Russian murderers and European philanthropists

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Since we are told: “You have never respected human rights,” we will not shy away from this challenge. The main human right is the right to life, and let's start with it.

In the 90s, before Russia joined the Council of Europe, Moscow newspapers wrote a lot about the death penalty. Some interpreted the demand for its abolition as an attempt by overly prosperous countries to impose their own rules on Russia, warned us against such a misfortune, urged us to live our own minds.

In others, even more interesting things could be read. Firstly, the readers were explained that in the West "humanism, representative power, a civilized court, faith in the law and unhypocritical respect for human life have been established since ancient times" (genuine quote), and Secondly, there were tired doubts about whether the inhabitants of modern Russia, even today, are able to assimilate such a system of values, to understand how unnatural the death penalty is.

Russians, de, not that mentality, they have behind them a long string of bloody despotic centuries, and respect for the human right to life has never been known to “this country”.

When you are in London, buy a ticket for a sightseeing tour of the city center on an open bus. There are headphones, you can listen to explanations in Russian. At Hyde Park, you will hear that where the "speaker's corner" (long empty) is now, there was a place of executions.

Executions were a major public entertaining the London public for centuries … The main gibbet was a clever swivel structure and had a (forget) playful name. There was a reason for humor: there were 23 loops on uneven beams, so it may have reminded the British of something - either a Christmas tree with decorations, or something else. She also had a more neutral name - "Derrick's car", after the last name of the local executioner for many years, there was even a saying "reliable as Derrick's car"¹.

Where Paddington Station is today, there was another noble gallows, arranged, unlike the previous one, without any fancy: three pillars, three crossbars, eight loops on the crossbar, so that 24 people could be hung at once - one more than Derrick's. London historian Peter Ackroyd lists a dozen more famous execution sites, adding that often the gallows stood simply at nameless intersections. And they worked without downtime, there was no underload. From time to time there was a crush in the crowd of spectators, the number of those trampled to death once (at the beginning of the 19th century) reached twenty-eight².

Art helps to understand some things. Historians of culture have long recognized that even in ancient, biblical and mythological subjects, European artists reflected the realities of the life around them. And these realities are terrifying. Look at the prints by Dürer and Cranach.

You will see that the guillotine existed two centuries (!) Before the French Revolution. You will see how some kind of brace is screwed into the eye of the tied victim, how the intestines are pulled out, winding them onto a special shaft, how a person crucified upside down is sawed from the crotch to the head with a saw, how the skin is ripped off people alive.

Peeling off the skin alive is quite frequent, almost a favorite) - the plot is not only graphics, but also the painting of Western Europe, and the thoroughness and accuracy of the oil paintings testifies, firstly, that the artists were familiar with the subject firsthand, and secondly, of a genuine interest in the topic. Suffice it to recall the Dutch painter of the late 15th - early 16th centuries. Gerard David.

The Moscow publishing house "Ad Marginem" published in 1999 a translation of Michel Foucault's work "Discipline and Punish" (by the way, there is another skin peeling on the cover), which contains many quotes from the instructions on the procedures of executions and public torture in different European countries up to the middle of the last century …European entertainers used a lot of imagination to make executions not only extremely long and painful, but also spectacular - one of the chapters in Foucault's book is ironically (or not?) Entitled "The Glitter of Execution." Reading is not for the impressionable.

Jacques Callot's engravings with garlands and bunches of people hanging from trees are not a reflection of some painful fantasies of the artist, but of the true cruelty of manners in 17th century Europe. The cruelty was engendered by the constant devastating wars of the Western European powers after the Middle Ages (which were even more ruthless).

The Thirty Years' War in the 17th century claimed half of Germany's population and either 60 or 80 percent - historians argue - of the population of its southern part. The Pope even temporarily allowed polygamy in order to restore the population. Cromwell's pacification of Ireland cost her 5/6 of its population. Ireland never recovered from this blow. As for Russia, it did not know such bloodletting on its territory for almost seven centuries between Batu and Lenin, and was not familiar with such unbridled ferocity of morals.

I'm sorry, but I have to say an unpleasant thing: the history of Western civilization does not set one up for great optimism - so bloody and brutal was her practice … And not only in the distant past - in the twentieth century too. In terms of the scope of bloodletting and atrocities, the 20th century surpassed any past. By and large, there is no guarantee that this civilization will not return to its usual practice.

