Word: lenin
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Vladimir Ilyich Lenin must be turning over in his mausoleum. He was never one for personality cults, but to strip his name from the city that gave birth to the communist revolution is the ultimate repudiation of what he stood for. That is precisely what the residents of Leningrad resolved to do last week. According to preliminary results of a referendum organized by the reformist city council, 55% voted to restore the town's old name of St. Petersburg...
...West, intending to yank his fusty country toward the future. When the Russians went to war against Germany in 1914, the city's Teutonic appellation suddenly became politically incorrect. Emperor Nicholas II's solution was to Russify the name, making it Petrograd. So it remained until 1924, when Lenin died, prompting the Bolshevik government to rechristen the city in his honor. It was there, after all, that worker revolts paved the way for the communist uprising...
...communist establishment adamantly opposes another name swap. Reluctant to rally behind the widely discredited Lenin, apparatchiks have focused their argument on the dubious notion that a rechristening would dishonor the martyrs of the brutal siege of Leningrad, in which the city withstood a Nazi blockade for 900 days without falling. Functionaries also complain that altering the city's name on street signs, documents and official insignia would cost 150 million rubles...
...voters want Lenin excised, nonetheless, in the well-established Soviet tradition of exorcising demons of the past by rewriting place names. The city of Lugansk has flip-flopped titles four times: Stalin made it Voroshilovgrad, after Marshal Kliment Voroshilov; Khrushchev restored the original name in his anti-Stalin campaign; his successors -- deciding that purge had gone too far -- changed it back to Voroshilovgrad; and finally (well, at least for now), the city is called Lugansk again...
...Mikhail Gorbachev panhandles the U.S. and McDonald's draws longer lines in Moscow than Lenin's tomb, it is difficult to believe that less than three decades ago, Washington and Moscow were on the steely edge of war. The drama and tension of those years are vividly recaptured in Michael Beschloss's The Crisis Years. But this is no simple rehash of John Kennedy's sparring with Nikita Khrushchev. Beschloss casts new light on topics ranging from the Cuban missile crisis to the security risks of J.F.K.'s sexual dalliances...