Born into the prestigious Moldovan boyar Mavrogeni family in 1776, Olga Konstantinovna enjoyed a childhood shaped by privilege and elite status. Her first marriage to Ananiy Gerasimovich Strukov, the provincial marshal of nobility, came with a massive dowry—56,000 rubles, vast lands, households, and hundreds of serfs. She quickly ascended as the “first lady” of Yekaterinoslav society, known for her wit and theatrical flair. 

Widowed early, she relocated to St. Petersburg, but within a year remarried Senator Fyodor Maximovich Briscorn, entering the upper echelons of metropolitan society. At Galernaya Street, she hosted families like that of the poet Alexander Pushkin.

In 1817, Olga Briscorn acquired a vast estate in the Dmitrievsky District of Kursk, moving dozens of serfs to her newly built cloth factory in Prilepy. Powered by imported weaving machines and crowned by the region’s first steam engine, the enterprise looked like a feat of industrial ambition—but beneath the surface, its workings were grotesque and lethal.

Briscorn’s regime of terror was methodical. Workers—both adults and children—were forced to labor 14–15 hours a day, often on holidays, utterly depriving them of time to tend their own land. Living conditions were medieval: sleeping on bare straw within the workshop, living on a starvation diet of cabbage soup, a sliver of porridge, a crust of bread, and a minuscule 8 grams of wormy meat per person. Any dissent drew brutal punishment with whips, bats, or starvation as weapons of control.

The toll was devastating. Between October 1820 and May 1821, a staggering 121 people died—44 of them children under 15. Seventy-four were given proper burials by priests; the rest were buried in mass graves. Meanwhile, over 300 serfs fled in desperation, seeking escape from horror and deprivation. 

In 1822, local peasants reached out to Emperor Alexander I, prompting a secret three-year investigation. By approximately 1825, Briscorn had been stripped of her factory, placed under state guardianship—effectively neutralized but shielded from any very public condemnation. She was imprisoned in state custody and died in 1836.