. For example, about the landowner P. A. Koshkarev, the 19th century writer of everyday life N. Dubrovin wrote:

“Ten to twelve of the most beautiful girls occupied almost half of his house and were intended only to serve the master (he was 70 years old). They stood on duty at the bedroom door and slept in the same room with Koshkarev; several girls were especially appointed to serve guests.”

However, unlike the “seraleks” of other owners, the girls in Koshkarev’s house were kept in very decent conditions. Ya. M. Neverov, who lived with Koshkarev as a child, recalled them:

“In general, the girls were all very developed: they were beautifully dressed and received - like the male servants - a monthly salary and cash gifts to holidays. Everyone dressed, of course, not in national, but in pan-European dress."

Excessive passion

In the first quarter of the 19th century, Lieutenant General Lev Dmitrievich Izmailov became widely known in the country. He became famous both for his exploits for the glory of the Fatherland, spending huge amounts of money, a million rubles, on arming the Ryazan provincial militia in 1812, and for his tyranny and numerous antics, the fame of which spread throughout the empire. They talked a lot, and then remembered the harem of General Izmailov. However, the details that horrified contemporaries and descendants became clear in 1828 after the completion of the investigation ordered by Izmailov’s peasants’ complaint.

The beginning and progress of this case are no less interesting than the details revealed during its course. It began with the fact that the general’s chargé d’affaires, his solicitor Fedorov, decided to earn extra money on his own principal and convinced his peasants to write a complaint about Izmailov’s numerous atrocities and abuses. The solicitor rightly hoped that during the investigation, which could not do without bribes to judges and other officials, he would be able to make a good profit. But the case, given the influence, age and past merits of the general, will still be closed.

At first everything went according to the planned scenario. In court, the testimony of the peasants was not recorded in full or was distorted and, under pain of punishment, they were forced to sign. Izmailov regularly gave, and Fedorov, not forgetting about his interests, handed over bribes, so that in the end the peasants were going to be sentenced to exile to Siberia for rebellion and slandering the landowner.

However, at the same time, senators Ogarev and Saltykov, who not only knew, but also did not like Izmailov, arrived in the Ryazan province with an inspection. The peasants were immediately released from the prison and sent home, and a real investigation began on Izmailov’s estates. In addition to Izmailov’s other serfs, the inhabitants of his harem were also interrogated. Moreover, their testimony turned out to be such that Izmailov’s biographer, S. T. Slovutinsky, who was well acquainted with the case, cited many of them allegorically or chose to omit them altogether:

“Both day and night they were all locked. Bars were inserted into the windows of their rooms. These unfortunate girls were released from this mansion of theirs, or, better to say, from their permanent prison only for a short walk in the master’s garden or for a trip to tightly closed vans to the bathhouse. They were not allowed to have meetings with their closest relatives, not only brothers and sisters, but even their parents. There were cases when courtyard people who passed by their windows and bowed to them from afar were severely punished for this. Many of these girls - there were only thirty of them, but this number, like a constant set, never changed, although the faces that made it up changed very often - entered the manor's house from a very young age, one must think, because they promised to be "at one time beauties. Almost all of them, in their sixteenth year and even earlier, ended up as the master's concubines - always involuntarily, and often through violence."

Slovutinsky described many cases when Izmailov raped young girls and granted the same right to his guests:

“From the testimony it turns out that General Izmailov was also hospitable in his own way: girls were always brought to his guests for the night, and for significant guests or those who came for the first time, innocent ones were chosen, even if they were only twelve years old... Thus, the soldier Mavra Feofanova says that in the thirteenth year of her life she was taken forcibly from the house of her father, a peasant, and she was corrupted by Izmailov’s guest, Stepan Fedorovich Kozlov. She escaped from this landowner, but she was caught and, on the orders of the master, was severely beaten with a stick."

