Sloboda was a kind of settlement in the history of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. The name is derived from the early Slavic word for "freedom" and may be vaguely translated as "free settlement". The status of "sloboda" varied over the time and territory. Initially the settlers of a sloboda was freed from various taxes and levies for various reasons, hence the name. Many slobodas were settled in newly colonized lands, particularly, by Cossacks, freedom from taxes being an incentive for colonization. This article does not cite its references or sources. ... This article needs cleanup. ...

By the first half of the 18th century this privilege was abolished, and slobodas became ordinary villages, posads, shtetls, townlets, suburbs. A posad (посад) was a settlement, often rounded by bulwarks and a moat, by a town or a kremlin, but outside the town/kremlin, or by a monastery in the 10th to 15th centuries. ... A shtetl or shtetele (שטעטל, meaning little town/city in Yiddish) was typically a small town or village with a large Jewish population in pre-Holocaust Central Europe and Eastern Europe. ... Townlet is an attempt to translate the Russian term posyolok gorodskogo tipa (посёлок городского типа) or the similar Ukrainian selyshche miskoho typu (селище міського типу)—literally urban-type settlement. A townlet was one of the results of Soviet urban design, a locality intermediate in character and status between towns...

The term is preserved in names of various settlements and city quarters. Some settlements were named just thus: "Sloboda", "Slobodka" (diminutive form), "Slabodka", "Slobidka" (Ukrainian).

See also

• Sloboda Ukraine
• Sloboda Tatars (слободские татары)
• German Quarter