Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd in November 1961 by the decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR. The decree was signed by the chairman and secretary of the presidium N. Organov and S. Orlov. The city bore the name of the "leader of the peoples" for 36 years. Its original name is Tsaritsyn.
Instructions
Step 1
The first mentions of the city of Tsaritsyn in documents date back to 1589, the period of the reign of Fyodor Ivanovich, the son of Ivan the Terrible. The city received its name, apparently, from the Tsaritsa River. The name of the river most likely comes from the distorted Tatar "sari-su" (yellow water) or "sara-chin" (yellow island). According to folk legends, recorded in the 19th century by the local historian A. Leopoldov, the river is so named in honor of a certain queen. Either the daughter of Batu, who was martyred for the Christian faith, or the wife of this formidable Horde king, who loved to walk along the picturesque banks of the steppe river.
Step 2
In April 1925, Tsaritsyn was renamed Stalingrad. The initiative to rename, as usual, came from local party leaders. In the 1920s, a semi-spontaneous campaign was launched to rename cities named after representatives of the Russian imperial family. The name Tsaritsyn also turned out to be inconvenient. The question was not to rename or not, but in honor of whom to rename. Various versions have been put forward. So, it is well known that the prominent Bolshevik Sergei Konstantinovich Minin, one of the leaders of Tsaritsyn's defense against the "whites" during the civil war, sought to rename the city to Miningrad. As a result, the local party leaders, headed by the secretary of the provincial committee Boris Petrovich Shedolbaev, decided to give the city the name of Stalin. Joseph Vissarionovich himself, judging by the preserved documents, was not very enthusiastic about this idea.
Step 3
The city received its current name Volgograd in 1961 during the “de-Stalinization” campaign. At that time it was considered ideologically correct to get rid of geographical names reminiscent of the "leader of nations." The choice of what new name to give the city was not obvious. It was proposed to rename it to Geroisk, Boygorodsk, Leningrad-on-Volga and Khrushchevsk. The point of view prevailed that "the names of the hero city and the mighty river on which it is located should merge into one." Immediately after the removal of N. S. Khrushchev from the leadership of the state, initiatives began to appear to return the name of Stalingrad. Supporters of this idea, of whom there are still many today, in a similar way want to perpetuate the heroism of Soviet soldiers in the Battle of Stalingrad, which turned the tide of World War II.
