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Imperial mirrors: multifunctional urban toponymy in the Romanov Empire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 November 2025

Catherine Gibson Open the ORCID record for Catherine Gibson [Opens in a new window] ,
Anke Hilbrenner  and
Anton Kotenko Open the ORCID record for Anton Kotenko [Opens in a new window]
Catherine Gibson*
Affiliation:
Tartu Ülikool , Tartu, Estonia
Anke Hilbrenner
Affiliation:
Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf , Düsseldorf, Germany
Anton Kotenko
Affiliation:
Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf , Düsseldorf, Germany
*
Corresponding author: Catherine Gibson; Email: catherine.helen.gibson@ut.ee
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Abstract

The naming of cityscapes has never been a disinterested or straightforward affair. This article, which introduces the special issue on multifunctional urban toponymy in the Romanov Empire, opens by providing an overview of recent developments in critical place-name studies and bringing this field into dialogue with the historiography of the empire. It then delineates the main waves of toponymic changes in the empire from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, and proposes a typology of the main categories of imperial toponyms used for (re)naming. Our main argument is that place names performed a wider array of functions, beyond just orientational and ideological, and were also used to gain socio-economic capital and enhance the social desirability and economic value of urban areas. Having introduced the contributions to the special issue, the article then outlines several avenues for future research.

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Urban History , First View , pp. 1 - 21
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
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© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press

Introduction

In 1858, a small street in St Petersburg formerly known as Gospital′nyi (Hospital) Lane was renamed Vilenskii after Vil′na (today’s Vilnius), the seat of the administration of the Northwestern region of the Romanov Empire. Walking down the street towards the city centre, then turning left or right, one could soon find oneself either on Kovenskii, Mitavskii, Grodnenskii or Druskenikskii lanes. In the mid-nineteenth century, a cluster of these tiny alleys in the Liteiny district of St Petersburg was renamed after cities in the empire’s northwest – Kovna (Kaunas), Mitava (Jelgava), Grodno (Hrodna) and Druskeniki (Druskininkai) – as part of a wider programme of changing street names, apparently initiated by the chief of the local police, Petr Shuvalov.Footnote 1 Over the coming years, dozens of streets in the capital were named and renamed after the empire’s cities and rivers.Footnote 2 The project was not without critics and, notably, as early as December 1866, historian and censor Aleksandr Nikitenko noted his disapproval of ‘the enlightened concern for the improvement and safety of the capital’ as renaming streets undermined their primary function and obstructed navigation through the city, even for locals.Footnote 3 While the full intentions behind the changes are not yet known, inscribing the empire onto St Petersburg’s streetscape seems to have been more than just a spatial reorganization of the city.Footnote 4 In his project of urban development, it was as if Shuvalov was playing with scales: the renamings compressed the vast state, made it visible and eventually turned the capital into a perceptible map and spatial encyclopedia – a veritable mirror of the Romanov Empire (Figures 1a and 1b).Footnote 5 Toponymy became another way of consolidating the image of St Petersburg as an ‘imperial city’.Footnote 6

Figure 1a. Map of St Petersburg indicating the streets named after imperial geography, c.1910. The (re)naming of streets took place throughout the century and in several phases. It seems that municipal authorities first identified a particular area of the city in need of (re)naming and then assigned it a loose geographical theme. This is most likely the explanation for why Lublinskaia (Lublin) Street found itself surrounded by streets named after the Baltic provinces, or why Tverskaia (Tver) Street, named in 1859, was located separately from streets named after the cities of Tver province in 1903–07. Nevertheless, the overall picture that emerged was that of a mirror of the empire, enhanced by the spatial clustering of names from proximate regions in a particular area of the capital. Source: Map by Anton Kotenko and Louis Le Douarin, based on Toponimicheskii portal Sankt-Peterburga, https://toponimika.spb.ru and Izvestiia S. Peterburgskoi Gorodskoi Dumy (1864–1916).

Figure 1b. Index to the St Petersburg map indicating the streets named after imperial geography, c.1910. Source: Anton Kotenko and Louis Le Douarin, based on Toponimicheskii portal Sankt-Peterburga, https://toponimika.spb.ru and Izvestiia S. Peterburgskoi Gorodskoi Dumy (1864–1916).

Over the past three years, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has brought urban toponymy in Eastern Europe to the forefront of public attention. A wave of changes swept across the region, with names associated with the former Romanov and Soviet rule being replaced. For example, Riga’s Pushkin Street (named after the Russian poet) was renamed Kārlis Mīlenbahs Street (after the Latvian linguist of the second half of the nineteenth century); Kyiv’s Pushkin Street is now known as Ievhen Chykalenko Street (after the Ukrainian activist of the late nineteenth century); and in September 2024 the idea of renaming the local Pushkin Street to Queen Marie Street, after the last queen of Romania, re-emerged in the Moldovan public sphere.Footnote 7 In March 2023, the Ukrainian parliament passed a law ‘On the Condemnation and Prohibition of the Propaganda of Russian Imperial Policy in Ukraine and the Decolonisation of Toponymy’, which obliged authorities around the country to replace toponyms ‘containing symbols of Russian imperial policy’.Footnote 8 Gestures of ‘toponymic solidarity’ with Ukraine prompted the renaming of streets around Russian embassies across the world.Footnote 9

While news of the ongoing transformations has grabbed the headlines, as our opening testifies, the naming of cityscapes in the region has never been a disinterested or straightforward affair. The politicization of urban toponymy in Eastern Europe and Northern Eurasia has a complex past, an understanding of which, as we argue in this special issue, can both contribute to the general field of place-name studies as well as provide a window onto larger narratives of the regions’ political, social and cultural history.

Framing the subject: bringing critical place-name studies into the history of the Romanov Empire

Anthropologists, geographers, historians, linguists and sociologists have extensively studied urban toponyms in a variety of historical and spatial contexts for many years.Footnote 10 Yet, since the late 2000s, the field of critical place-name studies, developed primarily by geographers, has increasingly moved away from traditional associations of toponymy with ‘antiquarian empiricism’ and the ‘encyclopaedic search for the authentic origins of names’, and has instead foregrounded ‘a critical interrogation of the politics of place naming’.Footnote 11 As Maoz Azaryahu put it, ‘naming streets is an example of the appropriation of the public domain by official agencies that have specific political agendas’.Footnote 12 Thus, instead of simply explaining what a given toponym means, critical scholarship on place names shifts the focus to the motivations driving toponymic changes and the reception of these actions.Footnote 13 This approach entails emphasizing not ‘the name itself but rather […] the cultural politics of naming – that is, how people seek to control, negotiate, and contest the naming process as they engage in wider struggles for legitimacy and visibility’.Footnote 14 More recent contributions surrounding decolonial approaches to critical place-name studies have also called for greater engagement with toponymic practices from the ‘bottom up’, through increased attentiveness to orthography, sound and Indigenous perspectives.Footnote 15