But all this could not be compared with what Izmailov did with his own daughter, adopted from the “seraglio”:

“Nymphodora Fritonova Khoroshevskaya (Nymph, as the courtyard people called her in their testimony, probably following the master’s example) was born while her mother was kept locked up in the master’s house, behind bars... Izmailov molested her when she was fourteen years old. She At the same time, she reminded him that she had been baptized by his mother; his terribly cynical, vile objection to Nymph cannot be given here... That same day, Nymph was again called into the master's bedroom. Izmailov began to interrogate her: who is to blame for the fact that he did not find her a virgin? The details of the poor girl's explanations about her innocence, about what the master himself did to her when she was still a child of eight or nine years old (all this is set out in detail in the testimony of Nymphodora Khoroshevskaya, given to the last investigators), are too outrageous to be conveyed in print. .. The lord's interrogation did not end well for the serf Nymph: first they flogged her with a whip, then with a rap, and over the course of two days they flogged her seven times. After these punishments, for three months she was still in the locked harem of the Khitrovshchina estate and during all this time she was master's concubine. Finally he became jealous of her pastry chef. This confectioner was immediately given up as a soldier, and Nimfa, after being punished with whips in the living room, sat on a wall chain in the prisoner's room for three days. Then she was exiled to the potash factory, in hard work, where she stayed for exactly seven years. On the third day, following her exile to the factory, her head was shaved. A few months later she was caught in the slingshot because the potash came out too little; She carried this slingshot for three weeks. She was transferred from the potash factory to a cloth factory, and then Izmailov ordered her to be married to a simple peasant; but the Nymph did not agree - and for that she was shackled for three days. Finally, she was exiled from the cloth factory to the village of Kudasheva, where, of course, she had to take some rest from her hard labor life at Izmailov’s.”

It would seem that after such facts were discovered and confirmed, General Izmailov could not avoid heavy punishment. In addition, to the charges of child molestation was added the use of torture, which was prohibited at that time. And besides, Izmailov was accused of another serious crime - he did not allow the peasants to go to confession so that information about his pleasures and atrocities would not reach the spiritual authorities.

However, despite all this, the Senate turned out to be extremely merciful to Izmailov. His decision stated:

“Since Izmailov’s estate has already been taken into custody and he himself, due to the way he treats his people, cannot be allowed to manage that estate, then it should be left in custody; and although it would be inappropriate for Izmailov to stay on his estate, but since he, out of respect for his serious illness, was left in his present place of stay, then he should be allowed to stay there until he recovers.”

After such a precedent-setting court decision, the emergence of a case against Viktor Strashinsky looked completely strange. And his investigation is absolutely futile.

Longest Review

At first, however, the investigation was quite successful.

“During interrogations on September 12, 1846,” the description of the case said, “they showed: the centurion of the village of Mshantsa Pavel Krivshun, without an oath, that the landowner Strashinsky either demands peasant girls to come to him in the village of Tkhorovka, or comes himself to the village of Mshantsa and rapes them. The peasant girls indicated by the centurion testified that they were corrupted by Strashinsky, that Esaul Ganakh, the girl Desyatnikova, the woman Martsinikha and the washerwoman Leschukova brought them to him and that they complained about this to their parents. The peasant Esaul Ganakh explained that he really brought them to Strashinsky the girls he demanded, but whether the landowner raped them or not, he doesn’t know about it and didn’t hear from them themselves.”

However, then the investigation began to stall:

“The mentioned women Desyatnikova, Leschukova and Martsenich testified that they never brought girls to Strashinsky. The fathers and mothers of the said girls (with the exception of only one Vakumova) all rejected the reference of their daughters to them, explaining that the latter never complained to them about rape. At the confrontation, 10 girls put forward by centurion Krivshun and another 6, who also accused Strashinsky of rape, renounced their previous testimony and during interrogations confirmed that he had never corrupted them, and they testified about this before in order to get rid of the claim to another estate for home services."

What looked even worse was that priest Yaschinsky, who started the case, began to recant his accusations:

“Priest Yaschinsky testified that no definitive information reached him about Strashinsky’s rape of girls, but that he saw the crying of fathers and mothers when their children were taken to the village of Tkhorovka, as some said, for rape, and others for services.”

Other witnesses also did not confirm the reports of rape:

“12 people from neighboring peasants testified under oath that they had not heard anything plausible about Strashinsky’s molestation and rape of girls, but that the crying of parents and children was due to the taking of peasant women into yard service. During a general search, two landowners responded under oath about Strashinsky’s behavior: they know him from the best side, and four, due to the lack of any connections with him, they know nothing about his way of life.”

