High Cost and Good Sense Limited Campaigns to Change Place Names in Soviet Times, Savin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 2 – The Soviet government in the 1920s and 1930s remains notorious for changing the names of cities, towns, streets, and institutions; but in fact, Andrey Savin says, the authorities severely limited this area because of high costs, popular resistance, and the danger that any change would have to be changed yet again as reputations evolved.

            The senior scholar at the Institute of History of the Siberian Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences in what promises to be the first of a series of articles on toponymy in Soviet times says despite what many now think, only 27 cities were renamed between 1917 and September 1924 (lenta.ru/articles/2020/07/03/savin_1/).

            During World War I, as part of its anti-German policies, the tsarist government changed many names from German ones to Russian, the most prominent being the rechristening of the capital St. Petersburg Petrograd. And so there was already a tradition in place that the Bolsheviks were ready to follow, albeit for different purposes.

            Many rank-and-file Bolsheviks wanted to change the names of places they felt were related to the former regime or the church and to promote the radical transformation of the world they hoped for. During the civil war, some of them went ahead on their own, Savin says; but the central government took steps to reign this trend in.

            Already in March 1918, the NKVD issued a directive specifying that any changes in nomenklatura would have to be approved by the central authorities given the costs of such steps and the confusion uncontrolled renaming could produce. Thus, the historian continues, economic considerations and good sense prevented “a toponymic revolution in Russia.”

            But pressure from below for name changes nonetheless continued, and so in 1923, the government created a special commission to look into the matter. Various commissariats were represented with various interests and positions, but the predominant view remained that name changing was costly and even destabilizing.

            Those considerations, however, were ignored in the wake of Lenin’s death in January 1924 when party members from across Russia rushed to rename this or that place or street in honor of the Bolshevik leader. That forced the Soviet government to intervene to block this, reaffirming that no change could happen without Moscow’s blessing.

            With rare exceptions, the historian says. Moscow reversed name changes introduced from below without such approval.  And that became the new standard.  As a result, when some Bolsheviks proposed renaming Moscow “Ilich City” in 1927, the central government rejected it out of hand.

            In the early 1930s, Stalin was more open to name changes; but he quickly ran into a problem that forced him to block many changes others wanted to make: if a city or street were renamed for a leading Bolshevik who then became “an enemy of the people,” that place would again have to be renamed at great expense and confusion.

            It was better, the Kremlin leader appears to have decided, to avoid such problems by not renaming anything in the first place, the historian concludes.