The critical turn in urban toponymy research, however, has not yet garnered significant attention from scholars of the Romanov Empire. Unlike monuments and architecture, which have been extensively studied as projections of political power in the built environment, toponyms and their visual manifestation on signs are, by comparison, smaller and often less noticeable in the cityscape.Footnote 16 Perhaps for this reason, the history of place names in the empire has remained in the purview of non-academics or local historians, falling into the realm of what, following Chris Philo, might be called histories of ‘nothing-muchness’.Footnote 17 Guided by ‘the toponym-as-cultural-indicator paradigm’, most available studies catalogue contemporary and past place names with their etymological explanations.Footnote 18 In recent decades, historians of Central and Eastern Europe have also increasingly adopted the practice of listing multiple variations of place names using slashes, dashes or parentheses to be more mindful of the multicultural heritage of the past. Formulations such as ‘Kyiv/Kiev/Kijów/קיעוו’ are now familiar sights.Footnote 19 As Tomasz Kamusella argues, highlighting the coexistence of multiple naming traditions offers a ‘more objective’ alternative to ‘national homogenization and wholesale repossession of the past for the sake of today’s nation/nation-state’.Footnote 20 Alongside this, digital humanities projects on urban toponymy in Central and Eastern Europe are developing new methods of working with these sources to explore multilingual urban toponymy across large datasets.Footnote 21 Yet, in all these cases, authors rarely delve into the reasons for the (re)naming process or analyse the rationale behind these decisions, their practical implementation or how local inhabitants reacted to changes. Meanwhile, as Daniel Milo observed, when scholars have tried to ‘escape from the anecdotal’, they ‘have generally resorted to classification, which they took to be its opposite. […] The authors in question accumulated examples without analysing their historical elements’, in this way ‘concealing a far more complex historical reality’.Footnote 22

By drawing on insights from scholarship on urban toponymy and bringing it into dialogue with histories of the Romanov Empire, the authors in this special issue seek to make five main contributions. First, critical place-name approaches have mostly been applied to a geographically limited set of empirical cases. Back in 2011, Maoz Azaryahu observed the overall ‘geographical unevenness of studies in critical toponymy’, with a large volume of work done on North America and North-Western Europe but a relative paucity of research published in English on place naming in other parts of Europe, South America, Asia or Africa.Footnote 23 Although scholarship in the past decade has made some progress in addressing this imbalance with a proliferation of publications dealing with non-Western contexts, Azaryahu’s argument still holds sway for Eastern Europe and Northern Eurasia, which have remained underrepresented in wider discussions of imperial and colonial place naming.Footnote 24

Second, the studies of urban toponymy in Eastern Europe and Northern Eurasia that do exist have mainly concentrated on two key moments of post-imperial transition in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. On the one hand, considerable attention has been devoted to the ‘reforming scythe’ of the post-World War I states, which strove to bring cityscapes in line with their nationalist or communist ideologies.Footnote 25 On the other hand, a separate stream of research has focused on developments in the late 1980s–1990s and efforts to ‘de-communize’ and politically instrumentalize place names in the post-Soviet period.Footnote 26 With rare exceptions, historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have paid far less attention to the topic.Footnote 27

Third, scholarship on the history of urban toponymy mostly relies on a relatively limited corpus of published sources, commonly gazetteers and maps.Footnote 28 Consequently, many studies lean towards being descriptive. Meanwhile, rich discussions of urban toponymy abound across various types of hitherto underutilized sources. In the case of the Romanov Empire, place names were the subject of lengthy and heated debates between bureaucrats at different administrative levels. For instance, a single archival file of the Kyiv municipal authorities on renaming the city’s streets spanning November 1899–July 1917 contains 305 double-sided pages of correspondence, attesting to the considerable attention contemporaries devoted to the matter.Footnote 29 Urban toponymy also spilled over into tense discussions in the public sphere, which were widely reported in the major newspapers. Finally, emotional tensions aroused by urban toponyms can also be found in ego-documents. For example, Mariia von Bock, daughter of Petr Stolypin, recalled how, in the winter of 1911, the empire’s prime minister was approached by Sergei Witte, his predecessor, to overturn the ‘indecent’ decision of the Odesa municipal authorities to rename Witte Street (into Peter the Great). Not wishing to fall into toponymic oblivion, Witte allegedly went down on his knees to beg Stolypin to intervene. According to von Bock’s narrative, when her father refused, Witte angrily promised never to forget the insult of having this honour revoked.Footnote 30

Fourth, historical studies of urban toponymy are dominated by research on individual cities. This has precluded scholars from building up a more consolidated picture of the main chronological and thematic trends in (re)naming, and from being able to compare toponymic logics functioning in different times and places. Thus, while preparing this Introduction, to situate our four case studies of Kyiv, Orenburg, Tartu and Vilnius in an all-imperial context, we gathered additional archival and published materials about Chișinău (and other cities in Bessarabia), Riga, St Petersburg, Tallinn and Tbilisi.

Finally, perhaps as a result of the developments outlined above, the major argument guiding historical critical place-name studies is that since the French Revolution, urban toponymy has been primarily an instrument of state power.Footnote 31 Scholarship in the field of critical place-name studies has persuasively shown how, since the late eighteenth century, toponyms have been increasingly relied upon as a tool to regulate and modernize urban space, and have constituted a key part of structures and discourses of power and identity politics, imperial expansion and colonization, regime change, nationalization and commemorative practices.Footnote 32 This narrow focus on ideology and power, however, has led to other meanings attached to names and reasons for changes in urban toponymy receiving less attention. The articles in this special issue highlight the more multifunctional nature of urban toponymy and open up avenues for further research in this direction.

Waves of toponymic changes in the Romanov Empire

Throughout much of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries, urban toponymy in the Romanov Empire attracted the attention of the authorities in a largely ad hoc manner. Issues surrounding place names tended to arise primarily in the context of newly annexed or contested territories. Renaming was not merely an administrative formality but served as an important symbolic tool in the discursive appropriation of space, particularly in the northern Black Sea region, Crimea and Central Asian steppe, as demonstrated by Ulrich Hofmeister’s contribution to this special issue.Footnote 33

The more proactive and systematic intervention of the imperial authorities into naming policies, however, gathered momentum in the second half of the nineteenth century, targeting not only borderlands but, as illustrated by the opening example of St Petersburg, also the imperial centre. As these policies gained traction, toponymy became more widely recognized as a domain saturated with ideological significance – an arena where power, identity and authority could be negotiated and asserted. Importantly, the growing politicization of urban toponyms during this period was not confined to the Romanov Empire. Russian-language newspapers from the late nineteenth century frequently reported similar renaming practices across Europe, suggesting an awareness within the imperial public sphere of broader transnational developments and a shared understanding of toponymy as a potent cultural and political tool, resonating far beyond the empire’s borders.Footnote 34

