Ideological War on Names

[Andrew McKernan]

Dear SEELANGers,

I write to you from Moscow, where I am on Fulbright assignment to study the
changing face of the Soviet city under Stalin, and the social (mass media,
literary, etc.) reaction thereof. My primary concern is how the physical
environment changed, the chaotic destruction and restoration of massive
chunks of downtown, the upheaval of the urban environment, and so on.

Just in speaking with another Fulbrighter about the metro stops that have
changed names in the few years that we've come to Russia, however, I've come
to thinking about the changes in place names, as well. Examples of this are
ubiquitous and famous: Tverskaya/Gorky, Kaluzhskaya/Leninsky Prospekt,
Kalininsky Prospekt, etc. I could keep going for a while. There are a few
literary authors I can immediately recall writing about this, as well - I
believe Pasternak includes something about the changing names towards the
end of Zhivago, and it's a major reflection for Ayn Rand's
narrator-protagonist in "We the Living."

I've seen a lot of passing references to the changing names in my research,
but the architectural historians were primarily interested in the buildings,
not the names. Does anyone know of any literature, scholarly or literary,
that deals with this? Any recommendations on pursuing this tangent? Until
now I had just taken the phenomenon as a typical byproduct, ipso facto, of
the changing regimes.

Most sincerely,

Andrew McKernan

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