The Tsar’s Dragons tells the epic historical saga based on the true story of how John Hughes, a lowborn, illiterate Welshman, founded Russia’s iron industry on the steppes of the Ukraine. Hughes’s town Hughesovka is a town of opportunity and new beginnings, where murderers, thieves, whores and illicit love affairs flourish. The immigrants live alongside aristocrats in manors, Cossacks who serve the Tsar and peasants whose homes are holes scooped in the steppe and discover that plague, famine and massacres can strike in palaces as well as pits.