The Don region in the 1680s provides a complex picture of interaction between Russians and non-Russians, Orthodox and others, and Cossacks and nomads. In an era in which religious rebels from Russia fled to the steppe and established common cause with Muslim rulers and in a period in which the tsar mustered the support of Cossacks, Kalmyks, and even Chechens to prevail in a regional struggle with Orthodox dissidents, it becomes problematic to frame Russia's steppe frontier in terms of religiously motivated Russian state expansion. This brief but important episode in the history of the Russian steppe was not about an aggressive Orthodox Third Rome crusading against the non-Christian peoples of the steppe frontier, but about religious dissidents trying to use the steppe as a staging ground for taking Russia back from the Antichrist.

In the last decades of the seventeenth century, as strong currents of dissent inundated the decentralized world of the Don River, the Don Cossack fraternity was pushed to the brink of fratricide. The fate of the Don Cossack Host hinged upon resolving differences between haves and have-nots, representatives of northern and southern communities, defenders of Nikonian Orthodoxy and Old Ritual, and supporters and opponents of Moscow. A great schism (raskol) challenged the region's relationship with the Russian government and provoked a civil war that sent roughly one in ten Don Cossacks in search of sanctuary in the North Caucasus.