Criminal anthropology of mariticide in Russia. Foreword to the article by P.N. Tarnovskaya “Female criminality in connection with early marriages”

Introduction

Crime as a type of deviant behavior has attracted public attention since biblical times. The criminal behavior analysis was addressed not only by specialists in various fields of knowledge, but also by writers. Accumulation of information about criminal behavior, its causes and measures to counteract this social evil, led to a need to streamline this knowledge within a unified science of crime. As a result of long and heated discussions about the name and structure of the science of crime, as well as its place in the system of scientific knowledge, an Italian criminologist Rafael Garofallo determined its name – Criminologia (criminology) (Garofalo, 1885). This name was supported by the opponents of the Italian anthropological theory of crime prevention – French scholars, including the most prominent representative of the French school of criminology, Gabriel de Tarde (Tarde, 1888. Pp. 512–533). All the other issues outlined above are still under endless discussion. However, in some states, including Russia, criminology was defined as part of criminal law sciences by the decision of public authorities with special competence¹, while the academic community suggested its structure and subject boundaries, reflected in para. 4 of the Passport of scientific specialty.

Procedure and result of the article assessment

Notably, even at the dawn of criminology, experts studying crime found that the ratio of deviant and criminal behavior differs between men and women (Herrmann, 1833. Pp. 257–295; Herrmann, 1836. Pp. 585–599; Ozerov, 1896. Pp. 45–83; Leale, 1910. Pp. 401–430). In this regard, experts began to more actively investigate female criminality as an independent phenomenon (Reingardt, 1890; Van Hamel, 1894. Pp. 385–391; Foynickiy, 1892; 1893a. Pp. 123–144; 1893b. Pp. 111–140; 1893c. P. 3; Zeland, 1899; Granier, 1906; Minovici, 1907. Pp. 565–579; Esipov, 1909a. Pp. 393–397; 1909b. Pp. 397–399; Lacaze, 1911. Pp. 449–456) and its separate types. Sharp discussions on this issue began among leading European criminologists (Tarnovskiy, 1893. Pp. 33–64; Polemica... 1894. Pp. 318–320). Our compatriot Praskovya Nikolayevna Tarnovskaya was one of the most reputable European experts investigating female deviance, including prostitution and crime. By the end of the 19^th c., she had a significant amount of scientific anthropological and criminological works on the issues of deviance and criminality of women, published in the Russian language (Tarnovskaya, 1891a; 1891b. Pp. 1–67; 1888. Pp. 58–62; 1894. Pp. 93–105; 1897. Pp. 8–22) and in foreign languages (Tarnowsky, 1889; Tarnosky, 1893. Pp. 225–233; Tarnowsky, 1897. Pp. 231–237). What should be born in mind, P. N. Tarnovskaya was just on the rise of her creative forces and actively continued her research. While maintaining her criminological specialization – the study of women’s criminality, by the end of the 19^th century she only changed the focus of her scientific interest: from female prostitution and theft to female criminal violence – murders.

One of the first works by P. N. Tarnovskaya, which opened a series of studies on murders committed by women, was an article published in 1898 in issue 5 of Severny Vestnik Journal under the title “Female criminality in connection with early marriages” (Tarnovskaya, 1898. Pp. 133–149). The work had a clear logical structure: introduction, research and conclusion. Its content was largely devoted to the anthropological study of Russian peasant women who committed mariticide due to premature marriage. In the introduction, the author examined in detail the adverse effects of marriage on girls who had not reached puberty: high mortality rate of infants under one year of age; psychological traumas, especially when a teenage wife was married off by her parents against her will and marital relations were painful for her. This situation provoked teenage wives to murder their husbands, who were perceived as tormentors. Based on her own experience of dealing with husband-murdering wives at the Moscow transfer prison and other penitentiary institutions, P. N. Tarnovskaya highlighted the overwhelming disgust or extreme painfulness of marital relations as the main reason for mariticide by wives who had not reached puberty. In this regard, she concludes that young women killing their husbands were victims of social ill-being, namely, early marriages. In addition to these, the objective conditions contributing to mariticide included forced marriage and harsh treatment in a new family; impossibility of divorce for peasant women, brought to a desperate situation; moral bluntness, and some deviations from the norm in the development of sexual feeling.

P. N. Tarnovskaya considered one of the reasons as a special category – deviation from the normal development of sexual feeling. In all, she identified five main categories of such deviations: delayed puberty; temporary indifference, or temporary aversion to the husband; complete indifference to sexual life; abnormal desire for a person of the same sex, which has not yet turned into actual perversion; aversion from a normal act, combined with sexual perversion. For each type of sexual abnormalities, P. N. Tarnovskaya described five typical cases of mariticidal women in the research part of her work. She provided anthropometric measurements and interviews, as well as the data from the convicts’ personal files. She did not disclose the full socio-demographic characteristics of the mariticidal women, designating their personal data as Olga K., Pelageya V., Olga P., Nastasia L. and Lukerya Ivanova.

