Overview of the topic in the media
Ten years ago the City Council of The City of Gorky passed decision No. 284 to return to the then Lyadov Street its historical name — Bolshaya Pecherskaya. That was the first "swallow." It was followed by the return of the city's own original name — Nizhny Novgorod, and the "renaming" of a whole series of streets in Historic Center. The history of Nizhny Novgorod society's struggle for historical justice is instructive in many ways. Let us recall its main milestones.
Our distant ancestors possessed not only religious piety but also an unusually developed taste and sense of proportion. Proof of this is the system of geographical names, large and small, left to us as a legacy. The names of ancient Russian towns delight the ear with their euphony and harmony: Tver, Samara, Zlatoust, Sergiyev Posad, Gorodets, Vorotynets (disambiguation)...
Nizhny Novgorod was founded by Yuri Vsevolodovich at the beginning of the 13th century. Gorodets had arisen even earlier.
One marvels at how organic and logical the old names of the towns and villages of the Nizhny Novgorod land are, along with the names of their streets and squares. A detailed list of old Nizhny Novgorod streets was left to us by the remarkable local historian Nikolai Khramtsovsky, who published in the mid-19th century the fundamental work "A Brief Sketch of the History and Description of Nizhny Novgorod." For the most part these names survived right up until the revolutionary cataclysms. The toponyms reflected the traditional occupation of the people who lived there — Kanatnaya (Rope), Pryadilnaya (Spinning), Kuznechnaya (Smithy), Bolshaya Yamskaya and Malaya Yamskaya (Coachmen's streets). Or they were named after the Orthodox churches standing on them (streets leading to a church) — Bolshaya Pokrovskaya, Alekseevskaya Street (Dzerzhinskogo), Varvarskaya Street, Voznesenskaya, Krestovozdvizhenskaya, Alexandro-Nevskaya, and so on. The names of squares and lanes were similar: Blagoveshchenskaya, Monastyrskaya, Sobornaya, Uspensky, Troitsky, Vsekhsvyatsky...
Only a few streets were named after monarchs or prominent local figures, and not arbitrarily, but in connection with some outstanding deed of theirs for the good of the people of Nizhny. Thus in Kanavino, beyond Nizhny Novgorod Fair, Alexandrovskaya and Elizavetinskaya streets arose, named in honor of Emperor Alexander I, who in 1817 facilitated the transfer of the Makaryev Fair to Nizhny, and of his consort Elizaveta Feodorovna. There too appeared Tsarskaya Street, Kryukovskaya (civil governor A.S. Kryukov oversaw the construction of the great trading rows), and Perepletchikovskaya — named after the famous city mayor and philanthropist F.P. Perepletchikov. And yet "personal" names could be counted on one hand. It simply wasn't customary among our pious ancestors.
But then the fateful year 1917 struck. Truly evil was the will of the Bolshevik leaders, who, following Marx, declared the Fatherland a fiction, the Orthodox faith an opiate, and history a reactionary invention.
The first street renamings followed already in 1918. In a number of district towns, by the first anniversary of the October coup, historical names were being wiped off the map wholesale, replaced with the pseudonyms of functionaries such as Uritsky or Volodarsky, or with slang words from the new Soviet jargon. A year later Nizhny's central street, Bolshaya Pokrovskaya, was named after the local-born Yakov Sverdlov, and the adjoining Malaya Pokrovskaya Street (where the Nizhny Novgorod Cheka was housed) was named after Yakov Vorobyov, chairman of the provincial Cheka, who had shortly before been sent to Voronezh to lead the Cheka there but never reached his post — he was captured by soldiers of General A.P. Kutepov's 1st Corps and executed by them.
Then the renamings took on the character of a chain reaction. In the early 1920s the toponym Rozhdestvenskaya" (named for the Church of the Nativity of the Mother of God) disappeared; it was first replaced with "Kooperativnaya," and then given the name of V.V. Mayakovsky.
