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Ulyanovsk, called Simbirsk until 1924, is the capital of Ulyanovsk Oblast on the Volga about 705 kilometres east of Moscow, famous as the birthplace of Vladimir Lenin and as Russia's only UNESCO City of Literature. The writers Ivan Goncharov and Nikolay Karamzin also came from here, and more than half a million people live in the city.
Simbirsk was founded in 1648 by the boyar Bogdan Khitrovo as a fort on a high hill on the west bank of the Volga, guarding the eastern frontier. In 1668 it held out against a month-long siege by the rebel Stenka Razin. Later it became a quiet town favoured by the nobility, was largely burned in 1864 and rebuilt, and in 1924 it was renamed after Lenin, who was born here in 1870 as Vladimir Ulyanov.
The dam built downstream in the 1950s turned the Volga here into a vast reservoir, and the old town looks over it from the Venets ridge. Visitors walk the wooden streets of the Lenin museum-reserve, see the huge Lenin Memorial and the Goncharov museum, find the monument to the letter Yo, and visit one of the largest aviation museums in Russia.
The Lenin Memorial in Ulyanovsk is a large complex of buildings created for the 100th anniversary of Lenin's birth in 1970. It stands on the high bank above the Volga in his home city, and its halls hold exhibitions on his life, while a park of 40 hectares runs down the slope towards the river.
The Lenin House Museum on Lenin Street in Ulyanovsk is the wooden house where the Ulyanov family lived from 1878 to 1887. It opened on 10 December 1923 as the only Lenin museum created during his lifetime, and its rooms recreate the family's home with many of their own belongings.
The Motherland of Lenin Museum-Reserve, created in 1984, covers 174 hectares in the centre of Ulyanovsk and includes 17 museums. Its heart is a quarter of wooden houses from the 19th and early 20th centuries, an open-air museum of a Russian provincial town as Lenin knew it.
The Resurrection-Germogen Church in Ulyanovsk was founded in 1722 near the spot where the people of Simbirsk had met relics of Saint German of Kazan in 1697. The present church was completed in 1879, and today it is once again an active Orthodox church of the diocese of Simbirsk.
The Karamzin Monument in Ulyanovsk was unveiled in 1845 in honour of the historian Nikolay Karamzin, who was born in the province. It was made by the sculptor Samuil Galberg with an architectural design by Konstantin Thon, and Tsar Nicholas I chose its place himself on a visit in 1836.
The Monument to the Letter Yo stands on the Novy Venets in Ulyanovsk and is a granite slab carved with the letter. Opened in 2005, it copies the letter as printed in 1797 in the almanac Aonidy, published by Karamzin, which was one of the first times the letter Yo appeared in print.
The Goncharov Museum in Ulyanovsk occupies the house where the writer Ivan Goncharov, author of Oblomov, was born in 1812. Standing on Goncharov Street, it is now a historical and memorial centre-museum and a branch of the regional museum, with rooms on his life and novels.
The Ulyanovsk Regional Art Museum began in 1895 as an art section of a local history museum and became independent in 1920. Its collection grew from the estates of Simbirsk nobles and merchants, and since 1932 it has filled the upper floor of the Goncharov memorial building in Ulyanovsk.
The Novy Venets is a boulevard on the Venets, the edge of the Simbirsk hill in Ulyanovsk where the wooden kremlin was built in 1648. It looks out over the wide Volga, the Imperial Bridge and the Presidential Bridge, and the Goncharov memorial building and the letter Yo monument stand along it.
The Imperial Bridge in Ulyanovsk crosses the Volga reservoir and is about 2.1 kilometres long. It was built in 1913 to 1916 as a railway bridge to a design by the engineer Nikolai Belelyubsky, and today its steel trusses carry both a railway track and a two-lane road.
The Civil Aviation History Museum in Ulyanovsk stands next to Ulyanovsk Tsentralny Airport and has its own airfield with many old airliners and helicopters. Created in 1983, it holds about 9,000 items, making it the largest aviation museum in Russia by number of exhibits.
Goncharov Street is the main street of central Ulyanovsk and runs for about 1.6 kilometres. It curves because it follows the line of a 17th-century moat that was the second defence line of the Simbirsk fortress, and since 1941 it has carried the name of the writer Ivan Goncharov.
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