Under these auspices, (re)naming functioned as one of the key instruments in the imperial authorities’ toolbox to integrate allegedly disloyal populations and project a Russified image of the empire onto the borderlands. The Western region, regarded as politically volatile following the 1863–64 uprising, became a key site of renaming initiatives directed at weakening Polish cultural and political influence, as Darius Staliūnas’ article in this special issue shows.Footnote 35 Two decades later, in the Baltic provinces, place-name changes reflected a wider shift in the all-imperial ‘scenario of power’ of the new emperor Alexander III (ruled from 1881–94) and his government, which ‘no longer tried to appear as German in Riga and Tatar in Kazan, but as a Russian master subjecting lesser people of the empire’.Footnote 36 Thus, from the late 1880s until the mid-1890s, as detailed by Catherine Gibson in her contribution to this special issue, toponymic changes were implemented as part of the so-called ‘Russification’ policies, which aimed to eliminate German-sounding names from the empire’s map.Footnote 37 This logic continued into the early decades of the twentieth century. As shown in Anton Kotenko’s article in this special issue, in the southwest, Russian nationalists started to perceive the street names of Kyiv as integral to the city’s image as a cradle of Russianness.Footnote 38 In another case, in the spring of 1914, newspapers reported that the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) proposed a campaign to de-Polonize the recently established Kholm province by supplanting all of its ‘non-Russian geographical and ethnographic names that have been entrenched in the consciousness of the population’, a list that included 120 settlements.Footnote 39

Finally, a veritable tsunami of renaming swept over the empire during World War I. A campaign against ‘German’ toponyms started with renaming the capital from St Petersburg to Petrograd in August 1914. In October, the MVD issued an order instructing governors to inventory all the place names of ‘German’ origin and to ensure that those which ‘used to have Russian names, must be returned to their ancient names’.Footnote 40 This led to the elimination of Nemetskie (German) streets, or other toponyms associated with the Central Powers.Footnote 41 News of these changes was reported alongside stories of the Germanization of toponyms in the occupied territories of the Romanov Empire.Footnote 42 In turn, in 1914, a similar project of ‘renaming cities and villages that earlier used to have Russian names’ was reportedly launched on the territory of the Romanov-occupied Galicia.Footnote 43

Pool of imperial toponyms

The selection of toponyms for urban (re)naming projects in late nineteenth-century Europe often reflected broader cultural, political and social priorities. In his study of 1880s Stockholm, Allan Pred demonstrates that name changes ‘were not random, without pattern or purpose’ but instead fell into ‘one of five intentionally designed categories that were heavily laden with the ideology shared by elements of the financially powerful and the well-to-do middle classes’. According to Pred, these five main categories included ‘patriotic and historical names’, ‘Nordic mythology’, ‘famous places near the city’, ‘the southern provinces’ and ‘the northern provinces’, along with two supplementary name types: ‘famous Swedish authors’ and ‘prominent men within technology and engineering’.Footnote 44

Our research on the Romanov Empire has discerned five main categories of imperial toponyms used for (re)naming, which we define as names that would not have appeared if not for the empire. The first type – imperial geography – is readily apparent from the case of St Petersburg, discussed in this article’s introduction. This group consists of names of cities, regions, rivers and other geographical features of the empire, beyond those serving a traditional orientational purpose and indicating the direction of travel out of a city, such as Riia (Riga) Street in Tartu or Berdychivs′ka (Berdychiv) Street in Zhytomyr. Prominent examples of this category include Bukharskaia (Bukhara) Street and Alley, visible in the maps of Orenburg’s and Vilnius’ streetscapes in Hofmeister’s and Staliūnas’ contributions.

A second major source of inspiration for imperial toponymy was provided by military history, with key events and figures commemorated throughout the empire’s cityscapes. In 1878, for instance, Obukhovskii and Tsarskosel′skii avenues in St Petersburg were renamed Zabalkanskii to pay tribute to the imperial army’s crossing of the Balkan mountains.Footnote 45 The celebration of the 1709 victory over Sweden at Poltava culminated in the creation of numerous Poltava or Peter the Great streets across the empire around 1909, while in 1912, urban toponyms were renamed to mark the centenary of the 1812 war.Footnote 46 The same principle was also reflected on a larger scale, such as in 1907, when the recently founded Novyi Margelan (present-day Fergana in Uzbekistan) was renamed Skobelev, in honour of the famous general, or in 1914, when the Council of Ministers approved a petition, which arrived from today’s Shymkent in Kazakhstan, to rename the city after General Cherniaev, who had conquered it for the empire.Footnote 47

The third category of imperial toponyms, which left a significant imprint on the empire’s cityscapes, comprised names related to the royal family and imperial dynasty. For example, in 1897, veterans residing on Tbilisi’s Novaia Gollandiia (New Holland) Street petitioned to rename it Nikolaevo-Aleksandrovskaia (Nicholas-Alexander) Street, in honour of the emperors under whom they had served in the army. The petitioners claimed that the current name had ‘been given arbitrarily, without any higher aim’.Footnote 48 Sometimes these renamings commemorated a royal visit, such as in 1891, when a Tallinn City Council member proposed renaming Rozenkrantskaia (Rosicrucian) Street to Aleksandrovskaia (Alexander) on account of the emperor Alexander I once having had coffee and changed his clothes in an apartment there, a ‘historical event’ deemed significant enough to warrant commemoration.Footnote 49 Such renamings gained particular momentum around 1912–13 to mark the tercentenary of the ruling dynasty, when cities around the empire were filled with Romanov names.Footnote 50

A fourth category of imperial place names was inspired by Russian culture, reflecting the empire’s ongoing nationalization around the turn of the century. Russian cultural markers were actively imposed on the empire’s cityscapes starting from 1899, as streets and squares were baptised in honour of the centenary of the birth of the most celebrated Russian poet, Alexander Pushkin.Footnote 51 Subsequent literary jubilees, such as the centenary of Nikolai Gogol’s birth in 1909 and the fiftieth anniversary of his death in 1902, were also widely memorialized through toponymic commemoration.Footnote 52 Other prominent figures honoured in this way included the poets Mikhail Lermontov and Vasily Zhukovsky, fabulist Ivan Krylov, novelist Ivan Goncharov and the ‘great Russian doctor, humanist and teacher’ Nikolai Pirogov.Footnote 53

Finally, a fifth category of imperial toponyms emerged at the turn of the century in conjunction with the empire’s foreign policy priorities. Thus, several cities commemorated the Romanov-French alliance with ‘French’ streets.Footnote 54 As mentioned above, after the outbreak of World War I, the imperial map was deliberately purged of toponyms associated with the Central Powers. The dynamics of such renamings varied across the empire, and in some cases, municipal authorities resisted the projects of imperial administrators. In 1916, for example, the chief of police of Chișinău petitioned the governor of Bessarabia to rename Bolgarskaia (Bulgarian) Street, claiming that it was ‘named after the ungrateful nation, for whose liberation in 1877–78 from the Turkish yoke, Russia shed blood, and which now betrays its mother and protector, Russia’. Although the governor supported the motion, members of the Chișinău City Council ultimately opposed it. In January 1917, they argued that the name had not been intended to honour ‘a state hostile to us, but because [the street] was for a long time inhabited by Bulgarians, who did not reveal any disloyalty to the Russian state’. On this basis, the Council voted to keep the street’s historical name.Footnote 55

