Renaming cities is an infrequent event, and it is primarily associated with a cardinal change of power, for example, the fall of the tsarist regime, gaining state independence or the desire to perpetuate a particular historical figure.
Instruction manual
1
The massive renaming of settlements in India in 1947 was precisely the result of one of these reasons. After the Second World War, this country gained independence from the British Empire, after which a massive change of geographical names began, and not only cities. Renaming in India continues to this day. So, in 1995, Bombay, a city in the west of the country, began to be called Mumbai, and the name of the city of Calcutta since 2001 sounds like Kolkata, which is more consistent with Bengali pronunciation.
2
On the American continent, renaming cities was not uncommon, especially during the formation of statehood in the territory of the modern United States of America. So, one of the most famous cities in the world, New York, in the seventeenth century was called New Amsterdam, when a Dutch colony was located on its territory. The city, however, eventually fell into the hands of the British, who renamed it New York.
3
During the existence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which does not exist today, many cities that were on the territory of this country were called differently than they are today. Ukrainian Lviv was called Lemberg, and the capital of Slovakia, Bratislava, had two names at all, Austrian and Hungarian. The Austrians called Bratislava Pressburg, and the Hungarians called Pigeon.
4
All these renaming, of course, had good reasons, but in few places they were fond of juggling city names in the same way as in the territory of the former Soviet Union. In the history of about two hundred cities of the USSR and Russia, they changed their names. It all started with the fall of the tsarist regime, when after the civil war the Bolsheviks who came to power began to rename cities whose names did not correspond to the new ideology. So, Nizhny Novgorod became Gorky, Perm turned into Molotov, Tver into Kalinin, Samara into Kuibyshev, Petrograd into Leningrad, and Tsaritsyn became Stalingrad. In total, over a hundred cities were renamed during this period.
5
The second wave of renaming began in the sixties of the twentieth century, when there was a general de-Stalinization throughout the country, and all the cities whose names were associated with the leader of the peoples received new names. The long-suffering Stalingrad became Volgograd, Stalin - Novokuznetsk, and Stalinogorsk turned into Novokuznetsk.
6
The collapse of the USSR and the rejection of Soviet ideology provoked the same massive renaming of settlements that were after the overthrow of the tsarist regime. Sverdlovsk again became Yekaterinburg, regaining its historical name, Kalinin - Tver, but the main renaming in the whole country is the transformation of Leningrad into St. Petersburg.
