This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky.

Listener discretion advised.

For most, it was just another very early morning in Imperial Russia.

The large estate was beginning to come to life,

as servants woke up and started their morning work. But the true hustle and bustle of the day was still a ways off. Still in the silence, there was a man creeping towards one of the mansion's many bedrooms.

There was a woman asleep inside the bedroom, completely unaware as to what was about to happen to her.

Perhaps she should have had an inkling.

The woman, still asleep in bed, was the de facto lady of the house,

the mistress of the estate's owner, and she, Natasha Minkin, was so cruel that she had pushed the

staff to the breaking point. She was abusive, petty, vindictive, and violent, and now there was a man

standing over her bed, brandishing a large kitchen knife. What happened next was intimate,

visceral, and brutal. The murder was so brutal it would traumatize even the man who carried it out,

and it would devastate Natasia's lover, a man many people considered to be the cruelest man

in Zaris Russia. Back when he and Natasia had both been alive, it must have seemed like a perfect match.

I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood.

Very little information has survived about the woman known as Madam Minkin.

I first encountered her name as a partygoer at Satan's Ball in Mikhail Bulgakov's novel,

The Master and Margarita. Even if you haven't read the novel, you can probably guess that

no one portrayed as a guest of the devil is considered

one of history's good guys. Like so many women from history, the most famous thing about

Madame Minkin was her association with a powerful man. In her case, that man was Alexei Arekcheyev,

...