Paul Goble
Staunton, February 4 – Ninety-five years ago this month, the Bolsheviks decided to rename Novonikolayevsk Novosibirsk but only after an intense discussion which included calls for the city to be named “Kurultay,” the Turkic word for assembly, in order to appeal to Siberia’s large indigenous non-Russian population, Konstantin Golodayev says.
The Novosibirsk Museum worker says that everyone at that time was convinced that the old name with is tsarist echos had to be dispensed with, but there was little agreement on what the new name should be for a city that then oversaw a region of four million square kilometers extending from Omsk to the Trans-Baikal (sibreal.org/a/30985116.html).
While there was broad agreement at the time that the old name had to go and that the new name should reflect “the new” that was at the core of the Soviet project, some, like artist Grigory Choros-Gurkin wanted to dispense with a Russian name entirely, arguing that any such, even a revolutionary one, would offend the indigenous peoples of Siberia.
On the pages of Sovetskaya Sibir, he urged that the city change its name to “Kurultay” because that word in Turkic languages stood for a meeting place in which all political, economic, and living condition questions should be discussed. “This word, as a symbol of the International,” the artist said, “was something every native understood.”
In the event, his argument was ignored. Instead, the Soviet authorities first of all accepted the idea of mining engineer Konstantin Tulchinsky who said that Siberia 100 years from then would have 20 million people and be “stronger than the US.” Unfortunately, his prediction has not proved true, Golodayev says. And Tulchinsky himself died in Stalin’s prisons.
But his proposal that Novonikolayevsk be renamed was, and the city briefly became Novo-Sibirsk. But after a few months, the authorities dropped the hyphen; and the wannabe capital of Siberia became what it is today, Novosibirsk.
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