This is a much, much more serious question than our western-loving fellow countrymen are used to thinking. Knowing what we know about Western civilization, it is difficult not to state that its narcissism, for all its familiarity, looks infinitely strange.

Sounds unexpected? Then I will quote one of the most prominent historians of our time, Oxford professor Norman Davis: "Everyone will agree that the crimes of the West in the twentieth century undermined the moral basis of his claims, including his past claims."³ For almost all of history, human life has been worth negligible precisely in Western Europe. Today, without immersion in special research, it is even difficult to imagine the Western European tradition of cruelty in all its gloom. The English "virgin queen" Elizabeth I cut off not only Mary Stuart's head, she also executed 89 thousand of their subjects.

Unlike her contemporary Ivan the Terrible, who called her a "vulgar girl", Elizabeth (whose mother, Anne Boleyn, by the way, was also beheaded) did not repent of what she had done either in public or in private, she did not write down those killed in the Synodiki, money for the eternal she did not send commemoration to monasteries. European monarchs never had such habits.

According to the calculations of the historian R. G. Skrynnikov, an expert on the era of Ivan the Terrible, while the tsar was innocently executed and killed from 3 to 4 thousand people. Skrynnikov insists that we are dealing with nothing more than mass terror, especially in relation to Novgorodians, and it is difficult to disagree with him, although Ivan the Terrible is a meek child next to Louis XI, Richard III (whom Shakespeare described as “the most disgusting monster of tyranny”), Henry VIII, Philip II, Duke of Alba, Cesare Borgia, Catherine de Medici, Charles the Evil, Mary the Bloody, Lord Protector Cromwell and a host of other cute European characters.

Even if there is a lot of falsehood against Tsar Ivan⁴, indisputable facts are enough for the Russian consciousness to pass a sentence on him, which is unlikely to be canceled. Among 109 figures on the monument to the Millennium of Russia in Novgorod, among which were the disgraced Alexei Adashev and Mikhail Vorotynsky, as well as the princes of Lithuanian Rus Keistut and Vitovt little-known to our citizens, there was no place for Tsar Ivan.

We can be proud of our moral bar: the British easily forgave their Elizabeth I for the killing of 89 thousand people, and we do not forgive Tsar Ivan the ruined 4 thousand.

But I will continue with examples. During the Albigensian wars, the crusaders massacred more than half of the population of southern France. The pacifier of Prussia, Grand Master of the Order of the Crusaders, Konrad Wallenrod, angry with the Courland bishop, ordered to cut off the right hands of all the peasants of his bishopric. And it was done!

On February 16, 1568 (the time of the height of Ivan the Terrible's oprichnina), the Holy Inquisition condemned all (!) Inhabitants of the Netherlands to death as heretics, and the Spanish king Philip II ordered this sentence to be carried out. It did not quite succeed, but the royal army did what it could. In Haarlem alone, 20 thousand people were killed, and in the Netherlands - 100 thousand.

Do you know which event is dedicated to Goya's etching No. 36 from the Disasters of War series? Order of the French command on February 3, 1809 to hang half of the Spanish prisoners in Northern Spain, every second. But I got ahead of myself prematurely, into the 19th century.

On August 1, 1793, the revolutionary French Convention issued a decree ordering "the destruction of the Vendée." In early 1794 the army got down to business. "The Vendée must become a national cemetery," proclaimed the brave General Tyurro, who led the "infernal columns" of punitive forces. The massacre lasted 18 months. Executions and guillotines (even children's guillotines were delivered from Paris) were not enough for the execution of the decree.

The destruction of people took place, in the opinion of the revolutionaries, not fast enough. We decided: to drown. The city of Nantes, as Norman Davis writes, was "the Atlantic port of the slave trade, and therefore had a fleet of huge floating prisons at hand." But even that fleet would quickly dry up. Therefore, they came up with the idea of bringing a barge laden with people on a reliable rope leash at the mouth of the Loire, drowning it, then pulling it back to the shore with ropes and slightly drying it before using it again. It turned out, writes Davis, "a wonderful reusable execution device."

It was not enough for revolutionary entertainers to simply kill people. They took pleasure in ripping off the spouses' clothes and tying them in pairs before being loaded onto the barges. Pregnant women were tied naked face to face with old men, boys with old women, priests with girls, this was called "republican weddings"⁵.