Concluding her study, P. N. Tarnovskaya pointed out the need to eliminate the causes of criminal behavior of mariticidal women both regarding the perpetrator, in the form of predisposing reasons, and on the part of society, in the form of causing reasons. In her opinion, a deficient sexual feeling in women is not a crime, but under certain social conditions it leads to mariticide, while outside these conditions, they can remain honest people for the rest of their lives. Without marrying early, having the opportunity to end their hated relationships by divorce, these teenage wives would not have become criminals. P. N. Tarnovskaya noted that, having studied the causes of the female murderers’ criminality, society could reduce their number not only by threats, retribution and punishment, but by humane, reasonable treatment of the weak, unstable and abnormally developed women. Turning to criminal anthropology as the doctrine of crime, she compared the issues of crime prevention to those of social hygiene. She came to conclusion that just as the task of public hygiene was to prevent diseases, the task of criminal anthropology was crime hygiene: the study of the causes of crimes and the prevention of their recurrence in the future.

Our comparison of the presented work with P. N. Tarnovskaya’s subsequent works showed that later P. N. Tarnovskaya used the results of a study of rural women-mariticides, first of all, for her largest and most popular scientific work to date, the monograph Female murderers, published in St. Petersburg in 1902 (Tarnovskaya, 1902). Later, it was revised and republished in the French language in Paris. This translated work also used the results mentioned in the article under study (Tarnowsky, 1908). At the same time, the results of the anthropometric measurement of female homicides presented in the article, with some other information, including the convicts’ photographs, were published in the mentioned monograph of 1902. Four photographs were placed in Chapter VIII “Murders motivated by sexual feeling and its deviations”: Olga Aleksandrova Kolova, 20 years old (Tarnovskaya, 1902. Pp. 349–350); Olga Dmitriyevna Plem..., 19 years old (Tarnovskaya, 1902. Pp. 365–366); Nastasia Log..., 20 years old (Tarnovskaya, 1902. Pp. 369–571), and Lukerya Ivanova Lop..., 26 years old (Tarnovskaya, 1902. Pp. 378–380). One more photograph – that of Pelageya Vasilyeva, 19 years old (Tarnovskaya, 1902. Pp. 417–418) – was placed in chapter X “Murderers with nervous and mental diseases”. The study results had a significant impact on the quality of the work, primarily on the conclusions reached in the chapter “Murders motivated by sexual feelings and their deviations”. Judging by the chronology of P. N. Tarnovskaya’s research, the presented article was her first work, which launched a series of new scientific studies devoted to female murderers.

Brief conclusions on the presented work

The work of P. N. Tarnovskaya “Female criminality in connection with early marriages” is a complete comprehensive criminological and anthropological empirical scientific research devoted to the study of the personality of a rural mariticidal woman. It allows assessing the impact of early marriages and murder-facilitating conditions on the criminal behavior of women. It also contains scientific recommendations on the general social prevention of mariticide by Russian peasant women.

The presented article by P. N. Tarnovskaya has an important scientific value. It refutes the stereotypes generally accepted in modern Russian criminology that representatives of the anthropological trend in pre-revolutionary criminology ignored the social causes of crime, preferring biological human flaws as factors of criminal behavior (Appendix). P. N. Tarnovskaya highlighted not only the personal factors of women’s criminality, but also the social factors of mariticide, namely, the established tradition of parents marrying off their daughters who were not ready for family life. The work reasonably suggested general social measures to prevent mariticide, rather than to eliminate the biological defects of convicted women.

APPENDIX

P. N. Tarnovskaya

FEMALE CRIMINALITY IN CONNECTION WITH EARLY MARRIAGES²

Translated into the modern Russian language by A. G. Khoroshavina, translated into English by E. N. Belyaeva

Anyone interested in the life of our peasant population is well aware that marriages among them are committed at an early age. The late Professor M. I. Gorvits³, who belonged to the brilliant galaxy of scientists who taught in the 1970s⁴ at the Medical and Surgical Academy and at the Women’s Medical Courses at Nikolayevskiy Hospital, established in one of his monographs on women’s diseases, based on carefully verified data, that, on average, puberty among urban girls occurs between the ages of 14–15 and among the rural population – two years later, i.e. between the ages of 16–17. However, it is during these years that marriages among peasant women take place, so many girls are married before maturity, while others are married during the period of transition from adolescence to youth. Meanwhile, hardly anyone will dispute that this period in the life of girls is not a favorable moment for getting married.

As one cannot undertake physiological experiments on humans, many conclusions of the natural sciences – biology and medicine – are based on the analogy of the classes of animals closest to humans that are subjected to vivisection⁵. Using this generally established rule, I will allow myself to draw some analogy from the field of zoology for this case. All foreign and domestic researchers involved in the improvement of animal breeds are well aware of the fact that the offspring of very young mothers gives a weak, poorly developed and insufficiently resilient generation and that in general the first litters of very young producers usually give weak individuals who are not the best representatives of the breed.

