State, Power and Community in Early Modern Russia is a vivid reconstruction of life in one of the garrison towns built on Muscovy's southern steppe frontier in the early Seventeenth-century to defend against Tatar raids. It focuses on how the colonization process shaped power relations in a particular southern garrison community, both at the village level, within the land commune, and at the district level, between the general garrison community and the appointed officials representing state authority.

BRIAN DAVIES is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He is the author of several articles on the social history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Russia and is at work on a new book about Russia's wars with the Ottoman Empire and Crimean Khanate.