'Why Not Tsaritsyn?" -- Most Volgograd Residents Opposed to Restoring the Name Stalingrad, Polyanskaya Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, February 4 – Despite the widespread trend in Russia to restore names from the past and the centrality of the Stalingrad battle in Moscow’s treatment of World War II, most residents of Volgograd are against restoring the name Stalingrad to their city because they feel it fails to capture their deeper regional identity, St. Petersburg historian Anastasiya Polyanskaya says.

            In a detailed 9,000-word, lavishly illustrated article, she describes how many in Volgograd – and Polyanskaya herself is a native of that city – feel that too much effort has been made to reduce their city’s rich history to a single event, the World War II battle (liberal.ru/excurses/volgograd-stalingrad-czariczyn-gorod-na-volge-v-poiskah-regionalnoj-identichnosti).

            Many of them aren’t interested in changing the name of their city; but if Moscow pushes for such a change, a large share want to go back not to Stalingrad but to Tsaritsyn, the city’s name earlier and one with a rich history of its own as a regional center. Some Volgograders even see a return to that name as a step toward “the decolonization” of their city.

            Such feelings, the St. Petersburg historian continues, inevitably provoke the question: “Can one speak about a single civic-cultural identity in a city which is so sharply divided between ‘before’ and ‘after’” as defined by others and imposed on them from the outside? The answer is in part yes, but the city needs to resolve many of its bigger problems to get there.

            In her view, Polyanskaya continues, “Volgograd will be able to acquire a genuine regional identity and become a perfected place if it begins to resolve the following tasks” – cleaning up the environment, promoting effective social and economic development, and self-consciously selecting a new urban “brand.”

            She argues that the existing memorials can become the foundation for the formation of a single urban self-consciousness which will open a path to a recognition of oneself as a regional community” that has far broader and more important routes than a single battle. Will this happen? She says she can’t give an answer but “can say there is a chance.”