In addition to extreme youth, our peasant women, when getting married, have another unfavorable factor for childbirth – they, as a new member of another family, immediately fall into conditions of hard work and perform it until the very childbirth. The natural consequence of these two unfavorable conditions – very young age and hard physical labor – for an organism that has not yet reached its full physiological development should undoubtedly be the birth of a weak, frail, and poorly resilient generation, unable to successfully combat childhood diseases. The high mortality rate among Russian children, especially in the villages, is, unfortunately, an undoubted fact. It is worth taking a look at the statistical tables of mortality to make sure that in all countries the mortality of children under the age of one is the highest in comparison with the mortality of children in subsequent years of life. In Russia, the mortality rate of children under one year of age surpasses other states in this respect and reaches astounding figures. For example, in Europe, an average of 18% of children born alive die before the age of one, in Russia – about 27 %, and in foster homes 70–90 % die in the first year of life⁶.

The hereditary transmission of the features of the parents’ body organization is an established fact in the biological sciences. A well-developed, healthy and strong mother’s body with a weak, frail father becomes the predominant factor, favorably affecting the offspring. On the contrary, the very young age of mothers, as well as the hard physical labor performed by their fragile, under-developed bodies, cannot but have a debilitating effect on the children of the peasant population.

Besides the physical organization of a human being, there is also the spiritual and moral side of the personality of these teenage wives, who are often married off by their parents at their own discretion, often against their personal desires. Under the natural conditions of transition to marital life, this period leaves an indelible mark on a woman’s mental life. The conditions of the first months of marriage have a decisive impact, if not on the rest of life, then on many of the woman’s best years. What should be the living conditions of a teenage wife in those unfortunately very frequent cases, when she was married off at the age of 16, when her body is not yet adapted to changes in life, when marital relations can only be painful for her? All this is further aggravated if she is married off against her own wishes, to a man she dislikes, to whom she feels nothing but aversion as her tormentor⁷.

When I visited prisons and stockades, especially the Moscow Central Transfer Prison, where female criminals convicted of murder, arson and other criminal offenses are gathered from all over Russia every spring and where they are awaiting transfer to Siberia or Sakhalin, I was struck by the extremely young age of some women convicted of murder. Among them, there were absolutely childish faces, small, thin, scrofulous 17–18-year-old teenagers, who involuntarily made one wonder how they got here, what could have prompted these half-children to evil-doing. After much questioning, I managed to hear a confession that the murder of her husband, most often poisoning, was committed as a result of irresistible disgust or the extreme painfulness of marital relations. Being in some way victims of the imperfect social structure, these young mariticides involuntarily forced one to delve into their sad fate and to search for the essential reasons that pushed them to such a grave crime.

Early marriages are ubiquitous in Russia, but most women who are married at an early age, often against their personal wishes, come to terms with their unpleasant fate, then get used to it and, despite the hopelessness of their situation, very rarely resort to murdering their husbands.

Obviously, besides the conditions of early marriages, besides forced marriage, besides the insurmountable difficulties for peasant women to divorce their husbands, there are also specific circumstances that encourage some of these teenage wives to resort to crime. Among such motivating reasons, there are undoubtedly some deviations from the normal development of the sexual feeling. These deviations from the proper development of the sexual feeling represent a great many varieties and shades, from mild degrees to undoubted, obvious anomalies, which, of course, are inappropriate to analyze here in detail and which I will touch upon only in the most general terms.

In my opinion, deviations from the proper development of the sexual feeling can be divided into five main categories:

Delayed puberty, when its onset, instead of 16–17 years, which is common for peasant girls, occurs at the age of 19–20, 21 and even 22 years. Such a delayed development is accompanied by a complete (temporary) lack of sexual desire, complete indifference, while with the onset of maturity, sexual feeling awakens and can subsequently be established quite normally.

Regardless of the maturity that has already occurred, temporary indifference or temporary aversion to a spouse may occur, which is found in hysterical women, who, as is known, may have either increased or, conversely, periodically extremely lowered sexual feeling. The manifestations of hysteria, especially in women, are infinitely diverse and represent a long range of various, more or less complex, weaker or more clearly expressed symptoms, ranging from the so-called hysterical temperament, expressed by character oddities and accompanied by one or more of the usual companions of hysteria (changes in pain and tactile sensitivity, anesthesia or hyperesthesia; presence of pain points; limitation of visual fields, insensitivity to colors, color blindness; prolonged body temperature rise – hysterical fever, hysterical vomiting, etc.) and ending with the classic convulsive seizures of hystero-epilepsy⁸, so wonderfully analyzed in the lectures of the brilliant J. M. Charcot⁹,¹⁰. Temporary indifference, temporary aversion to sexual intercourse in a woman can often exist on hysterical grounds.

Regardless of the above, one may observe:

Complete indifference to sexual intercourse, when a woman remains impassionate throughout her life and reluctantly agrees to marital intimacy solely out of a desire to have children. Such sexual indifference turns into deep disgust, open hostility and ultimate hatred when she is raped by an unloved husband. These cases include mainly late marriages of convenience (on the part of the girl), ending in divorce in the privileged class and mariticide in the peasant environment.

