History
Founded in 1747 as Pokrovskaya sloboda (Покровская слобода), it was granted town status and renamed Pokrovsk (Покровск) in 1914. Its German name was Kosakenstadt. It became the capital of the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, now a part of Saratov Oblast, in 1924, and it was renamed Engels after Friedrich Engels in 1931.
It was founded by Ukrainian settlers, and was settled by Germans during the reign of Catherine the Great; it is now a major center of the Volga German culture. It is the site of Engels Air Force Base, Russia's largest and most active strategic bomber base.
On August 26, 2011, a monument in honor of the Russian-German victims of repression within the Soviet Union was unveiled in Engels.
Read more about this topic: Engels (city)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“... all big changes in human history have been arrived at slowly and through many compromises.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)