Villages, hamlets, and virtually all the steamships were renamed. It seems the most zealous Russophobes had settled into the People's Commissariat of Water Transport. In the 1920s–1930s the settlement of Zhukovsky Backwater (base of the former "On the Volga" steamship company) was named "Memory of the Paris Commune" (what an absurdity!), Sobchinsky Backwater was named for the 40th anniversary of October, Lyulekhovsky Backwater for M.I. Kalinin, and Molitovsky Backwater "25 Years of October." At the same time the old and once famous village of Kadnitsy, long known as home to Volga river captains, pilots, and sailors, was renamed Leninskaya Sloboda. The euphonious Seima was turned into the ugly Volodarsk, and Chernorechye into Dzerzhinsk.
By a decision of the Nizhny Novgorod district council of 1931, in one large list (around 30 toponyms), the streets and lanes of almost the entire historic core of the provincial center were renamed. The toponyms Varvarskaya, Alekseevskaya, Tikhonovskaya, Bolshaya and Malaya Pecherskaya, Lykova Dam, and many others carrying layers of historical memory were erased from the city map. The same happened in the district centers: Streletskaya, Sobornaya, Pokrovskaya, and Yamskaya streets were "saddled" with party nicknames like Rosa Luxemburg or Clara Zetkin, the surname of some local Cheka officer or punitive-squad member (as, for example, in Vetluga (disambiguation) or Varnavino), or the name of some Moscow leader.
Contrary to the widespread belief that the renamings were a disease of the leftist first decades of Soviet power, the bureaucrats' games continued unabated in the 1970s and later. Indeed, if anyone thinks that changing a street's name is an extremely costly business, they will have to admit that in the years of stagnation a considerable share of the city budget of Gorky was spent on precisely this. Judge for yourself: by a decision of the Gorky city executive committee of 27.05.1977, 42 streets, lanes, and squares were renamed at once.
This false argument — about the great expense associated with renaming — became, in the democratic era, the main weapon of the demo-bureaucrats who dug in defending the status quo on the question of returning historical names.
But at first, on the wave of renewal, the Nizhny Novgorod public managed to achieve some success in the cause of restoring justice. The main victory was of course the return of its own original name to the regional center — Nizhny Novgorod. Let me remind you that the ancient city, founded by Prince Georgy Vsevolodovich in 1221, had been willfully deprived of its primordial name, hallowed by centuries, in October 1932. Then, after the return of the "stormy petrel of the revolution" from a comfortable, but no longer glorious, Italian emigration, a real orgy of glorification of him unfolded in the press and official circles. Hundreds of streets, squares, parks, steamships, libraries, and much else besides became "named for Gorky." In Nizhny Novgorod there appeared Gorky Street (formerly Polevaya), Alyosha Peshkov Street (formerly Pirozhnikovskaya), Gorky Square), the newspaper "Gorkovskaya Pravda," and much else. The crowning point was the sacrilegious renaming of the city itself.
And then came perestroika and glasnost. As soon as the ideological muzzle was taken off the intelligentsia, demands arose to correct the arbitrary act committed in the 1930s. A debate unfolded in the newspapers. The party apparatus at first met the initiative with hostility. But the opposing force was no lightweight either: scientists, writers, and artists of renown. The newspaper "Gorkovskaya Pravda" published an open letter from a group of supporters of the return, signed among others by academician A.V. Gaponov-Grekhov, surgeon Boris Korolev, writer Valery Anatolyevich Shamshurin, and a number of other figures famous beyond the local scale as well.
The struggle grew more heated. At a session of the city council a decision prepared within the depths of the party apparatus was adopted: renaming was inadmissible, since it would diminish the greatness of the world-famous Maxim Gorky, and besides would be costly — around 50 million rubles, enough to build an entire residential district. In response, the Soviet Culture Fund published its own calculations, with a sum an order of magnitude smaller. It turned out the crafty party officials had included in their figure everything conceivable and inconceivable, right down to the immediate reprinting of all maps and atlases and a one-time replacement of all signage.