In addition to these five types of overtly ideological imperial toponyms, designed to inscribe imperial and Russian national ‘languages of spatial orientation’ onto cityscapes, the pool of available place names in the empire was expanded by other, more locally rooted options.Footnote 56 Most notably, these included toponyms commemorating prominent local figures. Thus, in 1902, the Tbilisi City Council decided to rename Vodovoznaia (Water carrier) Street as Akademika Brosse (Academician Brosse) Street after Marie Brosset, a French-born scholar of Armenian and Georgian history and culture.Footnote 57 In 1908–09, the same council discussed a proposal to rename Malo-Sudebnaia (Small Court) Street into Zubalovskaia Street, in recognition of the Zubalashvili family of businessowners and philanthropists.Footnote 58 Similarly, in 1912, municipal authorities in Izmail, Bessarabia, petitioned the governor to rename Moskovskaia (Moscow) Street as Tulchianova, in memory of their recently deceased former mayor. The petition pointed out that Tulchianov, who had resided on the street, ‘never stopped caring about the welfare of his native city until his death’, and that ‘the city owes its entire orderliness (blagoustroistvo)’ to his efforts.Footnote 59

The argument advanced in this special issue, however, is that to truly grasp the historical significance of the functions of imperial toponymy, we need to move beyond surface-level etymological analysis or thematic categorization. While these six categories of toponyms used to (re)name places in the Romanov Empire provide a framework for drawing comparisons between cities, they do not capture how names functioned in practice or what they meant to contemporaries. To uncover these dynamics, we need to look beyond the words themselves and examine the processes behind their selection, approval and reception. In the next section, we explore how archival sources – still largely underutilized in critical place-name studies – can be used to shed light on the varied motivations behind naming and renaming decisions, as well as the multiple meanings that names held for contemporaries.

Multifunctionality of place names

Scholars of place naming agree that the ‘basic function of street names remains […] the organization of space in towns and cities’.Footnote 60 Above all, toponyms are meant to help people better navigate through space. Archival records are replete with examples of attempts to improve the navigability of Romanov cities through what might be termed orientational renaming. For example, in 1896, the Tbilisi governor corresponded with the city’s mayor on behalf of the Tbilisi Post-Telegraph District, reporting that mail delivery was hampered by the absence of house numbers and the lack of clearly displayed homeowners’ surnames. In response, the governor instructed the mayor to ensure that street signs were properly mounted on every corner and that each house bore a number and the surname of its owner, to make addresses ‘easier and faster to find […], as in other comparably populous cities of Russia’.Footnote 61 Such concerns were also lodged by landowners, who petitioned municipal authorities to resolve confusion caused by streets bearing multiple unofficial names.Footnote 62

Another motivation for street renaming was the desire to align toponyms with the evolving urban environment, which we define as adaptive renaming. This practice sought to ensure that names reflected the contemporary built environment and current uses of a location, particularly as cities expanded and their infrastructures changed. In 1895, for example, the Tbilisi City Council received a petition proposing to rename Staro-Arsenal′naia (Old Arsenal) Street into Sudebnaia (Court) Street. The City Council was receptive to the idea, noting that the arsenal had been removed 40 years earlier and that ‘the existing name of the indicated street has indeed lost its meaning’. The new name, by contrast, corresponded with the recently constructed ‘grandiose building’ of the courthouse, thus ensuring that the toponym was endowed with semantic relevance.Footnote 63

Another practical consideration was evident in Riga in 1901, when municipal officials argued that newly constructed streets required names ‘for the convenience of the public and police’.Footnote 64 The city’s building commission prioritized street names that would sound similar in the three main languages spoken by the inhabitants – German, Latvian and Russian. Footnote 65 This principle, designed to bring about the multilingual interoperability of street names, and which seems to have been a rather unique case of the authorities attempting to lessen confusion among residents of their multilingual city, persisted even in later renaming debates in Riga. Notably, in 1914, creative proposals were made to replace German-sounding names like Hermanovskaia (Hermann) Street with the similar-sounding Erevanskaia (Erevan), or Elbingenskaia (Elbingen) Street with Elvinskaia (Elva) (Figure 2). Although this project was not realized, such examples reveal that ideological and navigational renaming logics were not mutually exclusive but could operate concurrently, serving both symbolic and practical objectives in reshaping urban space.

Figure 2. An unrealized project to apply the multilingual interoperability principle to rename ‘German’ street names in Riga in November 1914. Source: LVVA, f. 2764, apr. 2, l. 755, 84.

In addition to improving navigation in cities, imperializing renaming performed an important function of honouring the empire’s people and events. The five categories of imperial toponyms outlined above undoubtedly contributed, on one level, to glorifying the empire and inscribing its presence onto the urban landscape, marking it as belonging to a specific political formation. Yet, not all spaces were seen as equally deserving of such symbolic transformation. For example, in 1895, residents of Vtoraia Novo-Molokanskaia (Second New Molokans, named after a Christian sect) Street petitioned the Tbilisi City Council to rename their street after the Caucasus viceroy Sergei Sheremetev. While supportive of the idea, the Council pointed out that the street was in a very unsanitary state, which is why they did not find it ‘appropriate’ to rename the street until the landowners had tidied it up at their own expense.Footnote 66 Similarly, in autumn 1913, the MVD rejected a proposal by the Kaunas municipal authorities to rename a poorly managed street on the city’s outskirts, which led to a dump, as Romanov Street.Footnote 67 The request, made during the tercentenary of the dynasty, may have been a misguided effort to demonstrate loyalty, or was perhaps a subversive gesture that implicitly mocked the symbolic inflation of dynastic naming. Either way, it revealed that naming was subject to strict spatial and symbolic boundaries: not every street was worthy of representing the empire.

Yet, even the most seemingly bombastic imperial toponyms did not always aim solely to venerate the empire; at times, they served other strategic or pragmatic purposes, especially when locals themselves proposed the renaming. This complexity is evident in cases of what might be termed renaming to gain socio-economic capital, where place names are employed to achieve aims in addition to, or even beyond, commemoration or ideological allegiance. A telling example of this can be found in the repeated attempts to rename the town (mestechko) of Leovo in Bessarabia between 1905 and 1912. Initially, Leovo’s inhabitants sought to rename it Alekseev, after the recently born heir to the throne, and later, Romanovsk, in honour of the dynasty. On the surface, such proposals could be interpreted as expressions of loyalty to the imperial family. However, archival documents reveal a more complex motivation: the petitioners primarily aimed to persuade the government to purchase Leovo from its negligent private owners and elevate its status to that of an ordinary town. The petitions’ rhetoric, which emphasized the commemoration of ‘a highly joyful event, the birth of the Sovereign Heir’ or ‘the most solemn event, three hundred years of the House of Romanovs’, served chiefly as a smokescreen to justify their request to rid themselves of private ownership, even if it meant renaming their town after the dynasty.Footnote 68 Although their pleas were unsuccessful, the discussion revealed how Leovo’s inhabitants attempted to use the power of names to improve their livelihoods.

