Useful Information
Ulyanovsk City Info
Ulyanovsk in 1955-1957, flooding significant territories north and south of Ulyanovsk and increasing the width of Volga by up to 25-35 km in some places, 3-6 km near Ulyanovsk. At the present time, the aging and congested Ulyanovsk bridge is the only bridge across the Volga river along the 400 km stretch from Kazan to Tolyatti. A second bridge has been under construction since the late 1980s, but it is still far from being complete. When finished, it will be one of the largest bridges in Europe, at 5.5 km. During the Soviet period, Ulyanovsk lost much of its historical heritage. All traces of the original wooden fort are gone, as are all churches of old Simbirsk; only a few 19th century buildings remain in the city, most notably, the houses where Lenin lived between 1870-1887. Some famous residents of Ulyanovsk are also remembered, such as historian Nikolai Karamzin and writer Ivan Goncharov. A semi-serious massive campaign for renaming Ulyanovsk into "Oblomovsk", after Oblomov, a character of Goncharov's novel, took place in 2003. Ulyanovsk is a significant industrial city. It is home to UAZ, a large automobile manufacturing plant, and Aviastar, an airplane plant that is best known as the manufacturer of the heavy aircraft An-124 "Ruslan", as well as a number of smaller factories.