So that those who hid in the forests did not survive, but died of hunger, cattle were slaughtered, crops and houses were burned. Jacobin General Westerman wrote with enthusiasm to Paris: “Citizens of the Republicans, the Vendee no longer exists! Thanks to our free saber, she died along with her women and their offspring. Using the rights given to me, I trampled children with horses, cut out women. I have not regretted a single prisoner. I destroyed everyone. Whole departments were depopulated⁶, was exterminated, according to various estimates, from 400 thousand to a million people. Sadly, Vendee's French national conscience does not seem to torment.

In Russia, before the appearance of the Bolsheviks, nothing like the Vendée hecatomb had happened. And then it happened: on the Don, in the Tambov province, in other places.

But back to the question of the death penalty. The German lawyer and prison scholar Nikolaus-Heinrich Julius, summarizing English legislation over several centuries, calculated that 6,789 of them contain the death penalty.⁷… I repeat, some historians even insist that England solved the problem of overpopulation in this way.

Back in 1819, there were 225 crimes and misdemeanors in England, punishable by the gallows.

When the doctor of the British Embassy in St. Petersburg wrote in his diary in 1826 how amazed he was that only five criminals were executed in the wake of the Decembrist uprising in Russia, he clearly reflected the notions of his compatriots about the proportionality of crime and punishment.

In our country, he added, in the case of a military mutiny of such magnitude, probably three thousand people would have been executed.

This is how things were looked at throughout Europe. Denmark passed a law in 1800 providing for the death penalty for anyone who “even advised” the abolition of unrestricted government. And eternal hard labor for those who dared to condemn the actions of the government. The Kingdom of Naples at the end of the 18th century dealt with everything supposedly revolutionary, many thousands of people were executed. Contemporaries wrote about the gallows forest.

And now let's take the most ancient code of our law, "Russian Truth", it does not provide for the death penalty at all! From the "Tale of Bygone Years" we know that Vladimir Svyatoslavich tried in 996 to introduce the death penalty for robbers. He did this on the advice of the Byzantine bishops (that is, at the instigation of the West), but was soon forced to abandon the cruel punishments unusual for Russia.

For the first time, the concept of the death penalty appears on the threshold of the 15th century in the Charter Dvina Charter (for the third theft) and in the Pskov Court Charter (for treason, theft from a church, arson, horse-stealing and three-time theft in a posad). That is, the first centuries of our statehood passed without the death penalty, we lived without it almost longer than with it. It is also understandable why this innovation first penetrated Pskov, which had a German version of its name (Pleskau) for a reason.

Pskov was, thanks to its proximity to the lands of the Teutonic and Livonian Orders, sufficiently (no less than Carpathian Rus or Lithuanian Rus) connected with Western Europe. The innovation gradually took root. But even during the Time of Troubles, the death penalty did not become, as someone might think, the usual measure of punishment. The Zemsky Sobor of the First Militia of 1611 prohibits the imposition of the death penalty "without the Zemsky and the whole Earth to sentence", i.e. without the consent of the Zemsky Sobor.

One of the most terrible executions of our Time of Troubles is the hanging of the young son of Marina Mnishek. One recent author (I do not want to advertise for him) calls this "an act unheard of among Christian nations." If his knowledge was not so poor, he could remember at least the story of the death of two young sons of the English king Edward IV, who were secretly strangled, as soon as they were orphaned, by their own uncle, the Duke Richard of Gloucester. After that, he was crowned with a calm heart as Richard III and became famous for many more murders, and two children's skeletons were later found in one of the Tower's casemates.

But back to Russia. The Code of 1649 provides for the death penalty in 63 cases - many, but still infinitely less than in Europe. The podjachi Kotoshikhin, who soon defected to Sweden, assured that many were executed in Moscow for counterfeiting a coin. But isn't it symbolic that Kotoshikhin himself ended his life at the hands of a Swedish executioner?

The Long Tour of Western Europe in 1697-98 made a great impression on the attentive and inquisitive Peter the Great. Among other things, he decided that the material progress of the countries he visited was somehow connected with the cruelty of the local laws and customs and made the appropriate conclusions. It is no coincidence that the most brutal and mass execution of his reign, the execution of 201 rebel archers on September 30, 1698 in Moscow, occurred immediately after the young tsar returned from his 17-month European trip.

