ABSTRACT
No body of superstitions lasted longer or exerted a greater influence on the psyche of the Russian peasant than that surrounding sorcery. Belief in personages who possessed supernatural powers with which to inflict harm—in the popular designation “spoiling”—persisted well into the Soviet era. Indeed, reports from the end of the nineteenth century indicate that every rural settlement could claim at least one such personage.1 The range of misfortunes that the peasants attributed to sorcery was wide and included crop failure, drought, the drying up of milk cows, family discord, infertility, epidemics, and various illnesses. Numerous judicial documents, newspaper reports, and ethnographic materials paint a vivid picture of this facet of Russian village life and testify that scenes of mass hysteria and mob violence were not uncommon. For example, from Nizhnii Novgorod Province in 1848 comes an eyewitness account of an entire village’s frenzied pursuit of a multicolored dog believed to be the transformation of a witch responsible for cholera.2 In 1879 in Tikhvin District of Novgorod Province villagers locked a fifty-year-old woman in her hut and burned her alive for “spoiling” several local girls; in 1888 near Khar ′kov peasants beat a supposed sorcerer to death.3 In addition to a lengthy list of murders and near murders, there were instances of exhuming the dead bodies of sorcerers and witches thought to be still active in causing drought and other calamities.4
