The Don and the Don Land have long been an attractive, but extremely dangerous frontier. This is where Russian people escaped from government tyranny, debts, trials and other grave guilts. Here they gained freedom, but life was at stake. The great reformer Tsar made the Don a service river, along which the first Russian military fleet came from Voronezh to recapture Ottoman Azov. A few years later, after the uprising of the Cossacks of Kondraty Bulavin was drowned in blood, the gallows were set free. It was difficult for the local population to come to terms with this, so the struggle for freedom continued. The book outlines several episodes from the history of Don freedom, the heroes of which were not only the Cossacks who faithfully served the Russian Empire and the Romanov dynasty, but also freethinking Cossacks, Don peasants and Rostov workers. Those who sought freedom on the Don shores gained and lost it, died and won. Amiran Urushadze - Candidate of Historical Sciences, Associate Professor of the Southern Federal University, specialist in the history of the Caucasus.