However, it is extremely difficult to deal with the established system of values. In terms of the number of executions, even under Peter the Great, Russia did not even remotely come close to the countries that served him as an ideal, and after his death this type of punishment began to decline sharply. The middle of the 18th century was marked by the actual abolition of the death penalty.

In 1764, it turned out that there was no one to carry out the sentence against Vasily Mirovich. For twenty years without executions, the executioner profession has simply disappeared. This profession did not flourish much in Russia in the future.

The next century was marked in Russia by a further softening of morals. Not in the sense that the criminals were recklessly merciful, not at all. There were fewer reasons to punish and pardon. In 1907, the collective work Against the Death Penalty was published in Moscow. Among its authors were Lev Tolstoy, Berdyaev, Rozanov, Nabokov Sr., Tomash Masaryk and other famous writers, jurists and historians. Branding the cruelty of the tsarist power, they provide a complete, accurate and name-by-name list of those executed in Russia during the 81 years between the Decembrist uprising and 1906.

During this time, 2,445 people were executed, i.e. 30 executions were carried out a year. This figure, however, is increased by the two Polish uprisings of 1830 and 1863. and the beginning of the revolution of 1905-1907. If you take peacetime, you get 19 executions per year. To the whole vast Russia! What does this figure say, taking into account the fact that throughout this period the death penalty for premeditated murder was strictly applied? She says that the killings themselves were extremely rare. (By the way, there were Finns in very violent peoples then, they more often than Caucasians used their famous "Finns".)

Even in the 19th century, murder, even if present in real life, remained something very terrible and unacceptable in the concepts of ordinary people. In the old code of law there is a very expressive, terrifying concept of "murder". I don’t want to say that bucolic customs reigned in the 19th century - there was domestic crime, there was robbery and, of course, murder. The question is, how many of them were there, how easily a criminal could dare to commit such a crime.

I myself heard (in 1971, in Irkutsk) how the old professor-geologist Nikolai Aleksandrovich Florensov told, according to his father, about the trips of poor people “on gold”. In the early 1890s, his father, then a young man, twice traveled "on gold" from Irkutsk through half of Siberia, once to Chelyabinsk, and the other to Tyumen (further to European Russia in both cases it was possible to travel by rail).

What are we talking about? There was a laboratory in Irkutsk, where the golden sand of the Siberian mines was brought, and there this gold was turned into ingots. In winter, the annual production of the laboratory was transported by sleigh or by train to the railway. And the poor traveled in boxes of gold, it was free passing transport for them! There was, of course, a freight forwarder and accompanying Cossacks - I think there were two.

Now it is even difficult to imagine such a thing today. And this with those harsh customs on the Siberian roads, about which, for example, Korolenko tells! Apparently, they were severe to a certain extent. The presence of unarmed passengers was more reliable than armed guards. The big gang would easily have killed everyone, but apparently, even for the robbers, there were some taboos, their villainy could not go beyond a certain limit, they did not dare to shed innocent blood. I don't know if there is such a concept in other languages, "innocent blood." I want to believe that there is.

Sex crimes were relatively rare in Russia. And in terms of suicide, Russia was in one of the last places in the world. Suicide shocked people - remember Nekrasov's: “ah, a terrible misfortune happened, we have never heard of such a thing. forever . This, incidentally, is one of the most accurate signs of the spiritual health of a nation.

(It is characteristic that the people clearly realized this peculiarity of theirs. Russia, despite some erosion of religious feeling, still remained to the end a deeply believing country, not without reason that it once chose holiness, Holy Russia as its moral ideal. But it is more painful to fall from a height.)

The rarity of murders shows us the moral character of the people better than any explanation. This appearance is clearly manifested in another important detail.

Above, we have already discussed how important public entertainment and spectacle were public executions in Western Europe. In France, this tradition was interrupted only by the Second World War. In a number of emigre memoirs and diaries, one can find (under 1932) indignation at the fact that an acquaintance N went to look at the execution of Pavel Gorgulov, the assassin of French President Doumer. The last publicly executed in Paris was a certain Weidman in 1939.

