She flies through the night in a hollowed-out mortar, steers with a pestle, sweeps away her tracks with a broom, and lives in a windowless hut standing on chicken legs. This episode treats Baba Yaga as a biographical subject, tracing her from unclassifiable pagan figure to fairy-tale plot device, to political cartoon, to modern shorthand for fear in John Wick, Spirited Away, and even battlefield drone nicknames.

We decode a name that means both grandmother and something closer to horror, disease, or serpent, and explain why Mikhail Lomonosov’s 1755 grammar book could find no Roman equivalent for her. We look at Andrei Toporkov’s theory that her pestle was a village weapon, the Siberian tree-stump storage huts behind the chicken legs, Vladimir Propp’s findings on her ambiguity, the tale of The Maiden Tsar and the three sisters, and the lubok prints that used her to mock Peter the Great and Catherine I.

• Iron teeth, a nose that hits the ceiling, and a predatory sense of smell for the Russian spirit
• Why an apex predator politely waits while Ivan blows three horns
• Crocodile as Tsar: the Old Believers’ coded satire in woodblock prints
• Andreas Johns’s alternative reading of the prints as shamanic battles
• Mussorgsky’s Hut on Hen’s Legs and the Emerson, Lake and Palmer adaptation