What is in a Name?

Johnny Cash had a number one song in the 1970s, A Boy Named Sue, written by Shel Silverstein. It is about a boy who grows up angry and aggressive, cursed with the burden of a feminine name (“I grew up quick and I grew up mean, My fist got hard and my wits got keen”). The boy grows up, tracks down the father that named him Sue, they fight and, just before the boy is to knock the father senseless, the dad pleads for understanding. He had to leave the boy alone in the world, he said, and “I knew you’d have to get tough or die. And it’s the name that helped to make you strong.”

Names have power.

What we call things colors our perception of them.

Consider what your expectation would be, driving somewhere across America, if you saw a “You are now entering” sign for these towns: Burnt Corn, Two Eggs, Painesville, Hell, What Cheer or Monkey’s Eyebrow. They all exist, and you have to bet there have been some interesting conversations over the years.

“So, where are you from?”

“Hell.”

“Excuse me?”

“Hell, it’s in Michigan.”

Our country is certainly not unique in the creation of oddball town names. Russia has its share as well: Выгода (Advantage), Доброе (Good), Кошки (Cats), Глубокий (Deep), Дурново (Evil), Золотуха (Scrofula – a tuberculous infection of the skin of the neck), Непьянуха (No Drunkards), Горелово (Burned Down), Неелово (Nothing to Eat).

One cannot help wondering how such names (American or Russian) came about. Was it a local with a bizarre sense of humor? A county official with a score to settle? An insiders’ nickname for a place, indiscreetly mentioned to a traveling geographer?

Russia’s Communists were quite intentional about naming and re-naming places after they came to power. It was a monumental honor to have a town named after you, and hundreds (if not thousands) of “heroes” of the Bolshevik Revolution were immortalized (or so they though) when their names were plastered on streets, towns, cities and regions. Places like Gorky, Kirov, Stalingrad, Brezhnev, Leningrad, Ustinov, Andropov, Kalinin were only the more prominent. Of course, if someone fell into disgrace, it was quite simple to change the name back... or to something else.

The cascade of place name restorations that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union was said to be righting history, cleansing Russian space of once sacred, now profane names. So Gorky turned back into Nizhny Novgorod, Leningrad once again became St. Petersburg, Andropov returned to Rybinsk, and so on. It created plenty of work for cartographers but was widely considered a good move.

The thing of it is, they missed a bunch. Well, more than a bunch actually, even if you don’t count all the permutations of “Lenin” that still litter contemporary atlases. As shown in The Black Book of Names on the Map of Russia, published recently in print and online (pvr.ru) by Posev [in Russian only], there are still hundreds of town and street names associated with “heroes” of the Bolshevik Revolution, Soviet totalitarianism and the Communist terror. Presented in the form of 112 biographies, The Black Book illuminates the quiet terror that sometimes lurks behind seemingly innocuous names.

Consider the name Zemlyachka. One would be inclined to take the name literally, meaning “female compatriot.” But it turns out Zemlyachka was the revolutionary nickname for the murderous Rosalie Samoylova, under whose leadership – in Moscow, Perm and the Crimea – thousands were killed. “It is sad to waste bullets on them,” Zemlyachka infamously said of White Officers caught in the Crimea, “Better to drown them.” And so they did.

Is it fatigue or failure of will that allows Zemlyachka and similarly nefarious names like Atarbekov, Budyonny, Zagorsky and Kingisepp to persist? One cannot say.

It is also near impossible to gauge the impact of such names on the Russian psyche, particularly if the link with the evil personage is forgotten or unknown. Or if people simply don’t care. “What is the point messing about with names when people have enough difficulty putting food on the table?” some will surely say.

The publishers of The Black Book have a simple reply: truth is a transcendent value and it matters what we call things.

Just ask anyone living in Toad Suck, Arkansas.