After this, Strashinsky, who had been avoiding interrogations since the beginning of the investigation, went on the offensive:

“The landowner Strashinsky, who did not appear at the investigation on the pretext of his and his daughter’s illness and was finally sent by order of his superiors with a police official on December 20, 1846, testified: 1) that the village of Mshants does not belong to him, but to his daughter Mikhalina, who owned he had been on patrimonial right for 6 years before the start of this investigation; 2) that the crimes attributed to him were not characteristic of either his title as a nobleman, or his 65-year old age, or, finally, his poor health; 3) that these accusations were based on malice and slander of the priest of the village of Mshants and the sotsky Krivshun, and that the peasants were carried away by the thought of freedom from serfdom, if these accusations brought against him, Strashinsky, were justified; 4) that the peasants of the village of Mshants, not belonging to him, Strashinsky , could not remain silent about his crimes if they were actually committed by him.”

In fact, the case could be closed for lack of proof of the crime. However, in 1845, in another district and on another estate of Strashinsky, exactly the same case arose.

“The investigation,” said the same description of the case, “about Strashinsky’s rape of peasant girls in the village of Kumanovka was also begun in 1845 on the basis of a report from the senior assessor of the Makhnovsky Zemsky Court Pavlov to the local police officer. In the report, the assessor explained that the peasants of the village of Kumanovka , which is in the traditional domain of Strashinsky, are immeasurably burdened with corvee and that he raped the daughters of two local peasants Ermolai and Vasily."

But the police were unable to bring witnesses for questioning:

“The police officer instructed the police officer’s assistant to present these girls and their parents to the zemstvo court, but the assistant informed the police officer that Strashinsky had not handed these people over. The police officer instructed the police officer to find out about this on the spot.”

The results of the preliminary investigation amazed the police chief:

“Having received a report that Strashinsky did not leave a single girl chaste on the Kumanovka estate, he reported this to the head of the province. By order of this latter, the Makhnovist district leader of the nobility, together with the district solicitor, was instructed to carry out a strict investigation on the spot into how Strashinsky’s cruel treatment of their peasants and burdening them with corvee, and about the rape of peasant daughters."

However, the history of the previous case repeated itself. The peasant women, intimidated by the landowner, one after another, refused to admit not only the fact of rape, but also their very acquaintance with Strashinsky. And he, in turn, began to prove that Kumanovka is managed not by him, but by the housekeeper, and he himself almost never visits this estate.

However, the story of mass rape The provincial authorities were already seriously interested, and in Kyiv they very carefully familiarized themselves with the results of the second investigation:

“Having examined this investigation, the head of the Kyiv province found that it was carried out without any attention and with the visible intention of acquitting Strashinsky... The investigation was entrusted to the Vasilkov district leader of the nobility together with the captain of the gendarme corps... The girls questioned in Strashinsky’s absence, who acquitted him during the investigation, now they showed that he actually raped them. Their parents, who also acquitted Strashinsky during the investigation, during the re-investigation confirmed the testimony of their daughters that he raped them. The husbands of the said peasant women also renounced their previous testimony that acquitted Strashinsky, and explained that when they got married, they found their wives deprived of their virginity, as explained by Strashinsky himself. New witnesses testified under oath that they heard that the landowner Strashinsky, coming to Kumanovka, ordered girls to be brought to him and had carnal intercourse with them."

Strashinsky explained the new testimony by the machinations of his enemies and the rebellious intentions of the peasants. But no one listened to him anymore, since the provincial authorities decided to establish the authenticity of the accusations and sent investigators to the village where the landowner lived permanently - to Tkhorovka. And so that Strashinsky would not interfere with interrogations, he was sent to Berdichev under police supervision. As a result, investigators received what they were counting on - frank testimony from victims and witnesses:

“During the investigation, it was discovered that the village of Tkhorovka belonged to Strashinsky’s wife, and in 1848 it passed, according to a separate record, to their son Heinrich Strashinsky. The peasants of the village of Tkhorovka, numbering 99, unanimously explained that Strashinsky oppresses them with duties, treats them cruelly , lived fornicatingly with their wives, deprived girls of their virginity, of which two (Fedosya and Vasilina) even died from rape, and that he corrupted, among other things, two girls Palageya and Anna, whom he himself had married with the woman Prisyazhnyukova.Wives and daughters of indicators, in including 86 people, explained for their part that they were indeed forcibly molested by Strashinsky, some at the age of 14, and others after reaching only 13 or even 12 years old... Many explained that Strashinsky continued to communicate with them even after their release married, and some testified that he forced them to be present when he copulated with others.”

