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| Bloody Mary: Schoolgirl Who Gave Birth in Toilet Follows in Footsteps of Tsar's Mistress |
| 2024-11-13 |
| Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Dmitry Gubin [REGNUM] In December, 18-year-old Russian schoolgirl Ekaterina Burnashkina will be tried in Turkey. The question of extradition is not on the table until the trial is completed, her lawyer recently told TASS. The news of what Ekaterina did "blew up" the media space of Russia and Turkey in mid-October: the young woman became pregnant out of wedlock, gave birth in the toilet of the Antalya airport and tried to drown the child in the toilet. Let's be honest, Burnashkina faces a serious sentence in Turkey. If the newborn girl had not survived, it could well have been a life sentence, without any options (Article 82, paragraph 1. i of the Criminal Code of the Turkish Republic). But, fortunately, the baby was lucky not to choke, which means there is a chance to get less. In Russia, Burnashkina faces a maximum of four years in prison for leaving a child in danger. And even then, only if an attempt on the baby's life is proven. By the way, the baby has already received confirmation of Russian citizenship at the consulate. The severity of the punishment prescribed in the Turkish criminal code can be explained by practical considerations. The Turks are clearly not interested in cases like the incident at Antalya airport becoming a precedent. As previously noted by the Regnum news agency, abandoned newborns are a rarity in Turkey. The severity of local laws is also a consequence of the historically established attitude towards children's lives as a special value. For Turkey, as a Muslim country, the issue of infanticide is absolutely clear, because the Koran says: "Do not kill your children for fear of poverty, for We provide for them and for you. Indeed, killing children is a grave sin." Of course, the Russian Orthodox Church, as well as other Christian denominations, also views the attack on the life of a child in the same ethically unambiguous way—as the gravest mortal sin. Another thing is that historically, in the “lower classes” of society, among the peasant class, there were frequent cases of the murder of newborn babies born out of wedlock. "A woman or a girl will give birth somewhere in a cage alone, then strangle the baby with her hands and throw it either into the water (with a stone on its neck), or into thick hemp, or in the yard, or bury it somewhere in a pig's sack... The matter remained "without consequences. Peasants do not like inquiries and criminality," wrote the researcher of peasant life Olga Semenova-Tyan-Shanskaya at the beginning of the 20th century. But at the same time, "walking girls" in general and child killers in particular were unequivocally condemned by the peasant "world". But the written "sovereign" law treated such crimes differently, and in certain periods strangely softly, almost like the current Russian Criminal Code. For example, the Cathedral Code of 1649, adopted under Peter I's father, Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, stated : “And if a father or mother kills a son or daughter to death, then they are to be put in prison for a year, and after serving a year in prison, they are to come to the church of God and announce that sin to all the people.” Severe punishment under this code was only given to a woman who "began to live a lewd and vile life" and got rid of a child born in sin. In essence, it was not so much infanticide that was punished, but, as they would say now, extramarital sex. But the attitude clearly changed under Peter the Great. The "Military Article" of 1715 made no distinction between legitimate children and bastards: "If someone... brazenly kills a child in infancy," the criminal was to be punished in the most severe manner possible - by breaking on the wheel. Legal historians write: Peter's law was perhaps the first to equate the taking of children's lives with "aggravated murder." Peter, who executed his adult son, Tsarevich Alexei, for treason, sharply increased penalties for the deaths of young children. It is quite possible that this - ethically more than adequate - decision of the tsar-reformer, which determined the laws of the Russian Empire for centuries, was a consequence of certain circumstances in Peter's personal life. And these circumstances, we note, vividly recall the story of Ekaterina Burnashkina. Two years before the adoption of the "Article of War", in 1713, Pyotr Alekseevich, so to speak, became closely acquainted with the maid of honor of Tsarina Catherine, the maid Maria Hamilton (or, as she was called in palace documents, Marya Danilovna Gamontova). If the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the name "Hamilton" is Admiral Horatio Nelson's mistress, that's not entirely true. Lady Emma Hamilton, born Amy Lyon, is only indirectly related to the noble Scottish family. But our Marya Danilovna is the most direct. Her ancestor, Thomas Hamilton, came to Russia during the reign of Ivan the Terrible. During the reign of Alexei Mikhailovich, Maria Danilovna's cousin married the all-powerful head of the Ambassadorial Prikaz, Artamon Matveyev. Maria Hamilton was not distinguished by strict morals, in the spirit of the times, which was later described by Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov : "The passion of love, previously almost unknown in coarse morals, began to take possession of sensitive hearts... Wives, previously not feeling their beauty, began to know its power." It is not surprising that "Lady Mary" was among the so-called mistresses of the Tsar of all Russia. In the year of the adoption of the "Military Articles", in 1715, the famous turner Andrei Nartov, who helped Peter in his passion for crafts, wrote in his diary: “Hamilton, a close confidant of the Empress, was admitted to His Majesty’s turnery; he embraced her, patted her on the shoulder, and said: “It’s good to love girls, but not always, otherwise, Andrei, let’s forget the craft.” It is known that Peter married his mistresses to his orderlies, and they gave birth to very worthy sons. For example, Artamon Matveyev's granddaughter Maria Andreyevna gave birth to Field Marshal Pyotr Rumyantsev-Zadunaisky, and Avdotya Ivanovna Rzhevskaya gave birth to two Field Marshals and one actual privy councilor. With Maria Hamilton, things turned out differently. When the Tsar cooled towards her, "Marya Gamontova" began to live with Peter the Great's orderly, the nobleman Ivan Mikhailovich Orlov, uncle of the Orlov brothers, who "roared" during the reign of Catherine II. In 1716, this stormy romance developed, but soon Orlov got tired of Hamilton and consoled himself with the already mentioned Avdotya Chernysheva, née Rzhevskaya. In November 1717, unmarried Marya Danilovna Gamontova gave birth to a child from an unknown father. And she hurried to get rid of the baby. Later, during the investigation, the maid Maria Terpovskaya reported how the infanticide took place. And its terrible details are painfully reminiscent of the story of Ekaterina Burnashkina. “First Mary came to her chamber, where she lived and pretended to be ill, and first lay down on the bed, and then soon ordered me to lock the doors and began to suffer for her family; and soon getting up from the bed, sat down on the bedpan and, sitting, lowered the baby into the bedpan. And I then stood near her and heard that there was a knock on the bedpan and the baby cried out... Then, standing and turning to the bedpan, Mary with her hands put her finger in the baby's mouth and began to press, and lifted the baby and pressed it down." Then, in the palace outhouse, they found the body of a baby wrapped in a palace napkin. An investigation began, led by the Tsar himself. The investigative documents recorded that Ivan Orlov, being beaten with a whip, confirmed in writing that it was he, Orlov, who was the father of several children, who had been born out of fornication and killed by their mother. Peter signed the sentence: “The girl Marya Gamontova, who lived promiscuously with Ivan Orlov and was pregnant by him three times and killed two children with medicines, and strangled and abandoned the third, for such murder... is to be executed.” On March 14, 1719, Maria Hamilton was beheaded on Trinity Square in St. Petersburg. The servant Terpovskaya was sentenced to be flogged and sent to a spinning yard. But the nobleman Ivan Orlov was simply ordered to be "released" after he testified. The historical legend says that Peter, supposedly, could suspect that the "girl Maria" had "children" from him, Peter, just like other mistresses. And Orlov only took upon himself the "guilt" of fatherhood and therefore was released. This, let us note once again, is a legend. But there is another piece of evidence. A number of authors, including the 19th-century historian Mikhail Semevsky, mention reports that at the end of the reign of Catherine II, Princess Ekaterina Dashkova, looking through the accounts of the Russian Academy of Sciences, came across a large consumption of alcohol. And she found out: the liquid was used to change the solution in large glass vessels containing two severed human heads - a man's and a woman's - stored in the basement of the Kunstkamera for more than 50 years. They raised archives from the time of Peter the Great, and it turned out that the preserved heads belonged to Maria Hamilton and Willim Mons, the brother of another of Peter the Great’s mistresses, Anna Mons, who was executed because he was in favor with Catherine I. If we assume that this version is true, then the sharp increase in punishment for infanticide under Peter I has an additional justification. Another interesting coincidence: there is a famous Scottish ballad Mary Hamilton, known among others by Joan Baez. The work is usually attributed to the 16th century, but the plot of one of the versions of the ballad - coincidentally or not - is very reminiscent of the drama of our, Russian Bloody Mary. According to the plot, the maid of honor Mary Hamilton, who was in favor with the king, once said she was ill ("just a stomach ache "), and then the queen learned that Mary had given birth and drowned her baby. As a result, the girl Hamilton is executed. This is what they did in the Scottish and English kingdoms, and this is what they had to do, by law, in the Russian Empire after the reforms of Peter the Great (which, it is possible, were influenced by the case of Maria Danilovna Hamilton). Severe punishment, already by virtue of Turkish legal and religious tradition, also threatens Ekaterina Burnashkina, who unknowingly, but down to the details, repeated the crime of Peter the Great’s maid of honor. |
| Posted by:badanov |