“Cossacks have made the entire history of Russia,” declared the illustrious Russian writer Leo Tolstoi in 1870. He continued: “Not for nothing do the Europeans call us Cossacks. The Russian people all desire to be Cossacks.” This quote highlights a historical relationship that was central to the course of Romanov empire-building and pervasive in the literary image of Russia, but which problematically straddled Russian conceptions of self and other. If Cossacks truly represented in Geoffrey Hosking's term “an alternative Russian ethnos,” what prevented Russians from realizing their desire to acquire a Cossack identity? Imperial boundaries barred their way. While Peter the Great decreed the divide, Cossacks embraced and patrolled boundaries between their communities and Rus', and identity documents made distinctions legible and permanent.

This book explores how the Don Cossacks negotiated the closing of the frontier that cradled the creation of their community and connects their social history to the rivalry of the Russian and Ottoman Empires in the Black Sea basin. In contrast to several comparable raiding communities such as pirates, uskoks, and buccaneers, which briefly flourished, then vanished, in the no-man's lands beyond the jurisdiction of established states in the early modern period, the Don Cossacks survived by changing. In the age of Peter the Great the Don Host transformed from an open, multi-ethnic fraternity dedicated to raiding Ottoman frontiers into a closed, ethnic community devoted to defending and advancing the boundaries of the Russian Empire.