There were confirmations of accusations in the death of the girls:

“Those girls died after being forcibly molested by the landowner Strashinsky: Fedosya within one day, and Vasilina after a few days, which is known to the whole society... The wife of the peasant Soloshnik, for whom Fedosya was in the service, and Vasilina’s aunt, the peasant woman Gorenchukova, explained “that the girls in question died from severe bleeding after being forcibly molested by Strashinsky.”

The landowner defended himself as best he could. He presented a doctor’s certificate stating that he suffered from chronic rheumatism, and therefore could not have committed the acts attributed to him. His wife filed a petition stating that in fifty years of marriage, her husband had never given her cause for jealousy. And in addition, he has excellently managed all family estates for 47 years.

The mildest punishment

However, the investigators did not waste time and discovered that Strashinsky’s mentioned mistress, the peasant woman Prisyazhnyukova, came to him after escaping from her former master, Lieutenant Colonel Solovkov. And Strashinsky committed perjury in order to keep her. In the eyes of noble society, such a crime looked almost worse than rape. In addition, the court archives revealed a case from 1832 that did not end with a verdict, according to which peasant women from the village of Mshants accused him of rape. So the number of his victims over the 47 years of managing the villages could not have been less than 500. In addition, a medical examination of peasant women was carried out, which confirmed the accusations.

The case went through the courts for a long time and reached the highest level, the Senate, only in 1857, a quarter of a century after the first accusations. The senators' opinions on the choice of punishment differed diametrically, and as a result of discussions, three opinions were formed, submitted to the emperor for approval.

According to the first opinion, the sentence should have looked like this:

“Strashinsky, having deprived all those special personally and according to their status of the rights and advantages assigned, to exile to live in the Tobolsk province. On the subject of the forced corruption of minor peasant girls and forcing peasant women who have reached the age of 14 to commit fornication with him, leave Strashinsky in strong suspicion.”

According to the second opinion, Strashinsky should have been found guilty of all charges:

“Viktor Strashinsky is guilty not only of cruel treatment of peasants, of installing the fugitive peasant girl Kislichkova and of forging her wedding to the peasant Prisyazhnyuk who belonged to him, but also of rape, combined with molestation, of peasant girls who have reached and have not reached the age of 14. The following circumstances convince us of this: 1) the peasants and peasant women of the villages of Tkhorovka, Mshantsa and Kumanovka, more than 100 people accuse Strashinsky of rape, and among such a mass of people it is difficult to imagine a strike; 2) their testimony becomes all the more reliable because the peasants belong not only to different villages, but live in different districts, gave answers not at the same time and to different investigators; 3) all the peasant women explained the details of the rape, pointed to the persons who brought them to Strashinsky, some of them told their parents about it, and many talked about the preparation them to fornication, which, constituting refined debauchery, cannot be invented; 4) the persons who brought the girls to Strashinsky, and the parents confirmed the reference made to them; 5) the husbands of the raped also responded that their wives married them already corrupted, as they confessed, by the landowner Strashinsky; 6) outside peasants of the villages of Mshantsa and Kumanovka and neighboring villages testified under oath that they heard about Strashinsky’s rape of his girls and married women; 7) medical evidence confirms the rape of 13 girls who were already from 14 to 18 years old, and although it does not serve as evidence that the crime was committed by Strashinsky, he could not provide any justification that would deserve respect, and in general in the case no persons were found who could be suspected of corruption; 8) the behavior of the peasant women is approved; 9) Strashinsky was tried already in 1832 for the rape of peasant girls in the village of Mshantsa. All this evidence, taken together, excludes the possibility of wondering about the defendant’s guilt and constitutes perfect evidence against him. For the rape of girls under 14 years of age, as the gravest crime committed by Strashinsky, he would be subject to deprivation of all rights of fortune and exile to hard labor in fortresses for a period of 10 to 12 years; but bearing in mind that he is now 72 years old, after depriving Strashinsky of all the rights of his estate, he should be exiled to a settlement in the most remote places of Siberia.”

