Why didn’t the Bolsheviks rename Moscow?

During the Soviet era, many cities were renamed in honor of Soviet leaders and dedicated communists: St. Petersburg, Tver, Yekaterinburg, Samara, Nizhny Novgorod and so on. We could continue this list for a long time. But were there any suggestions to rename Moscow? Yes, and we know of at least four attempts.

Petrograd in 1917

TASS

The first attempt happened in 1927, when about 200 government officials submitted a request to rename Moscow to Ilyich. “Lenin founded free Russia,” the request said. Stalin declined this offer, as Petrograd had just been renamed Leningrad and having the second large city named after the former ally was deemed too much.

Archive photo

The second attempt occurred in 1938, when Nikolai Yezhov, the then People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, made a proposal to rename the capital to Stalinodar in an attempt to win back Stalin’s favor. Stalin called it “nonsense”. Yezhov was soon executed by a firing squad.

V.I.Lenin

P.Zhukov/Sputnik

There’s evidence that another attempt to rename the capital took place after World War II and another after Stalin’s death, under Khrushchev. But at that time, the policy of de-Stalinization had already begun, so all the attempts were in vain.

A view of the Kremlin from Bolshoi Kamenny Bridge. Moscow, 1937

Anatoliy Garanin/Sputnik

It’s still considered strange that Stalin refused to give permission to rename Moscow, considering the existing cult of his personality, his portraits at every corner and the renaming campaign for cities and villages, also launched by Stalin. However, that was not the only case when he showed a lack of vanity. It’s known that he removed his image from the projects of the Order of Victory and refused the idea to rename Moscow State University in his honor.

Read more: Who was the last to be executed by law in Russia?

Dear readers,

Our website and social media accounts are under threat of being restricted or banned, due to the current circumstances. So, to keep up with our latest content, simply do the following:

• Subscribe to our Telegram channel
• Subscribe to our weekly email newsletter
• Enable push notifications on our website
• Install a VPN service on your computer and/or phone to have access to our website, even if it is blocked in your country

If using any of Russia Beyond's content, partly or in full, always provide an active hyperlink to the original material.