Another important area for urban inhabitants was the power of names to degrade or elevate particular areas of their cities. These instances of profit-oriented renaming reflect how place names were strategically reshaped to enhance the social desirability, moral geography and economic value of urban areas. For example, in July 1897–98, landlords petitioned the Tbilisi City Council to rename Malo-Griaznaia (Small Dirty) and Bol′shaia Griaznaia (Big Dirty) streets. They argued that ‘even though the street is located in the city centre and is kept quite clean, due to the name […] most residents are reluctant to rent apartments on this street, as a result of which, we partially suffer material losses’.Footnote 69 Similarly, in 1912, landowners of Tbilisi’s Nakhalovka district (literally ‘Impudent’, also used to refer to an area of a city built without permits) requested the City Council to change the ‘coarse name’. They emphasized that most locals owned or rented their property and land legally, but the derogatory name ‘grates on the ear, […] has a detrimental effect on the younger generation, and is loss-making for property’. The petitioners requested a more neutral name – Zavokzal′e (Beyond the Station).Footnote 70 While reviewing the case, the Council members rejected the petition, citing the importance of preserving historical toponymy and drawing parallels with other cities of the empire, like Moscow, where historical yet even ‘less pleasant (menee blagozvuchnye) names’ persist, such as Sobach′ia (Dog) Square.Footnote 71 Instead, the Council suggested adopting the Georgian translation, Nadzaladevi, as a less offensive alternative. The petitioners disagreed, viewing this as a mere linguistic substitution that was not much more decent and thus lacking in genuine improvement. A year later, 709 inhabitants signed a renewed petition requesting that the district be renamed Iverskaia, after a local church.Footnote 72

Finally, we also encountered cases that underscore the extent to which place names functioned as markers of symbolic distinction within the imperial urban order, leading to what might be defined as dignifying renaming. In 1893, for example, the Chișinău City Council renamed a street into Sinadinovskaia, in honour of the eminent local Sinadino family who had funded the construction and outfitting of a church.Footnote 73 These decisions were often embedded in local social hierarchies and politics. While individuals sometimes aspired to, or thought that they were deserving of, having a street named after them, municipal authorities did not always see eye to eye. Tellingly, in the late 1890s, Prince Aleksandr Melikov repeatedly petitioned the Tbilisi City Council to name a street after his family, citing his donation of land to create eight new streets. Yet, despite his philanthropic gestures and noble lineage, the requests were denied. Melikov’s frustration, expressed in the claim that his family was not ‘of a lower dignity than those princes and noblemen after whose surnames streets of Tbilisi are named’, highlights how toponymic recognition was a competitive arena in which symbolic capital, class standing and political favour all played crucial roles.Footnote 74 Names were more than just practical labels or ideological statements: they were limited assets of urban prestige, perceived as capable of elevating or diminishing the status of people and places alike.

Structure of the special issue and future research directions

The articles in this special issue emerged from the workshop ‘Imperial Mirrors: Toponymy of Urban Space in the Romanov Empire, 1855–1917’, held at the Nordost-Institut in Lüneburg in April 2024. The workshop aimed not only to fill a gap in the scholarship concerning the lack of attention paid to urban toponymy as a field of historical study, but also to use the Romanov Empire as a case study to reveal the ‘far more complex historical reality’ of place names that Milo was writing about. While crafting the special issue, we were mindful that historians of toponymy usually focus on capital cities, which, as Milo pointed out, are ‘prime territory for anyone interested in the government’s attitude toward naming’ but ‘the least representative for the historian interested in reconstituting not official but collective memory’.Footnote 75 Therefore, the following articles present case studies of toponymic changes from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth century in today’s Orenburg, Vilnius, Kyiv and Tartu – cities whose names were represented in the toponymy of St Petersburg, but which equally hold their own particular stories of how (re)naming played out.

We aim to contribute to an understanding of how empires worked across several scales of analysis, and therefore each author touches upon a specific theme and highlights a specific function of toponyms in the Romanov Empire. First, the articles bring insights into how central authorities imagined the empire’s space, which parts they perceived as more contested than others and where the most interventionist policies were implemented and why. Second, they shed more light on the relations between municipal authorities and the imperial government by showcasing the agency of local actors, as well as the structural limits of what was permitted in the context of an autocratic regime. Finally, by focusing on cityscapes, the articles recover one of the diverse ways in which the empire penetrated the everyday lives of its inhabitants, how the empire’s townsfolk negotiated and reacted to the empire being mirrored in their streets and how urban toponyms were used to create an imperial ‘imagined community’ through promoting the idea that its people shared a common geographical, cultural, historical and political space.Footnote 76

The articles showcase a broad spectrum of meanings and motivations for (re)naming in different times and places. The contribution by Ulrich Hofmeister examines how imperial officials and urban planners created a new ideological image of the empire on what was perceived as the tabula rasa of the new steppe frontier city of Orenburg in the long eighteenth century, revealing how the act of naming could be a gesture of political significance. The article by Darius Staliūnas charts the growing politicization of toponymic practices in the empire and explores the government’s attempts in the second half of the nineteenth century to both Russify and imperialize its multiethnic and multiconfessional borderland cities as a way of countering local Polish nationalism. Anton Kotenko’s article on late imperial Kyiv situates street names in the history of contemporary urban modernization, capitalism and Russian nationalism by examining the use of street names to raise the value of real estate, attract more tourists and maintain the image of Kyiv as a cradle of Russianness. Finally, Catherine Gibson’s article explores the legal regulation of urban toponymy, showing how Tartu’s residents resisted the city’s 1893 renaming from Dorpat to Iur′ev by exploiting legal ambiguities and contesting the application of the law in the courts.

While the articles in this special issue deal with four cases, presentations during the workshop covering Chișinău, Piotrków, Riga, Tbilisi, Vladivostok and Zhytomyr demonstrated the wider potential for urban historians of Eastern Europe and Northern Eurasia to continue this line of research for other cities of the empire, including, importantly, Russia proper. Moreover, since 2022, the contributors to this special issue have had no access to the archives of the imperial ‘centre’ in St Petersburg. Therefore, the results of our analysis could be further enriched by complementing the perspectives outlined here with that of the imperial government, which would most likely yield greater insights into the motivations driving (re)naming initiatives at the highest levels and hierarchies of decision-making within the empire.

Another limitation of our studies is the reliance, for the most part, on official sources, and limited engagement with what Alan Pred calls ‘folk geography’ or ‘popular geography’, ‘the language of getting around on the streets’ which comprised ‘an assemblage of terms and phrases that was remarkable for its relatively infrequent reliance on official street names and other “proper” locational signifiers’.Footnote 77 A question for future research, then, is to what extent the inhabitants of Romanov cities used the official toponymy, and what alternative spatial references they relied upon. Glimpses of popular geography in archives hint that not all (re)namings might have been as significant for contemporaries as we perceive them to be today. For example, in 1903 an inhabitant of Tartu, feeling disoriented by the changes to street names over the past decades, wrote an alternative guide to the city in the form of a casual ‘chat’ (Plauderei), where he led an imaginary visitor around using the names of local residents, unofficial street names, and old names as landmarks and points of orientation.Footnote 78 A similar situation was also observed in 1914, when the municipal authorities of Izmail submitted a proposal to rename dozens of city streets, which could have caused confusion among residents. Yet, the city’s chief of police dismissed the concern, explaining that the change ‘will not bring any inconvenience to the population because the city’s inhabitants are accustomed to orienting themselves by other signs, and first of all, the surnames of the owners of houses’.Footnote 79 We hope future historians will take inspiration from Pred’s framework to recover the ‘lost words and lost worlds’ of everyday urban experience in the Romanov Empire.

