Why were cities in Russia renamed so often?
With the beginning of World War I, Germanisms in the names of Russian cities became, as people would say today, toxic. That’s how St. Petersburg turned into Petrograd in August 1914, and, for example, the city of Yekaterinenshtadt in Povolzhye turned into Yekaterinograd in 1915.
Toponyms were also changed en masse in the 1920s-1930s, after the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War. All names linked to the tsarist regime were changed; cities received their new names in honor of the founders of Marxism and other Soviet figures.
Here’s some examples:
Yekaterinograd → Marksshtadt (1920) → Marks (1942)
Yekaterinodar → Krasnodar (1920)
Yamburg → Kingisepp (1922, in honor of the Estonian revolutionary)
Yekaterinburg → Sverdlovsk (1924)
Simbirsk → Ulyanovsk (1924)
Petrograd → Leningrad (1924)
Tsaritsyn → Stalingrad (1925)
Tver → Kalinin (1931)
Vladikavkaz → Ordzhonikidze (1931, from 1944 to 1954, it was renamed to Dzaudzhikau)
Novokuznetsk → Stalinsk (1932)
Nizhny Novgorod → Gorky (1932)
Vyatka → Kirov (1943)
In 1945, East Prussia was annexed by the USSR as a result of World War II.
Königsberg → Kaliningrad (1946)
Pillau → Baltiysk
Tilsit → Sovetsk
In 1948, the names of the cities of the Karelian Isthmus were changed to secure the results of peace treaties with Finland.
Antrea → Kamennogorsk
Kexholm → Priozersk
Koivisto → Primorsk
In 1956, the cult of personality of Joseph Stalin was officially denounced.
Stalingrad → Volgograd (1961)
Stalinsk → Novokuznetsk (back again!)
This tendency also affected toponyms that received their names from his associates.
Molotov → Perm (this name was restored in 1957)
Voroshilov → Ussuriysk
Chkalov → Orenburg
The city of Gzhatsk, in the vicinity of which the first astronaut in the world was born, was renamed Gagarin in 1968, right after the death of Yuri Alekseevich.
During perestroika (1985-1991), many cities recovered their historical names.
Leningrad → St. Petersburg
Sverdlovsk → Yekaterinburg
Kuybyshev → Samara
Gorky → Nizhny Novgorod
Kalinin → Tver
By the way, Leningrad Region and Sverdlovsk Region were not renamed. In 1990, Ordzhonikidze recovered two names at once – Vladikavkaz in Russian and Dzaudzhikau in the Ossetian language.
