History
The village of Staraya Zima (Ста́рая Зима́) on the present site of the town was established in 1743. In 1772, its population began to grow more quickly due to the construction of a horse-tract from Moscow which crossed the Oka River. Until the 1900s, Zima remained a roadside, mainly agricultural village.
In 1898, the Trans-Siberian railway was built through the village and a railroad station was open. Town status was granted to Zima in 1925.
Zima's population remained at around 40,000 from the 1960s until 1990; however, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the associated economic crisis, the population decreased by around 15% during the 1990s.
The town is the birthplace of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a Russian poet, the author of the biographical poem "Zima Station".
Read more about this topic: Zima (town)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)