The third opinion offered an extremely lenient sentence:

"1) The defendant Viktor Strashinsky (72 years old) should remain under suspicion for the molestation of peasant girls. 2) Order the Kiev, Podolsk and Volyn governor-general to make an order to remove from Strashinsky's possession the inhabited estates belonging to him personally on serfdom, if such are in present time, with the transfer of them into guardianship. 3) Return to Lieutenant Colonel Solovkov his runaway woman, given in marriage to Prisyazhnyuk, together with her husband and children from her..."

By that time, preparations had already begun for the abolition of serfdom, which caused acute discontent among the nobility. And Alexander II may not have wanted to create a new reason for disputes and conflicts. It is also possible that the emperor, who himself loved young girls, reacted with sympathy to Strashinsky’s passion. Be that as it may, he supported the third opinion. So the record-breaking rapist essentially escaped any punishment.

In hospitable houses, important guests were offered shelter, table and bed with a serf girl of their choice

The Strashinsky case turned out to be a record-breaking one not only in terms of the number of victims, but also in the fact that it only reached the Senate for consideration 25 years later

Four lawsuits were brought against Strashinsky, but the investigation dragged on for an unprecedentedly long time even for the extremely slow Russian justice system. Almost 25 years passed from the first charges to the verdict. And the punishment chosen by Emperor Alexander II the Liberator amazed a significant part of Russian society.

To maintain his reputation at the proper level, every strong landowner acquired a harem with a decent number of his own “seraleks”

Nature fun

Memoirists claimed that in the villages of “Arap Peter the Great” - Abram Petrovich Hannibal - there were many very dark-skinned and African-curly-haired serfs. Almost every noble owner of souls considered it his duty to have his own harem of two or three dozen serf beauties.

For example, they wrote about the State Chancellor, His Serene Highness Prince A. A. Bezborodko, that he shunned secular society and ladies because “the true “romance” of his life was a harem, always replete with concubines and often renewed.”

In hospitable houses, important guests were offered shelter, table and bed with a serf girl of their choice

Fighters for the happiness of the people were no exception to the rule Decembrists (the crunch of a French bread is heard here). For example, in the certificate on the case of December 14, 1825, about O. Yu. Gorsky, a participant in the uprising, it was said:

However, unlike the “seraleks” of other owners, the girls in Koshkarev’s house were kept in very decent conditions. Ya. M. Neverov, who lived with Koshkarev as a child, recalled them:

“In general, the girls were all very developed: they were beautifully dressed and received - like the male servants - a monthly salary and cash gifts for holidays. Everyone dressed, of course, not in national, but in pan-European dress ".

Excessive passion

They talked a lot, and then remembered the harem of General Izmailov. However, the details that horrified contemporaries and descendants became clear in 1828 after the completion of the investigation ordered by Izmailov’s peasants’ complaint.

The solicitor rightly hoped that during the investigation, which could not do without bribes to judges and other officials, he would be able to make a good profit. But the case, given the influence, age and past merits of the general, will still be closed.

His Serene Highness Prince Bezborodko preferred spending time with his courtyard girls and women to the brilliant court society

In addition to Izmailov’s other serfs, the inhabitants of his harem were also interrogated. Moreover, their testimony turned out to be such that Izmailov’s biographer, S. T. Slovutinsky, who was well acquainted with the case, cited many of them allegorically or chose to omit them altogether:

They were not allowed to have visits with their closest relatives, not only their brothers and sisters, but even their parents. There were cases when courtyard people who passed by their windows and bowed to them from afar were severely punished for this.

Many of these girls - there were only thirty of them, but this number, like a constant set, never changed, although the faces that made it up changed very often - entered the manor's house from a very young age, one must think, because they promised to be in their time beauties. Almost all of them, in their sixteenth year and even earlier, ended up as the master’s concubines - always involuntary servitude, and often through violence.”

Slovutinsky described many cases when Izmailov raped young girls and granted the same right to his guests:

Thus, the soldier Mavra Feofanova says that in the thirteenth year of her life she was taken by force from the house of her father, a peasant, and she was molested by Izmailov’s guest, Stepan Fedorovich Kozlov. She tried to escape from this landowner, but she was caught and, on the master’s orders, she was severely beaten with a stick.”

Strashinsky was also accused of kidnapping someone else's serf, with whom he had two daughters, whom he then molested...