The materiality of street signs represents another important avenue for future research. Despite their ubiquity in urban space, relatively few street signs from the Romanov period appear to have survived. One rare example from the Tallinn City Museum (Figure 3), along with descriptions from sources, suggests that the most common design across the empire featured a ‘Parisian’ blue background with white letters. These signs could be either monolingual or multilingual, though the choice of languages was most likely shaped by the local sociolinguistic environment and the discretion of municipal authorities.Footnote 80

Figure 3. Trilingual Russian, German and Estonian street sign from Tallinn, c.1900–17. Source: TLM_10860 KA 2237, Tallinna Linnamuuseum (Tallinn City Museum), http://www.muis.ee/museaalview/2264604.

The history of these objects reveals that renaming was not only a symbolic act but was also accompanied by significant financial costs, especially when producing new street signage. For example, in 1898, the Tbilisi City Council announced a tender for the manufacture of street signs, attracting bids from local suppliers and firms in other parts of the empire. One bid was from a Warsaw firm, A. Fel′zengardt-Skalski, who claimed to have supplied ‘St Petersburg and other well run cities’ of the empire with plaques ‘based on samples used around the whole of western Europe, namely: elegant enamelled metal on a blue background white relief inscriptions, which are illuminated even at night, durable, require neither repair nor cleaning, and are not exposed to any kind of climatic influence’.Footnote 81 In 1899, Fel′zengardt-Skalski followed up and reiterated the high quality of his signs, made of ‘Parisian embossed enamel’, ‘used in all capitals of Europe and America’ and ‘endangered neither by sunrays nor Siberian frost’.Footnote 82 Despite these claims, it is likely that the firm’s price of three rubles per plaque proved prohibitive. The Tbilisi City Council ultimately awarded the contract to a local supplier, Karapet Grigoriants, who offered a more economical option at just 40 kopeks per sign.Footnote 83 This is just one of numerous similar stories, which show how practical negotiations conducted by municipal authorities throughout the empire over cost, design and durability of signs could determine how the empire was made visible (or invisible) in its cityscapes.

In the end, we hope this special issue can further the ongoing denormalization of place names by highlighting the traces of the Romanov Empire in the built environment. Together with monuments and architecture, urban toponymy shall be considered as part of the ‘imperial debris’ – the residual imprint of the empire that continues to be etched into the contemporary urban space of much of Eastern Europe and Northern Eurasia. By prompting reflections on the lingering power of place names, perhaps, one day, our articles might also contribute to critical deliberations of toponyms in the former imperial centre itself.Footnote 84

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the organizing institutions – Nordost-Institut and Joachim Tauber, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and the University of Tartu – for supporting the workshop from which this special issue developed. We also thank all the participants for their presentations and discussions, and Louis Le Douarin for making the beautiful maps that accompany the articles.

Funding statement

Catherine Gibson’s work on this project was supported by the Estonian Research Council grant PSG1042. Anton Kotenko’s research was carried out as part of ‘Zootopia: Geschichte der zoologischen Gärten im Romanow-Reich’, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), project number 522242213.

References

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27 See, for example, Berecz, Á., Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries: The Entangled Nationalization of Names and Naming in a Late Habsburg Borderland (New York, 2020)Google Scholar, in particular Chapters 6 and 9.

28 For examples of studies relying on printed materials rather than archival sources, see, for instance, Aldrich, ‘Putting the colonies on the map’; Aldrich, R., Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France: Monuments, Museums, and Colonial Memories (Basingstoke, 2005), 27–30 10.1057/9780230005525CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 State Archive of the City of Kyiv, fond (collection) 163, opys (inventory) 39, sprava (file) 399 (O pereimenovanii ulits v gorode Kieve).

30 von Bok, M., P.A. Stopypin: vospominaniia o moem otse (Moscow, 1992), 201 Google Scholar. Von Bock dates the incident to the winter of 1911, although newspapers were reporting the discussions of the renaming already in summer 1909: ‘Vnutrennie izvestiia’, Novoe Vremia, 23 Jun. 1909, 4. The street in question had been renamed in 1900 from Dvorianskaia (Nobility) to Witte, who had been an honorary citizen of Odesa since 1884: ‘Numeratsiia domov i novoe naimenovanie nekotorykh ulits’, Vedomosti Odesskogo Gradonachal′stva, 25 Apr. 1900, 3.

31 On street names as a tool to control cityscapes, see Ferguson, P.P., ‘Reading city streets’, The French Review, 61 (1988), 386–97Google Scholar.

32 See, for instance, Ebert, V., Koloniale Straßennamen: Benennungspraktiken im Kontext Kolonialer Raumaneignung in der Deutschen Metropole von 1884 bis 1945 (Berlin, 2021)10.1515/9783110718133CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 U. Hofmeister, ‘Orenburg’s toponymy: staging the Russian Empire in the steppe’, in this special issue. On Crimea, see Jobst, K., Die Perle des Imperiums: Der Russische Krim-Diskurs im Zarenreich (Konstanz, 2007), 110–11Google Scholar.

34 For examples, see ‘Novosti zagranichnye’, Golos, 26 Sep. 1868, 3 (about Madrid); ‘Tret′e pis′mo iz Parizha’, Peterburgskii Listok, 14 May 1878, 1 (about Paris); ‘Zagranichnye vesti’, Peterburgskii Listok, 4 Sep. 1893, 1 (about Paris); ‘Imperator Vilgel′m v Vene’, Peterburgskaia Gazeta, 9 Sep. 1910, 2 (about Vienna); ‘Pereimenovanie ulits’, Moskovskie Vedomosti, 27 Jul. 1914, 3 (about Paris).

35 For instance, in 1865 newspapers reported on changes to the names of five villages in Podillia province into ‘more Russian ones’ (Golos, 19 Dec. 1865, 3), and in 1869 of the renaming of the town of Ianov in Hrodna province into Ivanov (Golos, 28 Apr. 1869, 1). For more on the post-1863 renaming of streets in Vilnius and northeastern provinces of the empire in general, see D. Staliūnas, ‘Imperialization of street names as part of the cultural appropriation of urban space in late imperial Vilnius’, in this special issue.

36 Wortman, Scenarios of Power, vol. 2, 237.

37 C. Gibson, ‘Lawful naming and toponymic resistance: the contested authority of the 1893 Dorpat-to-Iur′ev renaming law’, in this special issue.

38 A. Kotenko, ‘The value of names: toponymic commercialization in late nineteenth-century Kyiv’, in this special issue.

39 ‘Dal′neishaia natsionalizatsiia Kholmskogo kraia’, Den′, 22 Apr. 1914, 3.

40 National Archives of Moldova (ANA DGAN), fond (collection, hereafter f.) 9, inventar (inventory, hereafter inv.) 1, dosar (file, hereafter d.) 3745 (Po voprosu o pereimenovanii nosiashchikh nemetskie nazvaniia gorodskikh poselenii, posadov i mestechek v russkie), 1. In this case, the governor of Bessarabia forwarded the request to the provincial statistical committee, which assured him that no urban locales in Bessarabia had German names: ibid., 2–4.

