The maid maintained her innocence until court interrogators turned to torture. Tsarist officials employed beating, burning with red-hot irons, simulated drowning (better known now as waterboarding), and stretching on the rack. They soon induced Katerinka to confess again, this time to putting something in the princess’s food, but not of causing the miscarriage. She said that a folk healer had told her that if she gave the princess a magical salt, the princess would drop her opposition to Katerinka’s marrying. “And I took about a pinch of that salt from Baba Oklulinka,” she testified, “and I gave her for that salt a headdress…. And that salt all went into the princess’s food…. And I gave the princess that salt… because she had a grudge against me. But I never intended to bewitch the princess. And unfortunately, the illness started, and she miscarried the baby, but not from bewitchment.”30
We do not know the court’s ruling. The records end with Katerinka and Mikitka still under arrest. The old healer, Baba Oklulinka, who had also been arrested, died in jail. Valerie Kivelson has speculated that the two lovers might have been released eventually, for judges sometimes freed those accused of witchcraft if they found that confessions had been coerced by masters. Confessions extracted by the courts’ torturers were not subject to the same consideration.31
Katerinka had much in common with accused witches in Central and Western Europe. Many of the latter were also poor widows without large families to defend them. Some of them had sought to increase their influence over others by dabbling in magic, and thereby incurred the enmity of neighbors or employers or family members. We do not know how many Katerinkas there were in Russia or even whether Katerinka was guilty. What is clear is that widowhood, which sometimes conferred great authority on a wealthy woman, could doom a poor one to still greater poverty and vulnerability. Katerinka reminds us of another universal reality: strong-willed women, particularly poor ones, had to choose their battles carefully.
Women of the Conquered Territories
Muscovy’s expansion brought tens of thousands of non-Slavic, non-Orthodox people under tsarist rule. Ivan IV annexed Kazan (1552) and Astrakhan (1556), thereby pushing the kingdom’s boundaries south almost to the Black Sea. He also gave his blessings to expeditions into Siberia. In the reign of Alexis (1645–76), a substantial portion of today’s Ukraine came under Muscovite rule; and by 1700, the tsars had laid claim to all of Siberia. These annexations accelerated the transformation of Muscovy from a small kingdom at the edge of the East Slavic lands into a huge, multi-ethnic empire. They also complicate the task of studying the history of women in Russia because, from the 1600s onward, the Muscovite government claimed as its subjects dozens of ethnic groups. To describe the histories of all these conquered peoples is neither possible nor desirable in a work of the present sort, but some value may be found in an attempt to open up here, and to discuss again in later chapters, the significant interactions between the imperial homeland and the women brought under its rule.
The first major distinction that emerges from an examination of the relationship between Moscow and its new, non-Muscovite subjects is this: conquest had little impact on the gender ideas of people with close historical and cultural connections to the Muscovites, such as those who lived in Ukraine. This is not to say that conquest was an inconsequential event for the women there. The seventeenth-century wars in that region between the Poles, Cossacks, Muscovites, and Tatars killed thousands and devastated the economy. Women suffered as women usually do in war: some were butchered, others were assaulted, robbed, and raped, some were successfully defended by their menfolk, most struggled to protect themselves and their children, and a few performed extraordinary acts for which they were celebrated. In 1654, a woman named Zavisna, the wife of a Cossack commander, refused to surrender her town to besieging Poles after her husband had been killed. Instead she did away with many of the attackers by hurling a torch into the munitions dump. The explosion also killed most of the town’s defenders, Zavisna included.
In mid-century, the Cossacks of central Ukraine established an autonomous government and abolished serfdom. Thereafter, the Cossack elite began to claim increased prerogatives, which brought elite women greater status and more comfortable lives and peasants a renewal of serfdom. This process of social differentiation continued into the 1700s, but had little effect on the gender ideas or practices that governed women’s lives in Ukraine. Siberia was another story: what happened there was very similar to the concurrent European conquest of the Americas.
Muscovite and Cossack trappers, traders, and soldiers ventured into Siberia in the sixteenth century seeking furs, Muscovy’s most lucrative export. They entered a vast territory inhabited by perhaps as many as 220,000 indigenous people.32 The hundreds of Siberian tribes are often classified, as are native people in North America, according to their languages: the Finno-Ugric peoples of the west; the Turkic and Mongol peoples of the south and east; and the far-northeastern groups, including the Chukchi and Eskimos, who are related to native Alaskans. In the more northerly latitudes, Siberians lived by herding, hunting, and gathering. Many were nomads who followed the reindeer in their seasonal migrations. Those living in the south cultivated crops and bred horses, sheep, and goats. Nomadism was common there as well. Closely tied by history and culture to the Mongols, the southern Siberians, of whom the Yakuts and Buryats were the largest groups, were formidable warriors.
There were strong similarities in the beliefs and social organization of the many Siberian groups when the Muscovites came. Although Islam and Buddhism had made inroads in the south, the majority of Siberian natives had preserved their age-old animistic religions; they worshipped the forces of nature and the spirits that lived in the trees, rivers, and sky. Particularly revered was the Siberian brown bear, cousin to the North American grizzly. Shamans helped the Siberians communicate with the spirit world and tended them when they were sick. The Buryats and Yakuts, who had learned about powerful rulers from the Mongols, had strong clan structures and social divisions. Most of the other indigenous peoples lived in small communities and delegated leadership, when necessary (during a communal hunt, for instance), to respected elders. They did not need complex class structures or highly developed conceptions of property to wrest a living from the frozen land.
The gender notions of the Siberians were also more egalitarian than those of their conquerors. As did many of the native peoples of the Americas, they granted leadership within families and clans to senior men and gave older women more authority than younger ones. Men did most of the hunting and fishing; women collected and processed plants for food and medicine. Siberian women also worked with men in butchering and drying the catch. Men, women, and children watched over domesticated animals; among the Tungus of central Siberia this included training reindeer to be ridden and milked. Women made clothes out of animal skins or fibers, and tended babies. Parents arranged their children’s marriages, exchanging both bride price, paid by the groom’s family, and dowry. Strict rules prohibiting marriage between members of the same clan were common, as was the practice of men having as many wives as they could support.
There were significant variations from group to group. Elderly women of the Chukchi, Itelmens, and Koraks of the Pacific coast conducted religious rituals in concert with senior men. Similarly, Tungus women of the Lake Baikal region served in the honored position of shaman and acted as heads of their households when their husbands were away. On the other hand, people who had more complex class structures and greater contact with other patriarchal cultures, such as the Buryats and Yakuts, made stricter distinctions between women’s roles within and outside the family, and granted men more authority.