Of course, in Russia, executions drew spectators. For example, the executions of Razin, Pugachev, and this should not be surprising. These figures themselves shocked and mesmerized the imagination. And if not Pugacheva? The Dane captain Peder von Haven, who visited St. Petersburg in 1736, wrote that in the capital “the death penalty is not so ceremoniously furnished as in our country (ie in Denmark - AG) or anywhere else. The offender is escorted to the place of execution by a corporal with five or six soldiers, a priest with two little boys dressed in white carrying a censer, as well as only a few old women and children who want to watch this action. The funeral of some kind city dweller often attracts more attention than in Russia the execution of the greatest criminal”.

Other evidence. On the day of the execution of the Gruzinov brothers in Cherkassk, October 27, 1800, the police bypassed the houses of the inhabitants and expelled all residents to the Haymarket, where the execution took place⁸… It is also characteristic that at the moment of execution (of anyone's) the Russian people took off their hats, many turned away and closed their eyes. And one more important detail. After the execution of Pugachev, those gathered did not inspect the continuation of the execution - the whipping of his accomplices. “The people then immediately began to disperse,” we read from the memoirist Andrei Bolotov, a witness “rare and unusual in our country [! - A. G.] spectacle "⁹.

This is the behavior of people who are disgusted with everything cruel, even if they do not doubt the deservedness of punishment.

Parisians during the French Revolution behaved differently. According to the Chronique de Paris (quoted by the aforementioned Michel Foucault), “at the first use of the guillotine, the people complained that nothing was visible, and loudly demanded: give us back the gallows! ».

These two types of behavior reflect some deep ethnopsychological differences that originate in ancient times. (Today they are quieting: the global cultural revolution of the 20th century has greatly ironed out the differences between peoples.)

To change the Russian attitude to the death penalty it took a complete collapse of the entire inner world of our people, which occurred in 1917. Millions of soldiers took the tsar's abdication as their permission from the military oath, which they had taken to the tsar, God and the fatherland. The Duma sages, who advised the tsar to abdicate, did not take into account an elementary thing. The common people perceived the oath as a terrible oath, breaking which meant going to hell. The soldiers perceived the tsar's abdication as their release from the oath before the tsar, and before God, and before the fatherland, as permission to do whatever they wanted.

A harsh argument in the hands of those who claim that "human life has never been valued in Russia" has long been the statement: "Petersburg is on its bones." For the first time it was launched by the Swedes in the middle of the 18th century (of course, it was the mouth of the Neva that was taken away from them, it was the Swedish prisoners who cut through the first glades of future streets), it was reproduced countless times - mainly by compassionate domestic authors.

But also European, of course, too - the French writer Luc Durten, one of many, wrote in his book about the USSR in 1927 (“Another Europe”): “The construction of this city from stone took more human lives than excavation in Versailles … City stands on the bones - in the swamp, where Tsar Peter buried 150 thousand workers. A city on bones is something that everyone knows, isn't it?

True, no one has ever presented evidence of this "well-known truth", and the very first test (A. M. Burovsky, "Petersburg as a geographical phenomenon", St. Petersburg, 2003) showed: the city on the bones is a complete fiction, absolutely nothing and nowhere confirmed …

The same as the "Potemkin villages". The myth about them was debunked by the late Academician A. M. Panchenko. This is not entirely on the topic of this chapter, but the reader will forgive. The fable about the "Potemkin villages", like much in the western visits to Russia, is a product of simple human envy. In 1787, Catherine II showed the Austrian emperor Joseph, the Polish king Stanislav Poniatowski and foreign ambassadors her new Black Sea lands and the Crimea.

The guests were shocked by Russia's acquisitions, especially against the backdrop of Austria's failures in Turkish affairs and the deplorable state of Poland. The scope of construction in Kherson, Nikolaev, Sevastopol was also shocking, especially the shipyard, from the stocks of which the first ships were launched in the presence of guests. Years passed when, suddenly, a travel participant Gelbig (who was the ambassador of Saxony to the Russian court in 1787) wrote that the villages along the Dnieper were decorations that were transported at night to a new place, and the cattle were driven.

Technically, this would be impossible, but the enlightened public is not strong in such things. The childish delight that swept Europe defies description. What psychological compensation! The countries squeezed by their geography have the opportunity to say to themselves: all Russian victories, acquisitions, fortresses, ships, the whole of Novorossia - this is simply painted on canvas, hurray!

