The Tsar's Governor

An exciting story about courage and the first steps on the path to Great Russia!

The novel "The Tsar’s Viceroy" is the first depiction in fiction of the beginning of Russian settlement of the Middle Volga region, made possible after the capture of Kazan by Ivan the Terrible’s troops.

The Volga became a passable road, and cities were built along its banks. In 1648, Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich ordered the founding of the fortress-town Simbirsk on the mountainous isthmus between the Volga and the Sviazha. Under the leadership of the okolnichy Bogdan Khitrovo, laborers built a wooden fortress in a short time—one that would soon have to withstand a fiery siege against the forces of the ataman Stepan Razin.

The book is written only in Russian; the author deliberately avoided borrowings, and that makes the novel a rather curious phenomenon amid the linguistic nonsense infecting modern literature.