Son of the Volga

Son of the Volga: The Life, Rebellion, and Immortal Legend of Stepan Razin

In 1667, a wounded Don Cossack warrior descended the Volga River with eight hundred desperate men and a grievance that had been building for a generation. Within three years, Stepan Razin commanded twenty thousand fighters, had destroyed a Persian imperial fleet, conquered a corridor of cities stretching across the Russian interior, and mobilised an estimated two hundred thousand people in the most serious internal challenge the Romanov dynasty had ever faced. His rebellion shook the Muscovite state to its foundations, and it was crushed, as great rebellions are, not by the justice of the order it opposed but by the professional violence available to any state that decides it has run out of other options.

Son of the Volga is the full story of Razin's extraordinary life: the frontier world that made him, the personal catastrophe that radicalised him, the Caspian campaign that made him a legend, and the Volga insurrection whose bread-and-salt surrenders and garrison mutinies revealed the depth of a social crisis the existing order had been manufacturing for twenty years. It is also the story of what happened after, the hundred thousand dead, the Iron Oath that subjugated the Don, and the three and a half centuries of songs, films, philosophy, and cantatas through which the laughing head on the executioner's spike refused, and refuses still, to be silent.