Russians sick of the name game

Press, 1 August 1986, Page 21

Russians sick of the name game

From

Andrew Wilson,

in Moscow

"What a mess it would be if we suddenly renamed trees and plants, or the objects of everyday life, or if we started calling white ’black’ and black ’blue,’ ” writes Srgei Zalygin in the “Llteraturnaya Gazyetta.” “So why do we do this to towns, villages, streets, wide open spaces, and mountains?" he asks.

“A person goes to sleep in the town of Izhvesk, for example, and wakes up in Ustinov, and we pretend that nothing has happened.” But it has, says Zalygin — a memory has been obliterated, of the Russia of one’s parents and the past "Nobody can deny that Dmitri Fedorovich Ustinov (the late Soviet Defence Minister) was an outstanding statesman, but why should his name be made to collide with history?" Zalygin also objects: to .Rybinsk, north of Moscow, being renamed Andropov, and to a small town having been named, Karl Marx. “You walk through a town as if it were a cemetery. Many names you have never even heard of, you just know they are people who are dead.’L Until recently a new quarter of Moscow had the evocative name; “Cheremushkinskaya” (after a kind of white-blossoming cherry,, tree) — “But now it has become the Brezhnev quarter.” “Nowhere else in the world is, it done — and yet we do it. We. have even tried naming our, babies in this bizarre fashion, after enthusiasts, collectivists,' miners, and five-year periods.. “the thousand-year-old Russian city of Tver, situated in the. Tverskii region, suddenly be-, came Kalinin in the Kalinskii region, but if you talk to a dweller of Kalinin he will tell, you “I am a Tverskian.”

More than 70 Soviet towns are. named after the October Revolutionaries and about 50 after Kirov, Stalin’s restive henchman who was assassinated in 1934. . “Is this because in the first years of Soviet power we hurried to become firmly established and make our mark? To settle our accounts with the past — to shake its dust off our feet?” The writer himself lived on a street which was first called “Biiski" and was then renamed “Vegman ” “Baidukov,” “Sovnarkhbzdvska,” and finally' “Deputatski” (Deputies Street). He has had letters from people living on High-Voltage, WagonRepair, and Godless Streets, while names have yet to be thought ■up Tor some .streets in the former village of Ladizhino which was 10 .years ago renamed HEP (Hydro-Electric Power). With a dry turn of wit, after reading of the party’s recent rehabilitation of the former Soviet Foreign Minister, Zalygin concludes by suggesting that it is never too late ,to change names back to their originals. After all, the city of Perm was once called Molotov.

Copyright — Rondon Observer