Like the pirates, buccaneers, and marroons that emerged on the margins of European colonial societies in the early modern period, the Don Cossacks created community out of diversity and constructed a new polity in interstitial space between empires. Among the Cossacks outcasts and outlaws could seek liberty. For those returning from Tatar captivity the region served as a halfway house between bondage and new identities. Diversity and decentralization dominated the political and social world of the Don Cossacks.

Most historians have tended to simply view the Don Cossacks as a peculiar group of Russians, consigning the hybrid nature of early Cossack society to the margins of discussions of Cossack identity. In contrast, this study emphasizes that Don Cossacks created a new society, a socio-cultural fusion comprised of diverse elements, but committed to an anti-bureaucratic and egalitarian political system. Early Cossack identity was not defined by common language or common origins, but by common interest.

LIBERTY AND AUTOCRACY

Both Cossack and Russian observers agree that volia, translated here as liberty, was a predominant feature of life in the Don, but what did the term mean in a seventeenth-century context? The term itself has connotations of liberty, lack of restraint, and unencumbered actions according to one's own will. For Russian observers it likely meant the antithesis of the Muscovite value system in which autocracy, bureaucracy, legally protected honor, inherited social status, and an emerging institution of social and migration control, usually labeled serfdom, predominated.