Communists' campaign to rename Volgograd

By Vladimir Radyuhin

MOSCOW, SEPT. 8. Russian Communists have launched a campaign for renaming Volgograd back to Stalingrad, the city of World War Two fame. The Communist Governor of Volgograd Region, Mr. Nikolai Maksyuta, said returning the city its old name would be a fitting tribute to the 60th anniversary of the battle of Stalingrad in early 2003. Stalingrad was the site of one of the most crucial and bloody battles of World War II, marking the turning point in the war against the invading Hitler forces. More than 1 million Soviet soldiers, some 40,000 civilians and an estimated 800,000 German soldiers died in the six-month battle.

The city, named in honour of the Soviet dictator, Stalin, was renamed after Stalin died and atrocities of his regime were made public and officially denounced. The city was given the neutral name of Volgograd after the River Volga on which it stands, rather than its original name of Tsaritsyn, from the word Tsaritsa - Queen.

The Volgograd governor, Mr. Maksyuta, said he was confident the regional assembly, dominated by Communists, would endorse a referendum on the issue.

``My office is swamped with letters calling for returning our city its historical name,'' the governor said. World War II veterans living in Volgograd have backed renaming Volgograd, but a recent opinion poll showed over 60 per cent of Volgograd residents opposed the idea. Therefore the local assembly has appealed to the Russian President, Mr. Vladimir Putin, to return the city the name of Stalingrad by a federal decree.

Advocats of renaming Volgograd argue that the name Stalingrad would serve to honour and commemorate a great battle, while Russian Communists hope this would help rehabilitate the disgraced Soviet leader.

``There is history, there is reality, there is the memory of our fathers and grandfathers who were defending that city and were fighting in the name of Stalin,'' the Communist Party leader, Mr. Gennady Zyuganov, said supporting the proposal to rename Volgodrad.

Stalin is still popular in Russia and consistently tops the charts of the country's most outstanding statesmen of the 20th century, despite well-publicised revelations about his reign of terror, when over 20 million Russians died in labour camps.

Pollsters say the persisting popularity of Stalin is a reaction to the breakup of the Soviet Union and subsequent economic collapse in Russia. For the same reasons the Communist Party remains by far the biggest political party in Russia, claiming a membership of over half a million.

Communists hope Mr. Putin will back the idea of renaming Volgograd to win the votes of war veterans when he stands for re- election in 2004. The President personally lobbied for the reinstatement of the old Soviet anthem last year, and publicly denouced calls to remove Russia's revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin from the mausoleum in Red Square.

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