Sloboda
[1] In the history of Russia, a sloboda was a settlement or a town district of people free of the power of boyars.[2] By the first half of the 18th century, this privilege was abolished, and slobodas became ordinary villages, shtetls, townlets, suburbs.The Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary relates that by the end of the 19th century a sloboda was a large village with more than one church, a marketplace, and volost administration, or a village-type settlement of industrial character, where the peasants have little involvement in agriculture.Some settlements were named just thus: "Sloboda", "Slobodka" (diminutive form), "Slabodka", "Slobidka" (Ukrainian).The latter term is also the name of the capital city of Ialomița County, Slobozia, in modern Romania.