![]() Russian and Soviet leaders were keen to project power or to intimidate. During the age of colonialism, some senior administrators and generals achieved comparative immortality by having places named or renamed after them, notably in the British Empire (Abbottābād).Ī partial view of Aksu Stream nearby Waterfall Kuzalan in Dereli district of Giresun province, Turkey by Zeynel Cebeci. It helped to be royal (Victoria appears at least 31 times in 19 different countries), be a person of great power or influence (Washington), someone who had achieved some conspicuous feat (Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut), or explored new territory (Columbus). Leaders, at all levels, liked this idea and it spread rapidly. In due course, something more creative was needed, and somebody trying to curry favor suggested naming their settlement after its leader. People needed to differentiate between their settlements so they began to give them names: “river” (Rijeka in Croatia), “river mouth” (Dartmouth in England), “fast-flowing” (Bystrytsya in Ukraine and Bystrzyca in Poland), “white water” (Aksu in China, Kazakhstan, and Turkey), the “yellow river” (China). Rivers attracted people because they provided fish to eat and water to drink, and facilitated movement and communication. So rivers have played a part in two of Volgograd’s names. Tsaritsyn is actually a Tatar name meaning “Town on the (River) Tsaritsa” from the Turkic sary su, “Yellow River.” It was given this name because of the golden sands of the Tsaritsa, at the point where it flows into the Volga. This is a tempting assumption, but it is an assumption too far toponymy is prone to such traps. Something to do with the Tsar, probably, and given this name when it was founded as a fortress in 1589. So what was Stalingrad called before 1925? Tsaritsyn. Since he had been chairman of the local military committee which had organized the defense of the city in 1919 against the White Russian armies, why not name this city after him? But in the years following his death in 1953, Stalin began to fall from grace and many places named after him were renamed. By 1925, Josef Stalin was the Communist Party General Secretary, and the trend to rename cities and towns in his honor had begun. Between 19 it had been called Stalingrad, and was site of one of the most ferocious battles in the Second World War. Standing underneath the monstrous Soviet statue of “Motherland Calls” looking out over the mighty Volga River, I could understand why the city should have been renamed, rather unimaginatively, Volgograd “City on the Volga”.
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