Tsimlyansk

Town in Rostov oblast (province), rayon (sector) centre, 236 km north-east of Rostov-on-Don. Located on the right bank of the Tsimlyansk Reservoir, on the Don River. Tsimlyansk Railway Station in the Morozovsk - Kuberle line. River harbour. Population (1992 est.) 15.5 thousand, (1979 est.) 15 thousand.

Founded in the 17th century by Don Cossacks as a Cossack town of Tsimla, it was a stanitsa (Cossack village) of Tsimlyanskaya till 1950; in 1950-1952, it was transferred from the flood zone of the Tsimlyansk Hydroelectric Station reservoir and transformed into the industrial community of Tsimlyansk. Town since 1961.

An important traffic centre in the basin of the lower Don (transhipment of grain, coal, timber and forest products, mineral building raw materials, etc. from river boats to trains and vice versa). Centre of the agricultural area (raising of cereals; wine-growing, dairy and meat cattle production). By the beginning of the 1990s, the town had enterprises processing agricultural raw materials, in particular, a sparkling wine winery (makes Tsimlyansk Sparkling Wine), a butter-making, brewing etc. factories, a carpet factory, a seaborne machinery plant, a concrete product plant, a brickworks. The town area includes the Tsimlyansk Hydroelectric Station.

The largest part of Tsimlyansk was built up with one-storeyed farmstead houses under the Development Plan in 1950. Wide streets and squares of the central part of the town abound in green plantations.