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)
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“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)