Another shade of indifference is an instinctively existing, vaguely realized abnormal desire for a person of the same sex, which has not yet turned into an actual perversion and can remain so for a very long time, sometimes for a lifetime. At the same time there is a cooling towards the normal satisfaction of sexual feeling. This category includes examples of passionate friendship between girls or married women; the desire to be liked, to show themselves in the most favorable light; the desire to court, to please, to render services, to become needed, to see the object of one’s adoration daily, to admire and flatter her – exactly as it happens during the period of falling in love between persons of different sexes.

Aversion to a normal act, combined with sexual perversion, is a pathological phenomenon rarely observed, especially since confessions on this basis are made very reluctantly and in exceptional cases, explained by some kind of desperate situation.

Based on the described deviations from the correct development of sexual feeling and more or less clearly expressed anomalies, mariticides are mainly committed, the largest number of them falling in the first group, which includes cases of early marriages with delayed sexual development. Over time, as the body develops, the sexual feeling can wake up and then function quite normally. There are examples when such young women entered into cohabitation with a lover or, if the attempt to poison her husband failed, reconciled with him, voluntarily continued to live with him in marriage and gave birth to common children. Such is the example I provide:

Observation I. Olga K. (20 years old)

She was sentenced to 6 years of hard labor for attempted poisoning of her husband. Her parents are alive. Her father is 67 years old, he is sickly, “feeble”, cannot work, drinks a lot. His wife, Olga’s mother, Avdotya L., is 57 years old. She is a strong, intelligent and hardworking woman. She ran a field farm instead of her husband. She had 13 children, of whom 6 are alive. She is held in prison with her daughter, whom she loves dearly. Avdotya is accused of complicity in the poisoning of her son-in-law, her daughter’s husband.

Olga K. was 20 years old at the time of observation. She has light-brown hair and brown, almost black, eyes. She is tall, slender, extremely thin. Her face is somewhat asymmetrical and tapers sharply to the chin. Her head is irregularly shaped, the parietal part is strongly developed, the transverse largest size is 150 mm, with 172 mm of anterior-posterior size. The hard palate bones did not fuse. Functional examination of vision, taste, smell, hearing, pain and tactile sensitivity did not reveal any deviations from the norm. The knee reflex is weakened in both lower extremities.

Olga K. got married at the age of 18, before puberty. Her husband was much older than her and treated her kindly and well, but Olga began to feel an irresistible aversion to him, which led her to the point that she tried to poison him. She got married “by agreement” between the parents, since the groom was from a wealthy family. The wedding took place in the autumn of 1889, and in February 1890 she put arsenic in her husband’s herring, and he showed signs of poisoning. Suspecting that he was poisoned, the husband began to drink milk and interrogate his wife. She confessed everything.

Her husband’s family rushed to report her actions to the police, and an investigation began. Meanwhile, the husband and wife reconciled, and as the judicial investigation was underway, they began to live very amicably. With the onset of puberty, Olga K. stopped feeling aversion to her husband, so he began to make efforts to terminate the case, but this could not be achieved. She was tried and found guilty.

Olga K. is a good-looking and slender woman, but at the age of 20 she has not yet developed; she has undeveloped, childish breasts and does not show signs of pregnancy. She remembers her husband with tears and expresses the hope that he will follow her to penal servitude – to that degree they got along and became friends over the past year.

Such attachment to her husband, which arose a few months after the attempt to poison him, of course, raises some confusion about the infinite variety of ways in which feelings of love can manifest; but at the same time, it undoubtedly points to the fact that sexual relations, forcibly imposed on a subject who has not reached full physical development, can cause disgust and serve as a reason to murder a husband-tormentor, especially in a subject who is not completely balanced and has numerous signs of degeneration.

There can be little doubt that if Olga K. had married later, after puberty, she would not have attempted to poison her husband, would not have involved her mother, who became her accomplice out of compassion for her torments, and both of them would have lived peacefully in their native village, instead of going to hard labor.

Turning to the 2^nd category of deviations of sexual feeling, expressed in temporary indifference or temporary disgust found in hysterical individuals, I will give the following example.

Observation II. Pelageya V. (18 years old)

She was sentenced to 12 years of hard labor for the attempted murder of her husband and the strangulation of her child in prison.

Pelageya’s father died when she was a child. Her mother died recently from the consequences of childbirth; she had six children, of whom only three are alive. She had been having “seizures” all her life.

Pelageya V. was 18 years old at the time of observation. Her hair is blonde, with a golden sheen, and her eyes are brown. She has signs of degeneration: a cone-shaped head with a strongly developed occipital protuberance, facial asymmetry, and abnormal ear development. The teeth are uneven, and the upper incisors are very small compared to the large molars. Functional examination revealed a narrowing of the visual field in the left eye. She has a deviation in taste sensations – their inaccurate definition; pain sensitivity is not equally developed on both sides of the body – the left side is much more sensitive. Hearing, on the contrary, is impaired in the right ear. The fatty subcutaneous layer is poorly developed; petite, thin, extremely mobile Pelageya V. has the appearance of a child.