The "Potemkin villages" hoax is perhaps the most successful in world history. Two hundred years have passed since Gelbig, but here are the titles of translated articles about Russia, which I found at the same time on the InoSMI. Ru website:

Potemkin Village Policy in Russia (Christian Science Monitor); Nonproliferation in Russian - Potemkin Village (National Review); Free Market Potemkin (The Wall Street Journal); Potemkin-Style Economic Growth (Welt am Sonntag); Potemkin Gross Domestic Product (The Wall Street Journal); Potemkin Elections (Christian Science Monitor); Potemkin Democracy (The Washington Post); Potemkin Russia (Le Monde); Grigory Yavlinsky: Russia Built a Potemkin Village (Die Welt); Elena Bonner: Vladimir Potemkin (The Wall Street Journal).

It is not the clichés of thinking that amaze (what to do, this is a built-in property of Western, and indeed any other, journalism), it is the power of passion that amazes. The persistence of the absurdity about the "Potemkin villages" is a fact of Western, not Russian history. Such indifference of the West to Russia is very reminiscent of the attitude of a boy pulling a girl by the braid so that she would pay attention to him, admit that he is the best, and fall in love.

¹ During or shortly after the executioner Derrick, slewing cranes appeared in English ports. In England, they immediately began to be called "derrick cranes", then this name, but without any hanging overtones, took root in other places, including Russia.

² But today's Englishman courageously writes about Russia (!) The following: "Cruelty in this Eurasian society has always been the norm of life." Further, it is no less interesting: "The European rule that 98% of people elect their ruling elite contradicts the Russian, still Asian, in a broad sense, understanding" (The Guardian, July 31, 2006).

Ninety-eight percent, just think. That is, the must and the ideal, quite in the traditions of socialist realism, is declared to be. Learn and play with it.

³ Davis, Norman. History of Europe. - M., 2004. S. 21.

⁴ Now this is being proved more and more persistently, but no one can refute the moral assessments given to the tsar by the highest spiritual authorities of his time. When the oprichnina began, Metropolitan Athanasius, not wanting to consecrate what was happening with his name, retired in May 1566 to a monastery. The tsar had already made Archbishop German (Polev) the metropolitan of Kazan, but he did not show any gratitude, but on the contrary - in a conversation with the tsar announced that a terrible judgment awaited him, called for an end to the reprisals. “He has not even been elevated to the Metropolitanate, but is already binding me involuntarily,” Ivan said and stopped the enthronement.

Hegumen of the Solovetsky Monastery Philip (Kolychev), elevated to dignity on July 27, 1566, agreed to become the new metropolitan on condition that the executions cease. Exactly a year later, the executions resumed. The Metropolitan tried to influence the tsar without publicity, but in vain. Then, in March 1568, on Sunday in the Assumption Cathedral of the Kremlin, Philip publicly denounced Ivan and refused him a blessing three times in a row. The humiliation of the king was unheard of.

⁸ months later, the tsar got the church council to depose Philip for "magic" and other fictitious sins and sentenced him to exile. A year later, in the Tverskoy Otroch monastery, the chief oprichnik Malyuta Skuratov came to Philip for a blessing. The saint refused him and was strangled by Skuratov in anger. The spiritual authority of Athanasius, Herman and Philip is more than a sufficient basis for the existing attitude in Russia towards Ivan the Terrible, and Philip, canonized in 1661, under Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, can be regarded as the patron saint of Russian rights and freedoms.

⁵ Plavinskaya N. Yu. Vendee. // New and recent history. No. 6, 1993.

⁶ The word "Vendee" was already used then to designate a counter-revolutionary edge and counter-revolution in general. Actually, the department of Vendee is only one of the centers of the royalist uprising and the ensuing reprisals. In fact, these events covered nine departments in the northwest of France.

⁷ Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Russian Bibliographic Institute Pomegranate. T. 39. - M., b.g. [1934]. Stb. 583.

⁸ Anisimov E. V. The people at the scaffold. // Star. No. 11, 1998.

⁹ And what the Soviet school textbooks were silent about: “The pardoned rebels were brought before the Faceted Chamber on the next day of executions. Forgiveness was announced to them and the shackles were removed in front of all the people … At the end of 1775 [Pugachev was executed on January 10, 1775 - A. G.] a general forgiveness was announced and the whole thing was commanded to be consigned to eternal oblivion "(Pushkin's" History of Pugachev "). Was there a more merciful country in the memory of mankind?

Alexander Goryanin, fragment of the book "Traditions of Freedom and Property in Russia" (Moscow: 2007)