And so in September 1990 the regional council passed the long-awaited decision: "To rename the city of Gorky to Nizhny Novgorod." In October the decision was confirmed by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR.
Then came August 1991. The public continued its initiatives. The center of activity became the Toponymy Commission under the Nizhny Novgorod branch of the Russian Culture Fund, of which the author had the opportunity to be a member, and later deputy chairman, until 1995.
The core of the commission was made up of people who had come from the initiative group for renaming the city. Meetings were held monthly. They were attended by prominent scholarly historians Igor Alexandrovich Kiryanov and Yu.G. Galai, the major architect and restorer of the The Kremlin Agafonov, philologists, engineers, and journalists.
Mayor Dmitry Bednyakov was sent a top-list of about 60 Nizhny Novgorod streets, squares, and lanes requiring the return of their historical names.
That was the crest of the democratic wave, when the bureaucracy was experiencing a certain confusion. This is apparently what led to the adoption soon after of several decisions on the streets of the city center. The first decision, No. 284 of 19.4.1990, appeared even before the August putsch: Lyadov Street was given back its original name, "Bolshaya Pecherskaya Street." The second, the largest, No. 1095, was issued on December 24, 1991, at the moment of the dissolution of the USSR. Under it, Sverdlov, Vorobyov, Dzerzhinsky, Uritsky, Figner, and Krasnoflotskaya streets were given back their historical names: Bolshaya Pokrovskaya, Malaya Pokrovskaya Street, Alekseevskaya Street (Dzerzhinskogo), Sergievskaya, Varvarskaya Street, Ilyinskaya. A little later the main street of the former Nizhny Bazaar — the territory adjoining the Volga — was "renamed" as well, restoring to it (instead of "Mayakovskogo") the name Rozhdestvenskaya — in honor of the Church of the Nativity of the Mother of God, a masterpiece of 18th-century church architecture built by the famous Stroganov.
This was an important victory.
But then in the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin the momentary confusion was overcome. All subsequent appeals from the Culture Fund were simply ignored. Letters from the commission went unanswered.
In 1996, on the eve of the 100th anniversary of the All-Russian Exhibition, held in Nizhny Novgorod in 1896 with the participation of Emperor Nicholas II, and in connection with the revival of the Nizhny Novgorod Fair (closed by the Bolsheviks in 1929 with the introduction of the planned economy), the then Metropolitan of Nizhny Novgorod and Arzamas, Nikolai, sent Mayor I.P. Sklyarov a letter proposing to return to the street leading to the new-fair Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, on the Volga–Oka confluence, its original name "Alexandro-Nevskaya." It was also proposed to rename Sovetskaya Street, a continuation of Alexandro-Nevskaya running up to the Moscow Railway Station (Nizhny Novgorod), to Moskovskaya, as it had been of old.
The Kremlin did not react to the metropolitan's initiative in any way...
Essentially, the picture is the same today. In words, the leadership is for respecting traditions and honoring the memory of ancestors, but in practice... There are, however, several reasons for this, among them the indifference of the bulk of the population and the irreconcilably reactionary stance of the Nizhny Novgorod communists.
All this would inspire hopeless pessimism, were it not for the encouraging examples coming from other regions. In Kirov the governor of the region himself came forward with the initiative to return to the city its original name, Vyatka. The same is happening in Ulyanovsk, whose true name is Simbirsk; in Ivanovo, which dreams of once again being called Ivanovo-Voznesensk; in Tutaev, formerly Romanov-Borisoglebsk. The residents of the sadly notorious Bednodemyanovsk have achieved the return of their city to being Spassk! And the residents of Khalturin have achieved the return of the original name, "the city of Orlov"! And this happened quite recently. Let us too, the people of Nizhny Novgorod, hope for the best.