Paul Goble
Staunton, Aug. 31 – In a world where it is increasingly difficult to separate satire from reality, Sergey Aksyonov, a Svobodnaya Pressa commentator, argues that Putin should follow Trump’s action in renaming Lake Ontario Lake America by giving Russian place names to all places Russia has an interest, thus leaving the US with “only a lake in Canada.”
According to the writer, by changing the name of the lake to its north, “Washington has effectively staked a claim to the body of water straddling the US-Canada border, rendering it more American and Canadian” and raising the question: “Does expansion begin with changes in names?” (svpressa.ru/world/article/529886/).
The first reaction of Russians to Trump’s move is to oppose it, he continues. After all, they have a long “tradition of sympathizing with downtrodden nations and peoples” and thus are naturally inclined to be “indignant about Trump’s boorish and brazen habit of barging in where he isn’t wanted.”
“But,” Aksyonov says, isn’t it worthwhile for Russians to “take closer look at this approach” and possibly adopt it? Isn’t it possible that Trump’s brazenness is what makes him strong because he “doesn’t hesitate, cower, or hold back out of concern for how others may judge him?”
After all, isn’t it “better to be a bandit than to be a bandit’s victim?” given that “victim states do not survive” or even prosper. “Russia is no vast precisely because alongside its idealistic intelligentsia, there have always been tough statemen and military commanders who, devoid of sentimentality, have raised the Russian flag and not taken it down.”
Russia has been solicitous to its neighbors, Aksyonov says; but now they “perceiving Moscow as weakening have become increasingly brazen” in their behavior including about names and “a new approach is needed,” one that Trump may have shown the way forward to the Kremlin.
As examples of what Moscow might do, he suggests “the Caspian Sea could be renamed the Russian Sea,” because after all, Russia has the largest share of it and because some of its neighbors such as Azerbaijan are busily renaming places inside of today’s Russian Federation. And it could do the same with the Black Sea.
But it would be even more useful to give all the places in Kaliningrad Russian names given that Germany, Poland and Lithuania have been doing the same thing about that Russian federal subject on their own. And Aksyonov suggests that perhaps the time has come to “stake a new claim to our exclave” by calling “’Rusgorod.’”
“Changing a Soviet-era place name has its downsides.... Yet, if one views this innovation as a stage in the struggle for the people's *Lebensraum*—their living space—the change is acceptable: the Bolsheviks always prioritized substance over form. Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin—the "All-Union Elder"—is unlikely to take offense.”
Thus, “it would be especially fitting to give a Russian name to the country’s opposite extremity: the Kurils.” They should be called “the Russian Islands. even though their current name is historically grounded … renaming them now is a valid move to counter the resurgence of Japanese militarism.”
The naming of one’s own territories—and those of others—asserted by a nation of its own volition and in defiance of objections from other countries or international bodies, is a clear manifestation of sovereignty;” and that is precisely what Moscow is now asserting, Aksyonov points out.
“That is why,” he continues, “rather than idly waiting for the tide to turn, we should launch a geographical offensive of our own by staking new claims on the country's western, eastern, and southern extremities: the Caspian as the Russian Sea, Kaliningrad as Rusgorod, and the Kurils as the Russian Islands.”
Indeed, ‘for the sake of symmetry,” the Svobodnaya Pressa writer concludes, “we might even come up with something similar for the North,” Aksyonov says, renaming it “the Russian Ocean” -- before someone else thinks of trying to make it their own first by a name and then by force.
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