Ideological War on Names

[Rebecca Jane Stanton]

Dear Andrew,

you might check out the proceedings of this conference:
http://proceedings.usu.ru/mag/0063%2801_$01_02-2009%29/a43.pdf
I remember that someone there gave a paper on changing street names, 
specifically looking at some of the many cases in which names from 
different eras co-exist and as many as five different names may be 
recorded on adjacent signs for the same street.  Unfortunately I don't 
now remember who it was (but someone else on this list might).  I 
imagine there's a reference to it in the proceedings that would help you 
track down the scholar in  question.

All the best,
Rebecca Stanton

Andrew McKernan wrote:
> 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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