She reached puberty at the age of 15, and immediately after that she was married off. She was very much burdened by marital relations and a few months later, at night, she attempted to kill her husband with an axe in a fit of irresistible disgust for his caresses. She was arrested and tried. During the investigation, it turned out that she was pregnant, and later she gave birth to a healthy baby girl. Then, in prison, her child was found with signs of suffocation in a latrine. She does not want to explain why she took her child’s life, and probably cannot because of her extreme frivolity. Despite the upcoming transfer to Sakhalin, Pelageya V. is not discouraged; she speaks of the approaching trip as partie de plaisir¹¹, is going to get married there and is glad that, as a convict, she can consider her former marriage dissolved. When asked why she was thinking about a new marriage if she hated her first one so much, she replied: “Well, that was before, the girl was completely stupid then, now I want to get married again, maybe it will be better, it is boring to live alone, I have just turned nineteen after all”.

Pelageya V. is very good-looking; she has an extremely mobile character and is distinguished by an extremely changeable mood of mind: she goes from laughter to tears several times a day; sometimes she is cheerful, frisky, laughs loudly and talks all sorts of nonsense incessantly; then suddenly she stops talking, becomes sad and cries for no apparent reason.

Functional research established hysteria in Pelageya V.

To illustrate the 3^rd group – complete indifference to sexual intercourse – I will give an example of Olga P.

Observation III. Olga P. (19 years old)

She was sentenced to 4 years of hard labor for the attempted poisoning of her husband.

Olga’s parents are peasants, they are alive. Her father is 42 years old, he works at a metal factory¹²; her mother is 37 years old, she suffers from “bone decay”¹³ of the lower extremities. She has seven children, all are alive. Both Olga’s mother and father drink “moderately”.

At the age of 16, before puberty, Olga P. was married off. The wedding took place in early February, and already in May, i.e. 3 months later, Olga P. mixed arsenic into kvass and put a mug with a drink on the windowsill – the usual place from which her husband always took it and drank when returning from work. After drinking the poisoned kvass, Olga’s husband soon felt sick. A paramedic was called, they gave some milk to the husband and he kept alive. When her husband showed the first signs of poisoning, Olga was confused and confessed everything.

When asked how she could have decided to poison her husband, she explained that her husband had not beaten or offended her, he treated her well, but she could not bear the marital relationship. The disgust she felt was so strong that she decided to get rid of it at all costs, and did not come up with anything else but to poison her husband, and then go to a monastery and “pray for forgiveness” for the rest of her life.

In prison, she reached puberty, which was not established for a long time. She is currently 19 years old. While awaiting exile, she performs the duties of a nurse in a children’s hospital in prison. She is very hardworking, cheerful and good-natured, affectionate with the sick children of the exiled women, and likes to pray for a long time. However, she does not express any remorse about her deed and naively says that, in fact, she did not do anything wrong to her husband, because he remained “alive and well”, while she took a lot of torment from him – he was so “disgusting” and “her whole being was outraged by the violence he was doing with her”. She shudders at the rumor that has recently spread among the prison inmates that all convicts on Sakhalin will be married off to the exiled, and says that she prefers to strangle or drown herself rather than re-enter into marital relations.

There can be little doubt that Olga P. would not have attempted to poison her husband and would not have gone to hard labor if she had not been married off so early. It is also very likely that she would not have tried to poison her husband if she could have got rid of the marital relationship she hated in another way, for example, by divorce.

I am turning to the 4^th group, which represents a different shade of sexual indifference, accompanied by an instinctively existing, but vaguely realized, abnormal attraction to a person of the same sex, a desire that has not yet turned into actual perversion, which can remain so for quite a long time, sometimes for a lifetime. To clarify what has been said, I will give the following example.

Observation IV. Nastasya L. (20 years old)

She was sentenced to 8 years of hard labor for murdering her husband, Naum L., a peasant, by arsenic poisoning, and for arson.

Nastasya’s father is alive, he is 45 years old, strongly built and healthy, drinks moderately, has never been ill. Her mother died of typhus. They had nine children, of whom four are still alive. Nastasya does not know anything about any diseases in the family. She is a good-looking, healthy 20-year-old woman, tall, with dark brown hair and expressive brown eyes. Functional examination did not reveal any physical signs of degeneration or significant abnormalities. She reached puberty at the age of 15. At the age of 18, she was already married; she got married reluctantly. Her husband treated her kindly and well. However, 5 weeks after the wedding, Nastasya poisoned him by mixing arsenic into kvass. After suffering all day, Nastasya’s husband Naum died in the evening. The husband’s family, suspecting poisoning, took Naum’s body to their uninhabited house while awaiting investigation. On the third day, the house caught fire. When the fire was extinguished, Naum’s charred corpse was found in the house. A forensic medical examination revealed that Naum, a peasant, had previously been poisoned with arsenic, and then his corpse was doused with kerosene and set on fire. It was established that this crime was committed by Nastasya L., Naum’s wife, together with a relative Maria S., 27 years old, with whom Nastasya was very close. It was Maria S. who taught Nastasya how to do everything, actively assisted her in getting rid of her husband, and then told her how to hide the traces of poisoning by burning Naum’s corpse. Nastasya confessed everything wholeheartedly. Her accomplice, Maria S., not only did not confess, but even after the verdict, during her stay in the Central Transfer Prison while waiting to be sent to Sakhalin, she continued to stubbornly deny any involvement in this double crime. Maria S.’s personality is rather interesting: she is a courageous, energetic and determined woman, restrained and reasonable. She is full of indignation at the characterless, meek and feminine Nastasya L. for her making a full confession. The former tender friendship that bound the two women, in Maria S. turned into explicit hatred of Nastasya, with whom she does not even talk, she turns away when they meet and expresses absolute contempt for her “faint-heartedness and cowardice”.