But all this could not be compared with what Izmailov did with his own daughter, adopted from the “seraglio”:

"Nymphodora Fritonova Khoroshevskaya (Nymph, as the courtyard people called her in their testimony, probably following the example of the master) was born while her mother was kept locked up in the master's house, behind bars... Izmailov molested her when she was fourteen years old. She reminded him at the same time that she had been baptized by his mother; his terribly cynical, vile objection to the Nymph cannot be given here...

That same day, Nymph was again called into the master's bedroom. Izmailov began to interrogate her: who is to blame for the fact that he did not find her a virgin. The details of the poor girl’s explanations about her innocence, about what the master himself did to her when she was still a child of eight or nine years old (all this is set out in detail in the testimony of Nymphodora Khoroshevskaya, given to the last investigators), are too outrageous to be conveyed in print. .

The lord's interrogation did not end well for the serf Nymph: first they flogged her with a whip, then with an arapnik, and over the course of two days they flogged her seven times. After these punishments, she was still in the locked harem of the Khitrovshchina estate for three months and during all this time she was the master’s concubine.

Finally he became jealous of her pastry chef. This confectioner was immediately given up as a soldier, and Nimfa, after being punished with whips in the living room, sat on a wall chain in the prisoner's room for three days. Then she was exiled to the potash factory, doing hard work, where she stayed for exactly seven years.

On the third day, following her exile to the factory, her head was shaved. A few months later she was caught in the slingshot because the potash came out too little; She carried this slingshot for three weeks. She was transferred from the potash factory to a cloth factory, and then Izmailov ordered her to be married to a simple peasant; but the Nymph did not agree - and for that she was shackled for three days.

Finally, she was exiled from the cloth factory to the village of Kudasheva, where, of course, she had to take some rest from her hard labor life at Izmailov’s.”

However, despite all this, the Senate turned out to be extremely merciful to Izmailov. His decision stated:

"Since Izmailov’s estate has already been taken into custody and he himself, due to the way he treats his people, cannot be allowed to manage that estate, then it should be left in custody; and although it would be inappropriate for Izmailov to stay on his estate, but since he, out of respect for his serious illness, was left in his present place of stay, he should be allowed to stay there until he recovers".

After such a precedent-setting court decision, the emergence of a case against Viktor Strashinsky looked completely strange. And his investigation is absolutely futile.

In the estate of Viktor Strashinsky, investigators did not find a single peasant woman who had not been raped by him

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At first, however, the investigation was quite successful.

"During interrogations on September 12, 1846, as stated in the description of the case, they showed: centurion s. Mshantsa Pavel Krivshun, without an oath, that the landowner Strashinsky or demands to himself in the village. Thorovka of peasant girls, or he comes to the village himself. Mshants and rapes them.

The peasant girls indicated by the centurion testified that they were corrupted by Strashinsky, that Esaul Ganakh, the girl Desyatnikova, the woman Martsinikha and the washerwoman Leschukova brought them to him, and that they complained about this to their parents. The peasant Esaul Ganakh explained that he really brought the girls he demanded to Strashinsky, but whether the landowner raped them or not, he did not know and did not hear from them themselves".

However, then the investigation began to stall:

"The mentioned women Desyatnikova, Leschukova and Martsenich testified that they never brought girls to Strashinsky. The fathers and mothers of the said girls (with the exception of only one Vakumova) all rejected their daughters’ reference to them, explaining that the latter never complained to them about rape.

At the confrontation, 10 girls put forward by centurion Krivshun and another 6, who also accused Strashinsky of rape, renounced their previous testimony and during interrogations confirmed that he had never corrupted them, and they testified about this before in order to get rid of the claim to another estate for home services".

What looked even worse was that priest Yaschinsky, who started the case, began to recant his accusations:

"Priest Yashchinsky testified that he had not received any definitive information about Strashinsky’s rape of girls, but that he saw the crying of fathers and mothers when their children were taken to the village. Thorovka, as some said, for rape, and others for services".

Other witnesses also did not confirm the reports of rape:

"12 neighboring peasants testified under oath that they had not heard anything plausible about Strashinsky’s molestation and rape of girls, but that the crying of parents and children came from taking peasant women into yard service.

During the general search, two landowners responded under oath about Strashinsky’s behavior: two landowners said that they knew him from the best side, and four that, due to the lack of any connections with him, they knew nothing about his way of life".

