Former Soviet Union

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In a much repeated Soviet joke, an elderly Russian emigrant applies to re- enter his homeland. Under "Place of birth" on the form he writes, "St. Petersburg." Under "Left the country from?" he enters, "Petrograd." Under "Destination?" he puts, "Leningrad." Finally, under "Where would you like to settle?" he puts, "St. Petersburg."

If that old man is still around, he has his wish. Lenin's statues have been toppled, and the elegant former imperial capital, built by Czar Peter the Great, has its historic name once more. So do dozens, if not hundreds, of towns, cities and now independent states throughout the former Soviet Union, where names that reflect the communist past have been declared non grata.

The Bolshevik revolutionaries were hardly unique in renaming places to mark their arrival on the world scene; the French Jacobins even redid the months of the calendar. But the communists carried the process to extremes, both to honor their heroes and to Russify the hard-to-pronounce appellations of the territories, like Georgia and Central Asia, that they added to their polyglot empire. Thus, the ancient Azerbaijani trading city of Gyandzha became Kirovabad to honor Sergei Kirov (he got a ballet company too), who headed the Communist Party in the republic in the 1920s. Nizhni Novgorod was renamed Gorky, for the chronicler of the working class, Maxim.

Sometimes the communist rulers revised their pantheon of heroes and cities as politics changed: Stalingrad, originally Czaritsin, became Volgograd after Joseph Stalin's crimes were made public in the 1960s. (Another Soviet joke: After the change from Stalingrad was announced, the Kremlin supposedly received a cable that read, I CONCUR WITH THE CRITICISM OF THE COMRADES. SIGNED: JOSEPH VOLGIN.)

Now that Moscow no longer runs the former union, local governments are returning to traditional national place names that evoke far different memories. They are dumping the old communists: the city of Andropov, for Yuri Andropov, party boss from 1982 to '84, is Rybinsk again; Sverdlovsk, for Lenin's henchman Yakov Sverdlov, who approved the execution of Czar Nicholas II and his family there, has reassumed the proud title Yekaterinburg, for Peter the Great's wife, Catherine.

The local governments are also reinstituting preferred names and spellings that accord with their languages: not every republic now uses the Cyrillic alphabet from which the English versions are transliterated. So Belorussia is now Belarus, Moldavia is Moldova, Kirghizia is Kyrgyzstan. Belarus says its capital is Mensk, not Minsk, and Ukrainians insist that Lvov is Lviv.

The map above registers some of the recent revisions in former Soviet names. But with 15 independent states all rushing to reclaim their national heritage, this is probably not the last word on the subject.

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