When asked about what could have prompted her to decide to poison her husband after 5 weeks of marriage, Nastasya replied that she had already confessed everything she had done, but at that moment she could not have done otherwise. Marital relations, she says, were extremely unpleasant and painful to her, so she tried in every possible way to avoid them, but her husband demanded them from her; she could not bear this “torment” for more than 5 weeks: “It was either him or me anyway. If he were still alive, I would have to commit suicide”. At present, she is most upset by a disagreement with her dearly loved Maria S., to whom she is accustomed to obey in everything. Nastasya says she does not understand how Maria S. can be angry with her for so long because she confessed in court. Nastasya sought a chance to reconcile with Maria S. many times, but the latter responded only with scolding to all attempts and even beat Nastasya twice, after which they were forbidden to meet and talk in prison. In other respects, Nastasya L.’s behavior in prison does not cause any reprimands: she is an active, hardworking woman, willingly performs the duties of a nurse in a small hospital for children at the prison, and the warden speaks very approvingly of her as a submissive and perpetually working woman. In prison, Nastasya learned to read. When asked if she is thinking of getting married on Sakhalin, she answers with a fervent denial.

Obviously, in the friendship of these two women, Nastasya L. submitted to the influence of Maria S. as a person with a stronger character; she admired her, looked at her with gratitude as her redeemer, for the help provided to her by Maria in an effort to get rid of her husband and conceal the traces of poisoning. What exactly their mutual relations were during the period of their friendship remains a question unclear due to the sensitivity of this kind of recognition.

I turn to the 5^th and last category – aversion from normal desires, combined with sexual perversion. Let us see an example.

Observation V. Lukerya Ivanova (27 years old)

For her participation in murdering a peasant, Evgraf M., she was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. She pleads not guilty.

It was not possible to find out any definite information about Lukerya’s heredity and family due to her unwillingness to answer the questions offered to her. In a roundabout way, it only became known that Lukerya’s father is alive and that he is a chronic alcoholic. Her appearance is very characteristic – she is striking in her resemblance to a man: she has a developed Adam’s apple, flat undeveloped breasts, a hoarse and rude voice, in the photo she is depicted in a men’s shirt (kosovorotka – a Russian men’s skewed-collared shirt), and wears her hair cut in a man’s style – in a fringe¹⁴. Lukerya is illiterate, impudent in communication. She likes to drink.

She was never married. She reached puberty at the age of 13. She was never pregnant.

I will briefly describe the circumstances of the crime of which Lukerya is accused. The description is taken from a court case.