After this, Strashinsky, who had been avoiding interrogations since the beginning of the investigation, went on the offensive:

"The landowner Strashinsky, who did not appear at the investigation on the pretext of his and his daughter’s illness and was finally sent by order of his superiors with a police officer on December 20, 1846, testified:

1) what s. Mshants does not belong to him, but to his daughter Mikhalina, who owned it as a patrimonial right for 6 years before the start of this investigation;

2) that the crimes attributed to him are not characteristic of either his title as a nobleman, or his 65-year old age, or, finally, his poor health;

3) that these accusations are based on the malice and slander of the priest. Mshants and Sotsky Krivshun, and that the peasants were captivated by the thought of freedom from serfdom, if these accusations leveled against him, Strashinsky, were justified;

4) that the peasants from. Mshantsa, not belonging to him, Strashinsky, could not remain silent about his crimes if they had really been committed by him".

In fact, the case could be closed for lack of proof of the crime. However, in 1845, in another district and on another estate of Strashinsky, exactly the same case arose.

"Consequence, - said in the same description of the case, - about Strashinsky’s rape of peasant girls in the village. Kumanovka was also started in 1845 on the basis of a report from the senior assessor of the Makhnovsky Zemstvo Court, Pavlov, to the local police officer.

In the report, the assessor explained that the peasants of the village. Kumanovka, which is in the traditional possession of Strashinsky, is immensely burdened with corvée and that he raped the daughters of two local peasants Ermolai and Vasily".

But the police were unable to bring witnesses for questioning:

"The police officer instructed the police officer's assistant to present these girls and their parents to the zemstvo court, but the assistant informed the police officer that Strashinsky had not handed these people over. The police officer instructed the police officer to find out about this on the spot".

The most unkind methods of re-education were used against the courtyard women who refused the landowner affection.

The results of the preliminary investigation amazed the police chief:

"Having received a report that Strashinsky did not leave a single girl chaste on the Kumanovka estate, he reported this to the head of the province.

By order of this latter, the Makhnovist district leader of the nobility, together with the district solicitor, was instructed to carry out a strict on-the-spot investigation of both Strashinsky’s cruel treatment of his peasants and burdening them with corvee, and the rape of peasant daughters".

However, the story of mass rape has already seriously interested the provincial authorities, and in Kyiv they very carefully familiarized themselves with the results of the second investigation:

"Having examined this investigation, the head of the Kyiv province found that it was carried out without any attention and with the apparent intention of acquitting Strashinsky... The investigation was entrusted to the Vasilkovsky district leader of the nobility together with the captain of the gendarme corps...

The girls questioned in Strashinsky's absence, who acquitted him during the investigation, now testified that he actually raped them. Their parents, who also acquitted Strashinsky during the investigation, during the reinvestigation confirmed the testimony of their daughters that he raped them.

The husbands of the aforementioned peasant women also renounced their previous testimony that justified Strashinsky, and explained that when they got married, they found their wives deprived of their virginity, as explained by Strashinsky himself.

New witnesses testified under oath that they heard that the landowner Strashinsky, coming to Kumanovka, ordered girls to be brought to him and had carnal intercourse with them".

The Strashinsky case turned out to be a record-breaking one not only in terms of the number of victims, but also in the fact that it only reached the Senate for consideration 25 years later

And so that Strashinsky would not interfere with interrogations, he was sent to Berdichev under police supervision. As a result, investigators received what they were counting on - frank testimony from victims and witnesses:

"During the investigation it was discovered that s. Tkhorovka belonged to Strashinsky's wife, and in 1848 it passed, according to a separate record, to their son Heinrich Strashinsky.

Peasants from The Thorovkas, numbering 99, unanimously explained that Strashinsky oppressed them with duties, treated them cruelly, lived fornicatingly with their wives, deprived them of the virginity of girls, of whom two (Fedosya and Vasilina) even died from rape, and that he molested, among other things, two girls Palageya and Anna, whom he himself had adopted with the woman Prisyazhnyukova.

The wives and daughters of the indicators, among 86 people, explained for their part that they were indeed forcibly molested by Strashinsky, some at the age of 14, and others after reaching only 13 or even 12 years...

