Kotovsk is a city in Odessa Oblast

Odessa Oblast

Odesa Oblast, also written as Odessa Oblast , is the southernmost and largest oblast of south-western Ukraine. The administrative center of the oblast is the city of Odessa.-History:...

, Ukraine

Ukraine

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...

, the administrative center of Kotovskyi Raion. Population is 40,718 (2001).

Birzula, as it was called then, was the capital of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic from 1928 to 1929.

The city is known as the place where Soviet military leader Grigori Kotovsky

Grigore Kotovski

Grigory Ivanovich Kotovsky was a Soviet military leader and Communist activist.Kotovsky was born in Bessarabia, the son of a mechanical engineer. His father was of Polish ethnicity and his mother was an ethnic Russian. Kotovskt attended agricultural college and worked as an estate manager....

 was buried in a mausoleum

Mausoleum

A mausoleum is an external free-standing building constructed as a monument enclosing the interment space or burial chamber of a deceased person or persons. A monument without the interment is a cenotaph. A mausoleum may be considered a type of tomb or the tomb may be considered to be within the...

. In 1935, the city was named after him; formerly the settlement bore the name Birzula. The mausoleum was later destroyed during the Romanian occupation of Transnistria

Transnistria (World War II)

Transnistria Governorate was a Romanian administered territory, conquered by the Axis Powers from the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa, and occupied from 19 August 1941 to 29 January 1944...

.

The city has a major railway station and depot on the line Odessa

Odessa

Odessa or Odesa is the administrative center of the Odessa Oblast located in southern Ukraine. The city is a major seaport located on the northwest shore of the Black Sea and the fourth largest city in Ukraine with a population of 1,029,000 .The predecessor of Odessa, a small Tatar settlement,...

—Zhmerinka (stretch Razdelnaya—Poberezhye).