A wave of armed banditry swept across the south of Russia in its most cruel, boundless manifestation - kidnapping for ransom is perhaps the most commonplace thing; robberies, assaults, bloody reprisals against those who disobeyed, against the backdrop of corrupt officials drinking and fattening in front of ordinary people. How to survive where the law of the wolf pack applies?..The hero of the novel by Maxim Garin and Andrei Voronin “Ataman. “Blood for blood” - the hereditary Cossack Yuri Terpukhin, helping a friend, finds himself in such a whirlpool of events from which not many would be able to come out alive, but he succeeds, because Terpukhin is an ataman... Yuri Terpukhin does not kneel before the circumstances, even if His life is at stake - either join a gang, rob and kill, or die. Chosen by the ataman, he turns to the origins, to the roots of his people. A Russian Cossack is a warrior and a hard worker, not a highway bandit...