Yablonovka (Russian: Яблоновка) is a rural locality (a selo) in Rovensky District of Saratov Oblast, Russia, located about 50 kilometers (31 mi) south of the city of Engels on the left bank of the Volga River.
The first forty-seven settler families came from Bavaria (Nuremberg), Baden, Hesse (Darmstadt and Neu-Isenburg), the Palatinate, the Rhineland, Saxony, and Brandenburg.
The German colonists' special status was nullified under the Russification measures which began as part of Tsar Alexander II's reforms and continued under his successor, Alexander III, and some of the male colonists who had been conscripted were killed in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1888.
[2] When Nazi Germany broke the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa in 1941, Stalin abolished the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and signed an order of banishment against ethnic Germans, which took effect on September 16, 1941.
Post-war hopes for the re-establishment of the Volga German ASSR and return of the deportees were dashed by a February 21, 1992 decree of Boris Yeltsin in Saratov,[citation needed] and Yablonovka is now populated primarily by Russians.