Stepan Razin

Don Ataman Stepan Timofeevich Razin became the favorite hero of Russian folklore. Traditions are alive in many Volga cities, and songs about razin still come across the people - and about the unfortunate Persian Princess, which he ruthlessly throws" in a reclining wave ("because of the island on Strazhen ..."), and About the cherished Razinsky Duma ("There is a cliff on the Volga ...") What did this man deserve, with the name of which is connected one of the bloodiest civil wars in the history of Russia - the Cossack-peasant uprising of 1670-1671? Who was he really? Lucky Ataman, who wins so much turned her head, what made it possible to swing on the whole Russian kingdom? The villain and the rusticist, a bloody killer, devoted to Anathema by the Orthodox Church? Or a fighter for popular happiness, the leader of the peasant war, how described the difference in the writings of historians and writers of Soviet times? Or an expressive of the inevitable traction of the people to the will, to a fair life, which in fact wrapped in bloodshed and the most severe shocks of Russian statehood - what in the seventeenth, that in the twentieth centuries?
A book written by a prominent domestic historian Andrey Nikolayevich Sakharov back in Soviet years, brightly and fascinating, but at the same time accurately and reliably, with a strict support for sources, talks about the distribution and his followers and about the life of Russia "Bintashechnaya" XVII century. The new edition of the book is significantly complemented by the author