The highlight of the Engels Regional Museum is not its military hardware, which hammers home the point about what WWII was about (ie defeating Germany), but a magnificent collection of about 40 works by the Volga German Realist artist Yakov Veber (1870-1958), whose style is reminiscent of Ilya Repin's. Take any bus from ul Moskovskaya to the Torgoby Tsentr Lazurny in Engels. The museum is almost directly across the road.
Veber was arrested in 1937 on the dubious - if not spurious - grounds of 'anti-Soviet activities' and spent 19 years in Kazakhstan before being rehabilitated and allowed to return to Engels.