41 For discussions of renamings in Riga, confusion as to what constituted ‘German’ names and renaming of streets in one of its districts after the rivers of the empire, see Latvian State Historical Archive (LVVA), fonds (collection, hereafter f.) 2764, apraksts (inventory, hereafter apr.) 2, lieta (file, hereafter l.) 755 (Naimenovanie novykh ulits), 83–6. For examples of changes of ‘German’ toponymy in other provinces of the empire, see ‘Pereimenovanie nemetskikh nazvanii’, Den′, 30 Jan. 1915, 4; ‘V Saratovskoi Dume’, Den′, 24 Apr. 1915, 5; ‘Vypiska iz zhurnala ocherednogo sobraniia Barnaul′skoi gorodskoi dumy ot 21 ianvaria 1915 goda “O pereimenovanii Nemetskoi ulitsy v Bel′giiskuiu”’, in Barnaul′skaia gorodskaia Duma, 1877–1996: Sbornik dokumentov (Barnaul, 1999), 194–5. On the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ reaction to petitions to Russify previously ‘German’ toponyms, see ‘Pereimenovanie gorodov i drugikh poselenii’, Rech′, 24 Oct. 1914, 5.

42 See, for instance, ‘Kaiserberg’, Moskovskie Vedomosti, 24 Dec. 1914, 3; ‘Nemtsy v Repine’, Moskovskie Vedomosti, 1 Apr. 1915, 2; ‘Russkii front’, Russkii Invalid, 3 Jun. 1916, 3.

43 ‘Obozrenie Galitsii’, Russkii Invalid, 22 Nov. 1914, 3.

44 Pred, A., Lost Words and Lost Worlds: Modernity and the Language of Everyday Life in Late Nineteenth-Century Stockholm (Cambridge, 1990), 128–9Google Scholar.

45 ‘Zasedanie gorodskoi dumy’, Peterburgskii Listok, 21 Dec. 1878, 3.

46 ‘Khronika gorodskoi zhizni v Rossii’, Gorodskoe Delo, 14 (1909), 717–20. Many streets of Poltava itself were renamed (for instance, Razboinichii [Robber] Lane became Tikhaia [Quiet] Street and Temnaia [Dark] Street was renamed as Brilliantovaia [Diamond], in both instances deliberately attempting to reverse the meaning of street names). The author of Gorodskoe Delo ridiculed the decisions of local authorities to rename the streets instead of improving the city’s life more substantially with a new school or a hospital: ibid., 717. One such renaming was the abovementioned case of Odesa, where reportedly it was the right-wing majority of the local duma that pushed the renaming of Witte Street into Peter the Great Street: ‘Khronika gorodskoi zhizni v Rossii’, Gorodskoe Delo, 14 (1909), 719–20. On renamings of 1912 in Moscow, Vilnius, St Petersburg, Kherson and Ialta, see Novoe Vremia, 25 Feb. 1911, 2–3; 7 Nov. 1911, 2; 22 Sep. 1912, 13; 10 Oct. 1912, 7; 13 Oct. 1912, 4; ‘V oznamenovanie sobytii 1812 goda’, Moskovskie Vedomosti, 7 Jun. 1914, 3.

47 ‘Pereimenovanie goroda’, Peterburgskii Listok, 8 Dec. 1907, 4; ‘V Sovete Ministrov’, Moskovskie Vedomosti, 18 Jun. 1914, 2.

48 Georgian Central Historical Archive (GCHA), 192–6–1916 (Perepiska i naimenovanie ulits g. Tiflisa), 8.

49 Tallinn City Archive, 195.2.111 (Perepiska o pereimenovanii nekotorykh ulits), 3. For other similar examples, see ‘Vesti iz Kronshtadta’, Peterburgskii Listok, 28 Nov. 1904, 7; ‘V pamiat′ poseshcheniia gosudarem imperatorom Chernigova’, Peterburgskaia Gazeta, 10 Sep. 1911, 4.

50 For instance, a street was meant to be renamed Romanovskaia (Romanov) Avenue in Jelgava (‘K 300-letiiu doma Romanovykh’, Novoe Vremia, 18 May 1912, 2); property owners of Kamennoostrovskii (Stone Island) Avenue in St Petersburg petitioned local authorities to rename it Nikolai or Romanov (‘Khronika: gorodskie dela’, Novoe Vremia, 6 Apr. 1913, 14), while ‘peasants’ of Mazepyntsi of Volyn province, whose village bore an extremely politically incorrect name in the context of a Russifying empire, allegedly asked to rename it to Romanivske (Romanov) (‘Otnoshenie k pamiati Mazepy’, Novoe Vremia, 19 Mar. 1913, 6).

51 For more on this in the context of the Western borderlands, see T. Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863–1914 (DeKalb, 1996); W. Rodkiewicz, Russian Nationality Policy in the Western Provinces of the Empire (1863–1905) (Lublin, 1998). On the renaming of Gubernskaia (Provincial) Street of Chișinău into Pushkin Street, see ANA DGAN, f. 9, inv. 1, d. 384 (Perepiska s prisutstvennymi uchrezhdeniiami Bessarabskoi gubernii), 33–6. On the 1899 renaming of part of Iakovlevskaia (Jacob) Street as Pushkin Boulevard in Riga, see LVVA, f. 2764, apr. 2, l. 557 (Bul′var Pushkina), 1.

52 For instance, on renaming the streets after Gogol in 1902 in St Petersburg, Riga, Odesa and Ashgabat, see Novoe Vremia, 26 Jan. 1902, 4; 20 Feb. 1902, 2; 21 Feb. 1902, 5; 2 Mar. 1902, 4. On renaming streets after the writer in Kharkiv and Samara in 1909, see Novoe Vremia, 4 Mar. 1909, 3; 6 Mar. 1909, 5.

53 ‘Eshche Goncharovskaia ulitsa’, Peterburgskii Listok, 5 Jan. 1892, 3; ‘Goncharovskaia ulitsa’, Peterburgskii Listok, 10 Oct. 1900, 4; ‘Krylovskaia liniia’, Peterburgskii Listok, 26 Jul. 1909, 2; ‘Na rodine Goncharova’, Peterburgskaia Gazeta, 6 Jun. 1912, 2; ‘Skver i shkoly M.Iu. Lermontova’, Moskovskie Vedomosti, 30 Mar. 1914, 3; ANA DGAN, f. 9, inv. 1, d. 1996 (Po khodataistvu Kishinevskoi gorodskoi dumy o pereimenovanii Reniskoi ulitsy prisvoeniem ei imeni ‘N.I. Pirogova’), 1–9, at 2.

54 For instance, in 1897–98 there was an initiative to rename a street in St Petersburg in honour of Félix Faure, then president of France, or after Paris (‘K priezdu g. Feliksa Fora’, Peterburgskii Listok, 5 Aug. 1897, 2; ‘Ekho’, Peterburgskii Listok, 19 Apr. 1898, 3), while in 1902 in Odesa, Malofontannaia (Small Fountain) Road was renamed French Boulevard (‘Khronika’, Vedomosti Odesskogo Gradonachal′stva, 12 May 1902, 2).

55 ANA DGAN, f. 9, inv. 1, d. 5053 (Po raportu kishinevskogo politsmeistera o pereimenovanii v gorode Kishineve ‘Bolgarskoi’ ulitsy drugim imenem), 1–5.

56 Pred, Lost Words and Lost Worlds, 93.

57 GCHA, 192–6–1917 (Prosheniia zhitelei o naimenovanii gorodskikh ulits), 15. See the letter of thanks to the Tbilisi City Council from Brosset’s son, Lavrentii (Laurent), 26–7.

