State Networks Return to Soviet Place Names

The Russian name game, the decades-old practice of changing place names with every political season, is taking a new nationalist spin.


Television and radio programs broadcast throughout the former Soviet Union began this week to drop the politically correct pronunciations used since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.


Those names, adopted to acknowledge local customs, often sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard to the Russian ear. But the return to the old names sounds like linguistic colonialism to some of those affected.


Under the new policy, the former Soviet republic of Belarus once again will be referred to as Byelorussia, Moldova becomes Moldavia and Kyrgyzstan becomes Kirgizia. The Kazakh capital will be called Alma-Ata instead of Almaty, and the Russian republic of Tatarstan will again be Tataria.


The decision by the state-run broadcasting companies appeared to reflect Russians' growing desires to protect their culture and language from incursions by the other nationalities of the former Soviet Union.


Vladimir Pykhov, scientific secretary of the Russian language institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which recommended the changes, said political changes unleashed by the Soviet collapse have polluted the Russian language.


It is a somewhat ironic accusation in that it mirrors Alexander Solzhenitsyn's complaints about the corrupting Soviet influence on his mother tongue.


"No language can dictate to the Russian language its own pronunciation and spelling rules for proper names, since that degrades and distorts the Russian language and goes against its linguistic customs," Pykhov told Itar-Tass.


Sergei Podgorbunsky, a department head at Russian TV, defended the decision to use the old pronunciations.


"The name Alma-Ata developed from the Kazakh name for their capital Almaty," he said. "Why should we say it in Kazakh now?"


"There is no encroachment on national dignity," Podgorbunsky continued. "It was for political reasons that about three years ago we started using vernacular names. That was just another folly we now ought to correct."


Although Russian officials used linguistic arguments to support the decision, the change clearly had political ramifications.


Despite the re-emergence of local languages and cultures since the Soviet collapse, Russian programs are still widely followed throughout the former Soviet Union and are controlled by Moscow authorities.


For many in the far-flung republics and regions, Russian-language programs are their major sources of news and entertainment.


In the Kazakh capital, ethnic Kazakh politician Sabetkazy Akacayev said the new policy sounded ominous.


"It is a return to the colonial policy of past times," Akacayev said. "They want to say that Alma-Ata is still the city that was under Russia's boot. It's a political act, not a linguistic one. They forget that we're heading into the 21st century, not the 19th."


This week's changes were not as drastic as the name changes dictated by Soviet, Russian and tsarist authorities, who turned St. Petersburg into Petrograd, then into Leningrad and finally back to St. Petersburg.


Tsaritsyn became Stalingrad in the 1920s, then became Volgograd after Josef Stalin's death. President Boris Yeltsin's home town of Yekaterinburg, known under Soviet times as Sverdlovsk, regained its tsarist name after the Soviet collapse. The industrial city of Nizhny Novgorod became Gorky during the Soviet era before returning to its original name.