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History’s Top Executioners of All Time

Khalid Elhassan June 5, 2020 34 min

39. A Turn to the Terrifying

Some years into her wealthy widowhood, Darya Saltykova met and was swept off her feet by a handsome, younger, and poorer man, Nikolay Tyutchev. She carried on a torrid affair with him, which raised her usually gloomy spirits. Unfortunately, Saltykova discovered that her lover was cheating on his Sugar Momma with a younger woman. Worse, Tyutchev had gone and secretly married the other woman.

The beating of a Russian serf. Wikimedia

Something inside Saltykova snapped. Infuriated by her boy toy’s betrayal, she nearly killed her unfaithful lover. Tyutchev and his wife fled to his relatives’ estate near Moscow, and soon left the region to escape the widow’s wrath. Deprived of the opportunity to violently vent her frustrations on her betrayer, Saltykova turned around and vented her rage on her hapless serfs.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.