58 GCHA, 192–6–1919 ([…] Perepiska o pereimenovanii Malosudebnoi ulitsy v Zubalovskuiu), 8–10.

59 ANA DGAN, f. 9, inv. 1, d. 2588 (Otnoshenie Izmail′skoi gorodskoi upravy o pereimenovanii Moskovskoi ulitsy goroda Izmaila v ulitsu Tul′chianova), 1–2, at 2.

60 Neethling, ‘Street names’, 145.

61 GCHA, 192–6–1916, 1.

62 Ibid., 11–11ob.

63 Ibid., 14–14ob.

64 LVVA, f. 2764, apr. 2, l. 755, 25.

65 Ibid., 26–26ob, 41–41ob.

66 GCHA, 192–6–1916, 10.

67 Lithuanian State Historical Archive, fondas (collection) 1567, aplankas (inventory) 1, byla (file) 1879 (Po voprosu ob oznamenovanii 300-letiia tsarstvovaniia doma Romanovykh), 66–9.

68 ANA DGAN, f. 9, inv. 1, d. 770 (Po khodataistvu Leovskogo kommunal′nogo soveta o pereimenovanii mestechka Leovo v gorod Alekseev), 1–19v, at 3; ANA DGAN, f. 9, inv. 1, d. 2587 (Po khodataistvu Leovskogo kommunal′nogo soveta o pereimenovanii mestechka Leovo v gorod Romanovsk), 1–17, at 12; ANA DGAN, f. 72, inv. 1, d. 149 (Ot Leovskogo kommunal′nogo soveta v Kagul′skii nepremennyi zemskii komitet o pereimenovanii mestechka Leovo v gorod Alekseevo), 1–35. For another case of dynastic renaming to gain socio-economic capital, see ANA DGAN, f. 9, inv. 1, d. 3050 (Po zhalobe zhitelei poselka Shkandyba o pereimenovanii ego v Novoaleksandrovku), 1–19.

69 GCHA, 192–6–1916, 6, 24, 29, 30.

70 GCHA, 192–8–183 (Perepiska o vosstanovlenii geograficheskikh naimenovanii raznykh chastei goroda i pereimenovanii Nakhalovki v ‘Zavokzal′e’), 1.

71 GCHA, 192–8–183, 3.

72 Ibid., 6–12ob.

73 ANA DGAN, f. 9, inv. 1, d. 92 (Po khodataistvu kishinevskoi gorodskoi dumy o pereimenovanii Galbinskoi ulitsy v Sinadinovskuiu), 1–8.

74 GCHA, 192–6–1918 (Perepiska o naimenovanii gorodskikh ulits), 17–17ob, 24, at 24.

75 Milo, ‘Street names’, 365.

76 For more on this approach, see C. Gibson and A. Kotenko, ‘Horizontal threads: towards an entangled spatial history of the Romanov Empire’, Slavic Review, 84 (2025), 247–65. On the term ‘imagined community’, see B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 2006).

77 For a study of the ‘folk geography’ of Stockholm’s urban toponymy in the nineteenth century, see Pred, Lost Words and Lost Worlds, 92–142, at 94.

78 T. Pfeil, Plauderei über die Straßen-Namen vor 50 Jahren im alten Dorpat (Jurjew [Dorpat], 1903).

79 ANA DGAN, f. 9, inv. 1, d. 3849 (Po khodataistvu Izmail′skoi gorodskoi upravy o pereimenovanii v g. Izmaile nekotorykh ulits), 1–11, at 11.

80 For example, in Tartu, street signs were trilingual (Russian, German, Estonian): H. Palamets, ‘19. Sajand’, in H. Pullerits, U. Tõnisson, A. Liim and A. Andresen (eds.), Tartu: Ajalugu ja kultuurilugu (Tartu, 2005), 65–73, at 67. By contrast, in 1898, the Tbilisi governor ‘did not find it convenient to have the inscriptions in three languages [Russian, Armenian, and Georgian], suggesting that they be made only in one language, Russian’: GCHA, 192–6–1916, 39. In Riga, in 1902, the City Board supported a suggestion of one member of the City Council to use the opportunity to renew old street signs and replace them with new signs in German, Latvian and Russian, and voted to address the governor about this matter: LVVA, f. 2724, apr. 2, l. 2895 (Ulichnye tablitsy), 12. In 1871, a Warsaw correspondent of a St Petersburg newspaper mentioned that local street names were given in two languages (Polish and Russian), in white letters on blue plaques, and, to the author’s dismay, with Russian versions transliterating, not translating, Polish names (thus, there was a transliterated Vonzskaia (Narrow) Street instead of a translated Uzkaia, and a Dlugaia (Long) Street rather than Dolgaia). He proposed that Warsaw’s street names should be modelled on Prague, where ‘Germans, for instance, have [...] not Woditschkowa Ulice, but Wasser-Strasse’: -er, ‘Iz Varshavy’, Golos, 6 Jun. 1871, 3.

81 GCHA, 192–6–1916, 43.

82 GCHA, 192–6–1918, 4.

83 Ibid., 12–13.

84 On the concept of ‘imperial debris’, see A.L. Stoler (ed.), Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (Durham, 2013). On the clearance of the ‘imperial debris’ in Western Europe on the examples of street names in Utrecht and Düsseldorf, see B. Schilling, ‘Afterlives of colonialism in the everyday: street names and the (un)making of imperial debris’, in B. Sèbe and M. G. Stanard (eds.), Decolonising Europe? Popular Responses to the End of Empire (London, 2020), 113–39.

Figure 0

Figure 1a. Map of St Petersburg indicating the streets named after imperial geography, c.1910. The (re)naming of streets took place throughout the century and in several phases. It seems that municipal authorities first identified a particular area of the city in need of (re)naming and then assigned it a loose geographical theme. This is most likely the explanation for why Lublinskaia (Lublin) Street found itself surrounded by streets named after the Baltic provinces, or why Tverskaia (Tver) Street, named in 1859, was located separately from streets named after the cities of Tver province in 1903–07. Nevertheless, the overall picture that emerged was that of a mirror of the empire, enhanced by the spatial clustering of names from proximate regions in a particular area of the capital. Source: Map by Anton Kotenko and Louis Le Douarin, based on Toponimicheskii portal Sankt-Peterburga, https://toponimika.spb.ru and Izvestiia S. Peterburgskoi Gorodskoi Dumy (1864–1916).

Figure 1

Figure 1b. Index to the St Petersburg map indicating the streets named after imperial geography, c.1910. Source: Anton Kotenko and Louis Le Douarin, based on Toponimicheskii portal Sankt-Peterburga, https://toponimika.spb.ru and Izvestiia S. Peterburgskoi Gorodskoi Dumy (1864–1916).

Figure 2

Figure 2. An unrealized project to apply the multilingual interoperability principle to rename ‘German’ street names in Riga in November 1914. Source: LVVA, f. 2764, apr. 2, l. 755, 84.

Figure 3

Figure 3. Trilingual Russian, German and Estonian street sign from Tallinn, c.1900–17. Source: TLM_10860 KA 2237, Tallinna Linnamuuseum (Tallinn City Museum), http://www.muis.ee/museaalview/2264604.