In October 188*, a peasant Evgraf M. died suddenly in the village of K. with unmistakable signs of poisoning. With sudden diarrhea and vomiting, he hurried to the neighbors’ house to his uncle Vasily M. and announced to him that at breakfast, served to him by his wife Aksinya M., he ate one pancake and drank some milk, both of which seemed bitter and disgusting to him. He invited his wife to try pancakes and milk, but she refused and immediately threw the milk out. This gave Evgraf a reason to suspect her of planning to poison him. After Evgraf’s death, his uncle Vasily M. reported the incident to the police, and an investigation began. Aksinya soon confessed and, when asked who her accomplices were, pointed to Lukerya Ivanova. According to Aksinya M.’s explanation, which she gave at the inquest, her husband Evgraf M., with whom she lived well, did not allow her to be friends with Lukerya Ivanova, who had a very bad reputation throughout the neighborhood and was a reason for quarrels and dissension between husband and wife. After much persuasion and reassurance on Lukerya’s part, Aksinya, who obeyed her in everything, took a vial of some liquid from Lukerya, received instructions from her on how to act, and the very next day, while preparing pancakes, poured part of the contents of the vial into them. Having eaten these pancakes, her husband Evgraf fell ill and died on the same day. A forensic autopsy revealed the unmistakable presence of arsenic in Evgraf’s body. Aksinya M. was charged with poisoning her husband, and Lukerya Ivanova was charged with incitement to commit this crime. Pleading guilty, Aksinya stated that when pouring poison into the pancakes, she knew that she was giving her husband poison in order to take his life, according to the reassurance and persuasions of Lukerya, who praised her the charm of freedom and living together with her. Lukerya, on the contrary, stubbornly denies her complicity and says that she does not know why Aksinya is slandering her: “I used to see her, but it was just out of boredom, and we didn’t have any friendship”. Subsequently, Lukerya changed her testimony and tried to incriminate the victim’s uncle. Vasily’s involvement was not confirmed, it was an attempt to confuse the case. Lukerya’s persistent denial of her guilt led the investigation to the need to inquire people who knew her about her lifestyle and behavior in order to clarify the extent of her involvement in this case. All the interviewees testified that Lukerya was of debauched behavior and indulged in drunkenness. From these statements, it turned out that Lukerya became friends with Aksinya M. and constantly visited her. Evgraf M., Aksinya’s husband, was tired of Lukerya’s constant stay in their family and more than once drove her out of his house. Finally, he forbade his wife to see and spend time with Lukerya. This did not stop Lukerya: she began to wait for Aksinya on the street and saw her in the bathhouse. Aksinya was young, undeveloped, and undoubtedly obeyed the brisk and determined Lukerya. The investigation revealed, for example, such an episode. A few days before Evgraf’s poisoning, there was a strong quarrel between him and his wife over the fact that Lukerya waited for Aksinya, who was going to the vigil, accompanied her on her way home from church and waited outside until Evgraf fell asleep. Tired of waiting for a long time, she knocked softly on the window. Aksinya carefully got out of bed and went out to her. Then Evgraf rushed out of the house, chased Lukerya away, beat his wife and forbade her to meet and talk with Lukerya again. However, two days later, the two women met again in the bath, where, according to Aksinya’s testimony, she received the vial of poison from Lukerya. From this, it can be concluded that they had agreed on a meeting in advance. There is also evidence in the court case that the friendship between Aksinya M. and Lukerya Ivanova surprised everyone and, in fact, was not justified by anything: Aksinya was a very young woman (20 years old) from a respectable, well-to-do family, while Lukerya was much older (27 years old), known throughout the neighborhood as a carousing woman, leading a fun life and doing “all sorts of obscenities”.

Summarizing all that has been said, we come to the conclusion that early and forced marriages incite to crime mainly those women from the peasant environment who, due to their organization, have deviations from normal development.

These deviations may be expressed in the following.

1. Delayed development, characterized by the late onset of puberty, accompanied by other physical signs of degeneration: abnormalities in the development of the bone skeleton, anomalies of the skull, plagiocephaly¹⁵, early closure of sutures and fontanelles, causing a halt in brain development, or, conversely, non-closure of sutures, deformity of the head, limb abnormalities, asymmetry of the face with improperly growing teeth, non-fusion of the hard palate bone, narrow high palate, irregular ears, cleft lip¹⁶, etc.

An anthropometric measurement of the head of young women who committed mariticide showed that their skull size is smaller than that not only of law-abiding peasant women, but also of other categories of female violators of the law, taken from the same peasant environment. This can be seen from the following table.

From the data in this table, it can be seen that the anterior-posterior head size in women with sexual feeling abnormalities is 176.833 mm, but the same size is slightly larger, for example, in passion killers – 177.937 mm; the anterior-posterior head size is also larger in mercenary killers – 177.937 mm. The same size in law-abiding peasant women (the average value based on 158 observations) is 180.057 mm, therefore, it is much larger. In educated law-abiding women, the anterior-posterior diameter of the head was 183.200 mm, which indicates significantly larger diameters among representatives of the intellectual segments of the population. The same can be said about the horizontal circumference of the head – it is the smallest (528.333 mm) in women with abnormalities of sexual feeling.

2. A temporary decrease in sexual feeling caused by hysteria and accompanied by both physical signs of degeneration and functional disorders characteristic of hysteria: limited field of vision, incorrect perception of colors, color blindness, changes in skin sensitivity, an increase in the latter – hyperesthesia or, conversely, a decrease – anesthesia; the presence of pain points; difficulty breathing, a feeling of tangle (globus hystericus¹⁷), hysterical vomiting, hysterical temporary stuttering, and so on.

3. Complete sexual indifference, sexual coldness, turning into disgust in cases of forced concubinage.

4. Sexual indifference, when it is joined by a vague desire for a person of the same sex, which has not yet turned into actual satisfaction.

5. Aversion from normal desires, combined with sexual perversion, a phenomenon that, fortunately, is very rare among women.

In addition to these pronounced conditions, which explain some cases of mariticide committed by such young women, often several reasons occur simultaneously that lead to murder; for example, a forced marriage to a man who is very much disliked, harsh treatment in a new family, hopeless situation and, finally, a certain degree of moral bluntness, when all the gravity of the crime is not realized.

However, there have always been and always will be early marriages, I will be objected not without reason. They will happen especially in the peasant environment, where marriage brings to every family, if not an increase in material well-being in the form of a dowry, then at least an increase in the labor force in the form of a new pair of working hands. Undoubtedly, there have always been early marriages, but the consequences they caused were not recognized or were attributed to other reasons. Only a close comprehensive study of the personality of female criminals allows us to determine the significance of early marriages from the point of view of criminal anthropology.

