Witchcraft Trials in Seventeenth-Century Russia

Abstract

IN HIS CONTROVERSIAL ESSAY "The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," H. R. Trevor-Roper noted that, as a result of the Schism of 1054, "the Slavonic countries of Europe-with the exception of Catholic Poland, the exception which proves the rule-escaped participation in one of the most disreputable episodes in Christian history." Similarly, in his recent book Europe's Inner Demons Norman Cohn observed that the great witch hunt was "an exclusively Western phenomenon-Eastern Europe, the world of Orthodox Christianity was untouched by it. "' Did Muscovite Russia, that proverbially "rude and barbarous kingdom," indeed manage to preserve its innocence while other, ostensibly more civilized nations went mad with witch hysteria? At least one highly respected Russian scholar, Nikolai la. Novombergskii, did not think so. In the introduction to his collection of seventeenth-century Muscovite witchcraft trial records published in I906, he wrote, "Considering the overall significance of the historical documents presented here, we find that witchcraft trials were conducted in Russia with the same degree of cruelty as those in the West and that government authorities of the Muscovite state cooperated in these trials as zealously as did their counterparts in Catholic and Protestant countries."2 Keith Thomas has recently defined witchcraft "as the attribution of misfortune to occult human agency." According to this definition, a witch was someone with the ability to injure others mysteriously. The terms vedun