Putingrad

President Putin has said that Volgograd’s residents are at liberty to stop calling it Volgograd (its name for the past 54 years), and go back to Stalingrad, its name from 1925 to 1961. Perhaps he has forgotten how this all came about. But renaming cities has a long history in Russia.

Not only Stalin, but also many Soviet bigwigs liked the idea of commemorating themselves in this way. Petrograd, after all, was renamed Leningrad; and Simbirsk, Lenin’s birthplace, became Ulyanovsk (Lenin’s real surname was Ulyanov) back in 1924, but this was in response to his death, so he was not to blame. Trotsky was Lenin’s number two when Gatchina was renamed Trotsk, after him in 1923, although no one seemed to notice the somewhat silly joke (Gatchina is a suburb of what was soon to be Leningrad).

Stalin, Stalino, Donetsk

By 1931, the renaming epidemic had spread such that Tver, a city with a history to rival Moscow’s own, was rechristened Kalinin, after a party boss who was so ineffectual that he could not stop the arrest of his own wife, even though he rejoiced in the regal title of President of the Central Executive Committee.  

Cities started being called after Stalin in 1924, after Lenin’s death. At that time, Stalin  had not yet been appointed to fill the Leader’s shoes, but had every intention of doing so. Yuzovka was the first, in the Donbas – first rechristened Stalin, then Stalino, which someone must have thought had a better ring to it. Today it is known as Donetsk…

The first city to be renamed after Stalin was Yuzovka – now known as Donetsk.

Before becoming Stalino in 1924, the city of Yuzovka was originally named after its Welsh businessman founder, John Hughes, as he constructed a steel plant and several coalmines in the region (‘Yuz’ was the best Russian approximation to the pronunciation of his name). Despite being a far from insignificant place, Yuzovka, however, was not good enough to satisfy Stalin’s ego. So a year later, in 1925, the old city of Tsaritsyn, founded in the 16th century and named after the river it stood on, became Stalingrad. At that stage, Stalin had done nothing notable, and there was no big anniversary to celebrate either. Nevertheless, the renaming fashion soon spread; in 1924, Yekaterinburg was rechristened Sverdlovsk, in honour of Yakov Sverdlov, another prominent Party boss; and renamed cities soon began to form a kind of revolutionary altar screen, with Politbureau member Stalin in pride of place.

Renamed cities soon began to form a kind of revolutionary altar screen.

The power of wartime memories

After Stalin’s death in 1953, however, his former comrades still in power found it increasingly difficult to keep repeating the old lie that everything was great when Stalin was in charge. His ubiquitous name gradually began to fade away, and Stalingrad, Stalino, Stalinabad and thousands of smaller settlements honouring the Leader disappeared from the maps. Not that it happened overnight, or even immediately after Khrushchev’s famous speech in 1956, denouncing his predecessor’s ‘personality cult’ – the disappearance only finally happened in 1961. 

Getting rid of the name of Stalingrad was not achieved without much discussion;  people quoted the stirring propaganda slogans that were forever lodged in their memory. Stalingrad, it was argued, had become a symbol of the wartime victory connected with Stalin’s name; and people found a kind of mystical significance in the closeness of the names of the leader and the site of a crucial battle. Not for everybody, however: Prokhorovka was the site of an equally decisive victory in which the Red Army not only stood its ground but forced Hitler’s troops to retreat, but it had much less publicity, because who was Prokhor?  

After Stalin’s death his ubiquitous name eventually disappeared from the maps.

The USSR’s great victory on the Eastern Front was achieved not only thanks to Stalin, who appropriated it but who was no Napoleon, or even to Marshal Zhukov, the commander of the Soviet forces, and the only person who had a monument dedicated to him in central Moscow. Soviet victory on the Eastern Front was the work of many marshals, engineers, logistics experts, and foreigners who supplied the aircraft, trucks and weapons. Without all these peoples’ efforts, who knows when and how these battles would have ended. Not to mention of course the millions who gave their lives for it.  

Stalin, on the other hand, can be held personally responsible for the USSR’s massive defeat in 1941, when it was invaded by Hitler’s forces; and the Red Army was completely routed, losing nearly four million of its troops in a matter of months. This was not a defeat for the country, but mainly a defeat for Stalin himself – as politician, diplomat, effective head of the security services, and the executioner of Red Army top brass in the years immediately before the war. 

Victory in 1945 encouraged people to forget this defeat, although its memory has shaped both the internal and external politics of Russia to this day. Stalin was undoubtedly successful in maintaining his totalitarian regime and predetermining the further development of his country, which eventually brought about the collapse of the USSR. Of course, he did not invent the system he led; he was not being modest when he said he was just continuing Lenin’s work; he was only stating the truth. 

Putingrad

Putin is continuing Stalin’s work in the only way possible. The difference is that now it is more blatant, without the utopian masks that were once sincerely worn. 

Let us be clear: restoring Stalin’s name means restoring his regime.

But it is not personality cults, whether of Stalin or Putin, that will bring Russia down, rather the totalitarian regime adopted back in January 1918. All the current controversy around Stalin is in fact about whether this regime should be kept alive or whether Russians should take a good look at their country and rethink. But let us be clear: restoring Stalin’s name means restoring his regime. Putin is quite happy about that; now it is up to the people of Volgograd to decide.