Warning against early marriage, we are confident that, firstly, the coming generation, born of subjects who have reached a more complete development, will only benefit from this in the physical sense. Secondly, the mortality rate of children will decrease due to the greater maturity of the mothers’ bodies. Thirdly, there will be undoubtedly less mariticides committed during temporary sexual indifference by teenage wives who have not yet reached the development of sexual feeling.

Pointing out the causes of crime in some early, especially forced, marriages, we are guided by the common practical rule that it is easier to alleviate any difficult situation if its causes are clear. In this case, we consider it especially important that information about the undesirability of excessively early marriages is disseminated as widely as possible in society. Sexual feeling undoubtedly plays an important role in every person’s life. Some authors consider it to be one of the main engines of human will, and the desire to satisfy this feeling is placed immediately after the desire of a person to satisfy hunger. Nutrition is necessary to maintain the human body, these authors say, and the satisfaction of sexual feelings is necessary for the continuation of the human race, embodied in offspring. Without disputing the importance of sexual feeling in the life of an individual, we would like to note, nevertheless, that curbing this desire in oneself is an important condition for culture and the elevation of the human personality. Especially sad are the consequences of too early sexual intercourse, which is characteristic of our Russian youth, in contrast to English young men from educated segments of the population who maintain their physical purity until the age of 20. Syphilis is extremely rare among English school-age youth.

Concluding my short essay, I would like to note that it also aims to help clarify the role of criminal anthropology in everyday life. The essay provides an opportunity to see how wrong it is in some cases to evaluate crimes and put them into the category of premeditated and caused by ill will. A young woman who has just got married, ruthlessly poisons her husband, ponders and plans how to carry it all out, how to avoid suspicion; long before the poisoning is committed, she stores poison – in short, she shows clear signs of premeditation. This criminal is only 16-17 years old! What a depraved character! What a manifestation of malice! Is it possible to expect a correction from her? She is tried and exiled for many years of hard labor, hoping to punish and correct her in this way. In reality, it is an unfortunate, underdeveloped being, often with honest inclinations, responsive to goodness and having only one inherent flaw – the lack of sexual feeling. This creature is forced to show a feeling alien to her, tormented by constant harassment in the same direction, brought to complete hopelessness and caused to feel such disgust towards the perpetrator of constant torment that the sufferer decides to do anything to get rid of her husband-tormentor, and, following the example practiced in her environment, after more or less long hesitation she poisons her husband. What could be more unfair on the part of a society that pushed an underdeveloped being to commit a crime; that put her in conditions that make the crime the only way out of an unbearably difficult situation, and then, after she committed the crime, cried out for justice and punished this unfortunate creature?! One has only to look at the essence of the matter, to sort out the causes of the crime, and there will be no need for either punishment or retribution, since the criminal will disappear and there will be no one to punish in the name of justice. It will turn out that we are looking at an underdeveloped being who needs either to be given time for her sexual instincts to develop normally, or, in other cases, be treated for hysteria, or simply be left alone without forcibly imposing a way of existence alien to her.

The goal of criminal anthropology is to investigate the motives of crime; not to apply exile and hard labor to all criminals who have committed premeditated crimes, but to consider each individual case; to prevent the ordinary repetition of the causes of crimes, both on the part of the perpetrator – in the form of predisposing reasons, and on the part of society – in the form of causing reasons. I cannot but recall the comparison made by the brilliant speaker Professor Enrico Ferri¹⁸, who said that the uniform punishment for premeditated criminal offenses – exile and hard labor – is similar to a single medicinal remedy for all serious ailments with only a dose modification, for example, prescribing 1 g of quinine for fever, 2 g for typhus, 3 g for smallpox, and 4 g for cholera. Lack of sexual feeling is not a crime, but ultimtely, all the women (except for the case of Lukerya Ivanova), whom I have cited as examples, were punished precisely because they did not show this feeling and showed resistance when it was forcibly imposed on them. The observations I have cited relate to subjects with an improperly developed sexual feeling who were predisposed to crime under certain social conditions, although outside of these conditions they can remain law-abiding people all their lives. Without marrying early or having the opportunity to end their hated relationships through divorce, these teenage wives certainly would not have become criminals. By analyzing, on the one hand, the social conditions that cause crimes, and studying, on the other hand, the reasons that predispose to crimes, society will find a way to reduce the number of violations of the law not through threats, retribution and punishment, but through a reasonable, humane attitude towards the weak, unstable and abnormally developed members.

In the life of society, hygiene prevents diseases by indicating ways to make healthier homes, food, drink, and other things. The task of criminal anthropology is to be the hygiene of crime: by studying the causes of crimes, to prevent their recurrence.

Author's contribution

The author confirms sole responsibility for all aspects of the work.

Вклад автора

Автор подтверждает, что полностью отвечает за все аспекты представленной работы.

Conflict of Interest / Конфликт интересов

The author is a member of the Editorial Board of the Russian Journal of Economics and Law. The article has been reviewed on the usual terms / Автор является членом редколлегии журнала Russian Journal of Economics and Law. Статья прошла рецензирование на общих основаниях