Late Witchcraft Prosecutions in Imperial Russia within a Comparative European Context

Abstract

While Russia was an early practitioner within a European context in ceasing to apply the death penalty against suspected witches and sorcerers in 1744, it continued to prosecute them in what became a two-tiered system under Catherine II that lasted until the mid-nineteenth century. The last known prosecutions of witchcraft in Russia in the 1860s occurred several decades after the very last trials in places such as Bavaria (1792), Württemberg (1805), and Spain (1820). Based on archival and legal sources, this essay focuses on Catherine’s limited measures of decriminalization largely through the creation of “merciful” courts of equity in Russian and Ukrainian areas of the empire and their unintended consequences, including the aggravation of existing social tensions in the countryside.