Soviet Union: What's in A Name?

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Leonid Brezhnev is no hero to Mikhail Gorbachev, who has dubbed his predecessor's 18-year reign the "era of stagnation." Still, there are reminders of that reign all over the Soviet Union, where everything from an icebreaker to a whole city bears Brezhnev's name. Last week, in a two- paragraph dispatch, the TASS news agency announced that three of those reminders are being eliminated.

The city of Brezhnev, on the Volga River, returns to the far more poetic Naberezhniye Chelny (Dugout Canoes on the Riverbank). The Moscow suburb of Brezhnev is once again Cheryomushky Rayon (Cherry Tree District). In Leningrad, Brezhnev Square reverts to the Krasnogvardeiskaya Ploshchad (Red Guards Square). Not since Joseph Stalin's name was wiped from the city of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) and the country's highest mountain (now Peak of Communism) in the late 1950s has a Soviet leader been so posthumously disgraced. No word yet on whether the nuclear-powered icebreaker, the cosmonaut-training center, the military academy, the power station, the tank division and the assorted farms and factories that still carry the Brezhnev name will undergo an identity change.