In addition, Nicholas II had made yet another mistake. He thought that by publicly venting his hostility to Petersburg, he was expressing the feelings of “simple” Russian people. Benois felt that this was a fatal error. In violating the will of Peter the Great, the last Russian emperor undermined the idea of sovereignty so important to the first. Nor did he garner the people’s support. Though Nicholas was the first, he was hot the only ruler to tinker with the Petrograd mystique. The Bolsheviks followed him, at least in this, but in a much more decisive if even less rational manner.
The initiative to rename Petrograd Leningrad formally belonged to the Petrograd Soviet of Worker, Peasant, and Red Army Deputies. Actually it was the idea of the Soviet’s chairman, the ambitious Grigory Zinoviev, who as one of the rulers of the Communist Party had obvious reasons for this. When Lenin moved the capital to Moscow in 1918, it radically diminished the importance of Petrograd. In the new situation, when Lenin was rapidly being transformed into a Communist saint, endowing the city with his name would give Zinoviev, the city boss, a political advantage. In 1919, Zinoviev was also the chairman of the Executive Committee of the Comintern (Communist International), which made Petrograd the natural center of the world Communist movement. With all its “regalia,” especially the name Leningrad, the city could aspire to become the official “Party” capital of the country and of the entire “proletarian” world. The Communists hoped to perform a radical re-creation of the city’s mythos in the service of Communist ideology. Petersburg, the lighthouse of Russian artistry, would become Leningrad, the torch of the Communist movement.
Zinoviev had grounds for imagining himself leader of the Party. He had always been one of Lenin’s closest friends. The reputation of another major Party leader, Leon Trotsky, was waning. Stalin was still considered little more than an effective but unimaginative Party bureaucrat. In the coming intraparty power struggle, Zinoviev’s move to rename the city was clever.
This move was also, paradoxically, an application for reviving the city’s international status, but with a Communist aura. After all, Lenin and his comrades had always assumed that after the revolution in Russia, the Communists would seize power throughout Europe. Thus, Leningrad would be the natural capital of the future commonwealth of European Communist states. In his imagination Zinoviev could already see himself mounted on a bronze horse (or at least in a bronze car).
Zinoviev’s dreams did not come to pass. But in 1924, the rest of the party leaders supported Zinoviev, each for his own reasons. Renaming cities after revolutionary leaders had become a kind of reward. A Petrograd suburb had been renamed Trotsk even earlier, and also in 1924 the cities of Elizavetgrad and Yuzovka were renamed Zinovievsk and Stalino, respectively.
Decisions made by the Party elite were not subject to wide discussion, debate, or appeal. It was only abroad, in Russian émigré circles, that the renaming of the former imperial capital was met with a squall of protests and mockery. In particular, it was pointed out correctly that Lenin had spent relatively little time in Petrograd during his life, apparently had not liked the city, and moved the Soviet government to Moscow at the first opportunity. For the Russian émigrés and for many others as well, it was clear that the process of “plebeianization” of the city, which began with renaming Petersburg Petrograd, had taken another giant step. A popular joke circulated in the city that if the Bolsheviks had the nerve to give Lenin’s name to the creation of Peter the Great, then the famous “proletarian poet” Demyan Bedny could just as easily demand that “the works of Pushkin” be changed to “the works of Bedny.”
Young Shostakovich was one of the people who was not afraid to express outrage over the renaming of the city. Ignoring the danger of possible inspection, he wrote to Tatyana Glivenko, “Lenin was always against ceremony…. If I become as great a man as Lenin, when I die will the city be renamed Shostakovichgrad?” And later Shostakovich liked to joke about the cult of Lenin that reigned in the Soviet Union. “I love the music of Ilyich,” he would proclaim. Using only the patronymic was the affected way in Russia to refer to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who, as we know, did not compose music. After savoring the confusion of his interlocutor, Shostakovich would explain gravely, “Naturally, I mean the music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky.”
From the ideological point of view, such jokes were not harmless. The Lenin mystique was being broadly inculcated; even superficial deviations from the official cult were perceived as heresy. So it was only among close, trusted friends that Shostakovich would sometimes sing, after having a few drinks, the song of the Baltic sailors: “Burn bright, candle in Ilyich’s ruddy backside.”
