Bulavin Rebellion  The Bulavin Rebellion (Astrakhan Revolt) is the name given to a war  of Don Cossacks against the Tsardom of Muscovy, soon to be renamed Imperial Russia, between the years 1707 and 1708. The war was led by Kondraty Bulavin, a democratically elected Ataman of Don Cossacks. The war was triggered by a number of underlying tensions between the Imperial government under Peter I of Russia, the Cossacks, and Russian peasants fleeing from serfdom in Russia to gain freedom in the autonomous Don area. It started with the assassination of Prince Yury Dolgorukov, the leader of Imperial army's punitive expedition to the Don area, by Don Cossacks under Bulavin's command. The end of the rebellion is associated with Bulavin's death in 1708. A number of social grievances were prevalent in the peasant population of Russia in the years leading up to the Bulavin Rebellion. Peter the Great's radical reforms designed to "Westernize" old Muscovy in the 18th century were met with widespread discontent. The pious, deeply conservative masses saw his reforms as an affront to their traditional way of life and to their Eastern Orthodox faith. Peter was even equated to the Anti-Christ and assumed to be an impostor posing as the true Tsar. On top of this, Peter's newly formed police state was expanding territorially, and by this expansion was encroaching upon salt resource sites coveted by the Cossacks for preservation of their foods. This dispute over land was in one sense an economic issue, but the Cossacks also regarded this as an intrusion upon their semi-autonomous political state. In general, the entire rural Russian atmosphere was in an agitated state, waiting for a catalyst of some kind. In response to the constraints and fears of living in Peter's police state, large numbers of serfs absconded, abandoning the major urban areas, especially Moscow and the new capital at St. Petersburg. While some groups emigrated to Poland or Austria, many chose to avoid the border patrols and instead fled to the rural periphery and the river regions already inhabited by the Cossacks. It was Peter's policy to hunt down and arrest absconders and return them to their lords where they could be counted for taxes, a policy which, by this time, had no statute of limitations. In accordance with this policy, Peter deployed a group of bounty hunters under Yuri Dolgorukov to scout the Cossack regions for fugitive peasants.