On 22 October 1990, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR issued a decree renaming The City of Gorky as Nizhny Novgorod and Nizhny Novgorod Region as Nizhny Novgorod Region. The decree was preceded by a resolution of the City Council of People's Deputies and, before that, by a public poll conducted alongside local elections. The city's historic name was restored 58 years after it had been replaced [1].
Early Attempts
The question of restoring the name had been raised long before 1990. The first time was in the late 1950s, when a group of writers from Gorky appealed to Nikita Khrushchev. The city had been renamed in 1932, and the appeal rested on the argument that restoring the historic name would not contradict the prevailing campaign against the cult of personality. No decision followed [1].
The issue resurfaced in the 1980s. A first attempt by a citizen initiative group in 1987 came to nothing. Later in the decade, Gorky hosted a conference of the All-Russian Society for the Preservation of Historical and Cultural Monuments, at which the idea of restoring the historic name was raised again [1].
By that time, a wave of renamings was sweeping the country: Leningrad became Saint Petersburg, Kuybyshev became Samara, Sverdlovsk became Yekaterinburg [1].
The Dispute over Cost
The main argument advanced by opponents of the renaming came down to its price tag. After Honorary Citizen of Nizhny Novgorod declared their support for restoring the name, Party officials calculated that the renaming would cost the budget 50 million rubles — enough at the time to build an entire residential microdistrict [1].
An independent estimate was produced by experts at the Culture Foundation headed by Academician Dmitry Likhachev: the figure they arrived at was an order of magnitude lower, and if the names in official documents were replaced gradually, the costs would be negligible [1].
The Poll and the City Council's Decision
On 4 March 1990, election day for the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, voters in Gorky were asked at polling stations whether they approved of renaming the city. A majority said yes, though the margin was slim. The deputies of the City Council subsequently voted in favor of the renaming [1].
The Chairman of the City Council of People's Deputies, Alexander Nikolaevich Kosarikov, recalled that the idea of restoring the name was, as he put it, in the air, and that the renaming was meant to draw attention to a city that had long been closed and had barely existed in the information landscape [1].
We understood that the renaming would draw attention to a city that had long been closed and had, as it were, not existed at all in the information landscape.
Approval in Moscow
The petition signed by the Chairman of the City Council was sent to the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, after which a lengthy silence followed; word even circulated in the city that the document had been lost. Kosarikov attributed the delay to the fact that initiatives from the provinces, including renamings, were regarded by the bureaucracy as destabilizing novelties [1].
The decree was issued in Moscow on 22 October 1990 under number 250-I and signed by R. I. Khasbulatov, First Deputy Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR. It covered more than just the city: a single document renamed both the city and the region.
The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR decrees: 1. To rename the city of Gorky as the city of Nizhny Novgorod. 2. To rename Gorky Region as Nizhny Novgorod Region.
The City on Maps
For half a century the name was accompanied by secrecy: the city was inaccessible to foreign tourists as a center of the defense industry, and on maps published for other countries the city at the confluence of the Volga and the Oka effectively did not appear [1].
Sources
- biblmr.r52.ru — "City Day. Nizhny Novgorod" — Anisimov S. How It Happened: The Return of the Name