In Putin's Footsteps

NOTE ON NAMING AND RENAMING

In Russia, names are often political. Naming your child Maria or Marlen signals a political stance. Maria, of course, is the name of the Christian Mother of God; Marlen, a popular name in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, is a combination of “Marx” and “Lenin,” and naturally brings to mind something less than holy. City streets at times bear the names of political upheavals or memorialize landmark events or, most of all, important leaders. Both 1917 and 1991 were moments of upheaval and great potential for Russia, so one often sees names reflecting those turbulent years—and especially 1917, with its revolution of worldwide import.

Saint Petersburg has undergone renaming more than any other city in Russia we can think of. Built on the orders of Peter the Great, it was first called Sankt-Peterburg—Saint Petersburg—with “burg” harking back to the Dutch origins of the name. In the 1910s, during the upheavals of wars and revolutions, “Saint” was eliminated and the city found itself renamed, in Slavic fashion, Petrograd. After Vladimir Lenin died in 1924, Petrograd became Leningrad. After 1991, the city became Saint Petersburg once again. Some residents now joke that it will soon become Saint Putinburg, since Vladimir Putin hails from the city.

Russia’s tradition of naming and renaming may seem exaggerated to outsiders, but it stems from the country’s binary spirit, with the currents of history sweeping first in one direction and then in the other. In the twentieth century alone, Russia witnessed two tumultuous political transformations, lurching from monarchy to socialist dictatorship to the chaos of Boris Yeltsin’s democracy to the “centralized” democracy that almost inevitably led to the rise of Vladimir Putin, with his initial calls for “a dictatorship of the law.” Those were welcome words to Russians wearied by out-of-control oligarchs, organized crime, strikes, and the collapse of infrastructure. Many lessons should have been drawn from such events, but Russian leaders, once victorious, generally seek to annihilate the past from which they could have learned. They have regarded the past not as the foundation for future growth, but as a source of error to be destroyed before it infects their own regime. Total destruction must precede creation, and this obliteration of history manifests itself in statues and names.

Russians have traditionally glorified their leaders, even turned them into demigods, when they were not actually God’s anointed vicars on earth, as were the czars. They have also been quick to vilify them when the system of government changes or a new leader arrives. The functionaries of the Soviet system suffered especial peril when their boss in the Kremlin moved on—often, but not always, to the next world. Statues of Joseph Stalin and Lenin used to grace every public square in the USSR, and the bodies of both lay within the mausoleum beneath the Kremlin walls. After Stalin’s death and denunciation by Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s corpse was removed to a more modest location nearby. The authorities then set about expunging his name from street signs and pretty much every public space. Expunge the name and voilà! The crimes the dictator committed against millions vanish.

After World War II and the Soviet annexation, the German name Königsberg became Kaliningrad. It remains Kaliningrad to this day, even though more than half the city’s population has no idea that their city was named after Mikhail Kalinin, a Bolshevik revolutionary, Soviet functionary, and Stalin ally. The fall of the Soviet Union prompted many cities to revert to their prerevolutionary names, but this was not an option for Kaliningrad, which had belonged to Germany. Reviving its German name would have hampered its new Russian present. Things were different for Kuibyshev, however, which reassumed its czarist-era name, Samara, even if its main square is still Kuibyshev Square, with its monument to the city’s former namesake, Valerian Kuibyshev, another Soviet functionary of the Stalin era, still intact. Similarly, Yekaterinburg, or Sverdlovsk during the Soviet decades, brought back its old name after 1991. Nevertheless, a statue of the Bolshevik Yakov Sverdlov, a Lenin contemporary, remains afoot on Lenin Street, near the Sverdlov State Academic Theater of Musical Comedy. Moreover, Sverdlovsk Oblast has kept its Soviet name even though its capital now is Russian Yekaterinburg.

The incongruity between reality and state-sponsored mythology may trouble foreigners, but it goes almost unnoticed by the Russians, who accept the implicit contradictions as a part of daily life. Like the double-headed eagle next to the Lenin statues, such incongruities characterize Russian culture, which thrives on ambiguity and approximation.

And not only cities and streets get renamed. Russian leaders have at times chosen their own names. The German-born Empress Catherine II or Catherine the Great was once a more modest Princess Sophie Auguste of Anhalt-Zerbst. The current leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, was Vladimir Gundyaev before donning his robes. Although they claimed to be leading a state founded on scientific Marxism, Soviet leaders followed these same imperial and religious traditions. Hailing from the town of Simbirsk on the Volga, Vladimir Lenin was, first, Vladimir Ulyanov, but after a stint in Siberian exile he adopted the name of Lenin, so impressed was he by the mighty river Lena near which he served his sentence. After Lenin’s death Simbirsk was renamed Ulyanovsk, and it is Ulyanovsk to this day. Stalin’s original surname was Dzhugashvili. From the small town of Gori in Georgia, then part of the Russian and later the Soviet empire, the young Dzhugashvili decided to harden his image by concocting a name from the word stal, Russian for “steel.”

Outsiders generally associate Russia with totalitarianism, the epitome of political centralization, and this is not an incorrect assumption. However, much in Russian life also depends on the whim of local authorities, and sometimes even on the people’s will. Residents of Ulyanovsk, for example, chose to continue their association with Lenin, rather than renaming their town Simbirsk.

All this naming and renaming can seem baffling to non-Russians. Russians themselves view it as representative of their land’s long and complex history, a land of people accustomed to thinking one thing and saying another, a land where roads often lead to dead ends, a land where (for now at least) the Putin-era farrago of symbols from almost all Russia’s epochs—Red Victory flags from the Great Patriotic War, red-white-and-blue banners from the imperial period, Soviet-era statues, and emblems from Russian Orthodox Christianity—are tasked with reconciling the irreconcilable extremes of a country where the past is anything but past.