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.
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.
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.
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?
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