
Annotation:
The river Don and the lands around it have long been an attractive but extremely dangerous frontier. Russian peoples escaped to this region fleeing from state tyranny, debts, trials, and other heavy burdens. Freedom was gained here, but life itself remained at stake. The tsar-reformer Peter the Great transformed the Don into a service river, along which the first Russian navy sailed from Voronezh to wrest control of the Azov Sea from the Ottoman Empire. Some years later, after the uprising of Kondraty Bulavin’s Cossacks had been drowned in blood, gallows began to be introduced on the shores of these waters. The local population found it difficult to come to terms with this and, thus, the struggle for freedom continued. Urushadze’s book contains several episodes from the history of the fight for freedom along the Don, the heroes of which are not only Cossacks who faithfully served the Russian Empire and the Romanov dynasty, but also free-thinkers, Don peasants, and Rostov workers. Those who sought freedom on the banks of the Don gained and lost it, perished and won it.