Window on Eurasia: ‘Russians! Don’t Call Your Children Elektrifikatsia – or Viagra!’

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, November 10 – Some members of the Russian Duma want to take a step that even the Soviet government never did: they want to prevent the residents of the Russian Federation from giving their children names that someone in authority deems “ahistorical” or “inappropriate.”

 

            Thirty years ago, the author of the standard five-volume dictionary of Russian family names created a stir when he published an article in “Literaturnaya gazeta” saying that Russian parents should not call their children “Elektrifikatsiya” or other exotic names like those used in the early Soviet period.

 

But even then, this was viewed as nothing more than the expression of a preference, like the handbooks of possible names that Soviet parents could purchase in a bookstore or consult at a registration office, and while the practice of giving people names like “Melsor” for “Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin-October revolution” declined, it did not disappear.

 

Last week, “Rossiiskaya gazeta” reported that a group of Duma deputies is drafting legislation that would create a list of names that parents in the Russian Federation would be allowed to give their children, apparently prompted by a report that one family had named their child “Lucifer” (rg.ru/2014/11/06/proekt.html).

 

            Viktoriya Pashkova, a lawyer who is helping to draft the legislation, said that this was no more than what many other countries like Germany and Sweden have long done, and she pointed out that Belarus bans names “which contradict the norms of morality and the national traditions” of that country.

 

            Now, Archpriest Gennady Belovolov, the director of the Ionna Kronshtad House Museum and an influential Russian Orthodox commentator, has weighed in on the issue, arguing that such legislation is needed now when he says a war is going on against Russia’s national identity (ruskline.ru/news_rl/2014/11/10/russkim_imenam_nuzhna_ohrannaya_gramota/).

 

            An individual’s name is “the spiritual passport of the individual,” he argues, and must reflect the national and religious traditions of his country.  At a time when Russian passports do not indicate the nationality or religious faith of their bearers, names must serve the purpose of identifying and reinforcing national identity.

 

            In the Orthodox tradition, parents choose names from those of the saints because “a Christian name testifies above all that [the individual] is a Christian and a member of the Church.” But these names, especially when there is “a war against Russia,” show his or her “membership in the Russian people.”

 

            (Neither of these reports specify whether there will be special lists for members of non-Russians, who form nearly a quarter of the population and who have different religious, cultural and political traditions.)

 

            Unfortunately, the archpriest says, the Russian tradition was broken by the Bolsheviks and “a mass of ‘names’ formed as abbreviations of the families of the leaders of the revolution and of holidays” became widely used, including Vladlen, Marlen, Rem, Vilen, Oktyabrina, and Dazdraperma.

 

            And for a time, Russians even named their children after the leaders of the revolution and the Soviet state. Thus, there were Ledats (for Lev Davydovich Trotsky), Dalis (for ‘long live Lenin and Stalin”), Fed for Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, aand even Pofistal (for “the defeater of fascism Joseph Stalin”).

 

            With the end of the Soviet system and the resulting ideological vacuum, Father Gennady says, new names have emerged that are equally a violation of the Russian national tradition, names like Privatisatsiya, Viagra, Mercedes, Millioner, or the especially lamentable Lucifer, recently registered in Perm.

 

            Parents should reflect that children given such names will hardly be grateful, not only because such names will “create a mass of psychological problems” for their bearers but also because the parents are cutting their children off from their people and their Church. A law will help them do so.

 

            The archpriest expresses the hope that such legislation will also lead to the revival of ancient Orthodox names which are seldom encountered now, including Izyaslav, Yaropolk, Zlata, Militsa, Gorazd, “and others.”

 

            There is one new naming trend in Russia that Father Gennady says he does approve of: Some families are now giving their children names “in honor of the members of the family of the last Russian emperor. Such actions “in truth represent the popular canonization of the tsarist martyrs.” Of course, all their names were those of earlier Russian saints.