To visualize this irregular district imagine a rectangle. Bulge the west side out and punch the east side in. Pinch the north end and let the bottom right corner taper to the southeast. This compact shape is bounded north by more of Russia(1), northeast by Kazakhstan, east by the Caspian(2) Sea, south by the Caucasian(3) republics, southwest by the Black Sea and northwest by the Sea of Azov and Ukrayina (the Ukraine). The northernmost band across the district is highlands: on one end the Donets Heights just south of that river and on the other the Pre-Volga(4) Heights flanking Europe's longest river on the west. South of this is a lowland band of prairie, but still high enough in the center to hold a major reservoir, the Ciml'ansk, one of Europe's ten largest lakes. At the western end of the band, the reservoir's river, the Don(5), enters the shallow Taganrog Bay, which extends northeast from the Sea of Azov. At the other end is the threaded lower course and delta of the Volga which ends in the Caspian. The desert shores of those inland waters are below sea level, an indication that the world's largest lake was once even bigger.
The southernmost band is the Greater Caucasus Mountains, topping 5500 meters at Mount Elbrus and exceeding 5000 meters at other points on or near the frontier. Two famous passes permit travel: the Darja Pass(6) in the north center of the Georgian(7) border, and--along the Caspian Shores--the Albanian Gate. A highland bulge, the Stavropol' Plateau, extends north from the continental bounding range and separates the river basins of the Terek and the Kuban'.
More than three in four(8) speak Russian as their first tongue and many more are fluent, and an even greater proprotion are Russian Orthodox Christians or secularists whose ancestors worshipped that way. There is an anormous variety of local ethnic groups in and near the Greater Kavkaz Mountains, and this constitutes much of the remaining quarter. Many of these people, when not secular, are Moslems, and the entirety of Russia is destabilized by their discontent.
Two large cities predominate: Rostov-na-Donu, the district's capital, and Volgograd
The area has been peopled for as long as the rest of Eurasia: the better part of a hundred thousand years. The mountain valleys have the least changing history, with ethnic continuity extending back thousands of years. The steppes have such great discontinuities that I cannot describe all the pastoralists who passed through even in the last two millenia. The early religions are even less known. The fact that the prophet Zoroaster(10) preached not far away in today's Azerbaidjan, and that he wrote in a language closely related to Proto-Iranian, and that Proto-Iranian was spoken north of the Greater Kavkaz, would lead me to guess that his religion penetrated this area. His converts had probably previously shared the common elements of ancient Indo-European religion and the more local shamanist tradition. Certainly, for example, Mithra had been worshipped both northwest and south of Caucasia. But in any case other forgotten religions co-existed until Islam began to replace them all. And after new groups rode into the steppes they too converted with time to Islam, some as late as the 18th century. Only starting in the 19th century did Christianity reach the north side of the Georgian border, arriving from the opposite direction with Russian conquerors, spreading less by conversion than by migration: Russians are the overwhelming majority in the populous and urbanized north of the district.
A list of several groups that previously lived in the area follows: I. Proto-Iranians were already mentioned and extended far to the northwest. Their descendents were the Alans, once powerful enough to invade Europe, and that language is the immediate ancester of Ossetian. II. Bulgars were speakers of a Turkic language(11), who, for a while, settled near today's Rostov. III. Of the ancestors of today's Turks, Turkmen and Azeri, some remained further east in Turkmenistan, some settled along the Caspian's westerns shore and some moved on to Anatolia. Their languages became distinct with time and separation. These speakers were probably the ancesters of the Turkic-speaking rulers of Khazaria as well. (That state provided an exception to the area's religious history, promoting Judaism, tolerating diversity and retarding the spread of Moslem hegemony in the steppes.)
Some groups still around and once prominent are: I. Avars(12), companions to Atilla's Huns; II. Mongolians, locally called Kalmyks, and still practicing Buddhism; III. Tatars, the Mongols' adminstrators. IV. Kumyks, often called by the names of their subgroups, Karachai and Balkars, and not to be confused with Kalmyks. While some say they arrived more recently they have been locals since the 11th or 12th centuries; and V. Chechens.
northwest
northeast
east, from the District's northeast
northeast of Astrakhan Oblast, and across the Caspian Sea
south
southwest
west, from the District's northwest
(1) Transcribed more formally as Rossija or Rossija.
(2) Or Kaspiyskoye or Kaspijskoye.
(3) Or Kavkaz.
(4) Or Privolzhskaya or, with a diacritical on the z, Privolzskaja.
(5) Europe's fifth longest river.
(6) Or Darya Pass, also called the Iberian Gate.
(7) Georgia is more properly called Sakartvelo.
(8) The 1998 census counted 15.15 million "Russians" out of 21.76 million total. But this ethnic division excludes from the majority many Russian speakers whose descent is from another group or whose religion is not Orthodox Christian.
(9) Formerly Stalingrad.
(10) Or Zarathustra.
(11) Not to be confused with the Slavic language that was named after them.