The Free Waters. Stories of Fight for Freedom on the Don

The Don River and the Don land were always an attractive but extremely dangerous frontier. Here Russian people escaped arbitrariness of the authorities, debts, trials and other grievous sins. Here they gained their freedom, but the life was at stake. The tsar-reformer made the Don a service river, and the first Russian naval fleet came from Voronezh to reconquer the Ottoman Azov. A few years later, after Kondraty Bulavin's Cossack revolt was drowned in blood, there were floated gallows on the free waters. It was difficult for the local population to accept this, so the fight for freedom continued. The book tells several episodes from the history of freedom on the Don, these heroes are not only the Cossacks who served the Russian Empire and the Romanov dynasty faithfully and loyally, but also the freethinking Cossacks, the Don peasants and the Rostov workers. Those who sought freedom on the banks of the Don, gained and lost it, died and won.