Many explained that Strashinsky continued to have relations with them after they got married, and some testified that he forced them to be present when he had intercourse with others".

There were confirmations of accusations in the death of the girls:

"Those girls died after being forcibly molested by the landowner Strashinsky: Fedosya within one day, and Vasilina a few days later, which is known to the whole society...

The wife of the peasant Soloshnik, for whom Fedosya was in the service, and Vasilina’s aunt, the peasant woman Gorenchukova, explained that the said girls died from severe bleeding after the violent molestation of them by Strashinsky".

In a matter in which the entire nobility was interested, Alexander II faced a difficult choice - to exile Strashinsky away to Siberia or to understand and forgive

The mildest punishment

In the eyes of noble society, such a crime looked almost worse than rape. In addition, the court archives revealed a case from 1832 that did not end with a verdict, according to which peasant women from the village of Mshants accused him of rape.

So the number of his victims over the 47 years of managing the villages could not have been less than 500. In addition, a medical examination of peasant women was carried out, which confirmed the accusations.

According to the first opinion, the sentence should have looked like this:

"Strashinsky, depriving everyone special personally and by status of their assigned rights and advantages, was exiled to live in the Tobolsk province. On the subject of forcibly molesting young peasant girls and forcing peasant women who have reached the age of 14 to commit fornication with him, leave Strashinsky in strong suspicion".

According to the second opinion, Strashinsky should have been found guilty of all charges:

1) peasants and peasant women of the villages of Tkhorovka, Mshantsa and Kumanovka, more than 100 people accuse Strashinsky of rape, and among such a mass of people it is difficult to imagine a strike;

2) their testimony becomes all the more reliable because the peasants not only belong to different villages, but live in different districts, and gave answers at different times and to different investigators;

3) all the peasant women explained the details of the rape, pointed to the persons who brought them to Strashinsky, some of them talked about it to their parents, and many talked about preparing them for fornication, which, constituting refined debauchery, cannot be fictitious;

4) the persons who brought the girls to Strashinsky, and the parents confirmed the reference made to them;

5) the husbands of the raped also responded that their wives married them already corrupted, as they confessed, by the landowner Strashinsky;

6) outside peasants of the villages of Mshantsa and Kumanovka and neighboring villages testified under oath that they had heard about Strashinsky’s rape of his girls and married women;

7) medical evidence confirms the rape of 13 girls who were already from 14 to 18 years old, and although it does not serve as evidence that the crime was committed by Strashinsky, he could not provide any justification that would deserve respect, and in general in the case no persons were found who could be suspected of corruption;

8) the behavior of the peasant women is approved;

9) Strashinsky was tried already in 1832 for the rape of peasant girls in the village of Mshantsa. All this evidence, taken together, excludes the possibility of wondering about the defendant’s guilt and constitutes perfect evidence against him.

For the rape of girls under 14 years of age, as the gravest crime committed by Strashinsky, he would be subject to deprivation of all rights of fortune and exile to hard labor in fortresses for a period of 10 to 12 years; but bearing in mind that he is now 72 years old, after depriving Strashinsky of all the rights of his estate, he should be exiled to a settlement in the most remote places of Siberia".

The third opinion offered an extremely lenient sentence:

"1) Defendant Viktor Strashinsky (72 years old) should remain under suspicion on the subject of molestation of peasant girls.

2) Instruct the Kyiv, Podolsk and Volyn governor-general to make an order to withdraw from Strashinsky’s possession the inhabited estates belonging to him personally on serfdom, if there are any at the present time, with their transfer to guardianship.

3) Return to Lieutenant Colonel Solovkov his runaway woman, given in marriage to Prisyazhnyuk, along with her husband and children from her..."

By that time, preparations had already begun for the abolition of serfdom, caused acute discontent among the nobility. And Alexander II may not have wanted to create a new reason for disputes and conflicts.

It is also possible that the emperor, who himself loved young girls, reacted with sympathy to Strashinsky’s passion. Be that as it may, he supported the third opinion. So the record-breaking rapist essentially escaped any punishment.

Is it any wonder that these “blacharods” were drowned in latrines during the revolution? Slavery is vile and disgusting, and the people’s hatred of their oppressors quite naturally resulted in the Revolution.

On the sexual exploitation of female serfs. Wild landowners

The case of the record-breaking rapist

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