Changing names

[Serhii]

I am very pleased I made a mistake , I wish we forget all of them forever. Of course I mean him , and a lot of alike at every corner.

I understand Kvitka Cisyk street , not much John Lennon …. Most of all I like traditional local ones …. I have been to Lviv several times and do enjoy them ( = streets and their names )

[Esterix]

Here I am again...
Well, the list of the names of that Lviv street is quite long. It were interesting to know what inspired the first one. I saw also a town in Crimea with that name... As for Lennon street... I don’t remember to have found one... but now I know there is one there. In any case to change names doesn’t mean to change things or history... It were too easy!!!
By the way, I don’t understand why Serhii thinks it was a mistake to give another example of names changing from his town. More examples give a better view.
Perhaps there they are not ready to change street names so often, but the town (Dnipropetrovsk) changed the name a lot of times, and only the last one is from the soviet era.
Here is the timeline of name change from Wikipedia:

Yekaterinoslav 1776–1782, reestablished 1783–1797
Novorossiysk 1797–1802
Yekaterinoslav 1802–1917
Sicheslav 1917–1918
Yekaterinoslav 1918–1926
Dnepropetrovsk/Dnipropetrovsk 1926–present

Also Mariupol, Zaporizhzhya, Luhansk, Donetsk and others changed names.
Lviv, Chernivtsy, Vinnitsya have also a lot of names, but I think the reason is the one Hannia mentioned. Usually in the borders, or where more nationalities were present, towns have more names, which are variants/translations of the same place in different languages or of different ethnical groups. That is not really a complete change.
In Crimea some town names have their tataran variant, which was used before. This is also a similar example.
But as far as I read Kyev and Moscow didn’t change names. Or better, nobody had the idea to change them. Probably they were felt as unchangeable historical landmarks as other european town names.
It were interesting to read what’s written in the books about this topic.

[Esterix]

I found a list with all names of the many ukrainian renamed towns.
I don't know how much is correct, but I think it can be useful to identify new names of old towns.
The link is:

List of renamed cities in Ukraine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There are also the lists of the renamed cities in all ex Soviet countries.

[Esterix]

While looking for infos about the town I’m focusing (Ekaterinoslav/Dnipropetrovsk), I found, among others, the book “Revolutionary dreams - Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution”, by Richard Stites, published by Oxford University Press in 1989. The book is a little bit old, and I don’t know so much about that author, but reading here and there I found 2 paragraphs about renaming towns and streets. The author includes this habit under iconoclasm: war against sign. Signs (statues, buildings, names.... which reminded the past). The description of what was happening is interesting, so I copy the 2 pragraphs here, to add more points of view about this topic.

“If icons were visual reminders of a “dark” past, names were both visual and audial reminders. As in previous revolutions, places, things, and people were renamed in order to avoid odious associations or to honor new heroes and commemorate dead ones. One could almost construct a thin outline of Soviet political history by inspecting the renaming of certain places – Tsarytsin – Stalingrad – Volgograd being only the most famous such case. Petrograd – still bearing in Slavonic form the name of its founder – was renamed in 1924 after the death of Lenin. Lenin towns appeared all over Russia and were interspersed with places such as Sverdlovsk, Zinovievsk, Trotsk, Stalingrad, Dnepropetrovsk, Luxemburg, Uritsky, and Pervomaisk (May Day). Catherine the Great had ordered the levelling of Pugachev’s birthplace on the Don, the removal of its villagers across the river, and the renaming of the settlement Potemkinskaya – in addition to renaming a river and a Cossack community associated with the revolt; now the dozen towns honoring her fell victim to the same impulse. Bolsheviks were not alone in this habit: during the Civil War, Gulyai – Pole was known locally as Makhnograd.
Inside towns, a similar practice prevailed. In Petrograd-Leningrad, for example, the Nevsky Prospect became for a while the Prospect of the 25th of October, a cumbersome name that never caught on (though during the 1920s it was sardonically called “NEPsky Prospect” in droll reference to the commercial elements associated with the New Economic Policy). Names like Bakunin and Marat Streets appeared; and names like “Senate” and “Resurrection” gave way to “Decembrist” and “Insurrection”. Millionaya Street, adjacent to the Winter Palace and the locus of royalty, now took on the name of the terrorist who had tried in 1880 to blow up the palace and the royal family. Two short streets north of the Nevsky, near the site of Alexander II’s assassination, were rechristened Zhelyabov and Perovskaya in commemoration of their common deed and their mutual love. In Kiev, Vorovsky Street replaced the ancient Kreshchatik and to some, even devoted Communists, “it just [didn’t] sound right.” Renaming became so common that citizens could hardly learn the new names, and the practice was the frequent butt of jokes in satirical literature. In 1921, a group of poets led by Esenin and Mariengof went around the central streets of Moscow, pulling down nameplates and putting up their own names. Yet Moscow and the Kremlin were never renamed; the Winter Palace was too closely associated with royal power to allow it to be endowed with the name of a virtuous revolutonary; and Smolny was too redolent of the euphoric October days to change it. The Nevsky and the Kreshchatik eventually retrieved their original names.”

[Esterix]

While looking for infos about the town I’m focusing (Ekaterinoslav/Dnipropetrovsk), I found, among others, the book “Revolutionary dreams - Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution”, by Richard Stites, published by Oxford University Press in 1989. The book is a little bit old, and I don’t know so much about that author, but reading here and there I found 2 paragraphs about renaming towns and streets. The author includes this habit under iconoclasm: war on sign. Signs (statues, buildings, names, etc. which reminded the past). The description of what was happening is interesting, so I copy the 2 pragraphs here, to add more points of view about this topic.

“If icons were visual reminders of a “dark” past, names were both visual and audial reminders. As in previous revolutions, places, things, and people were renamed in order to avoid odious associations or to honor new heroes and commemorate dead ones. One could almost construct a thin outline of Soviet political history by inspecting the renaming of certain places – Tsarytsin – Stalingrad – Volgograd being only the most famous such case. Petrograd – still bearing in Slavonic form the name of its founder – was renamed in 1924 after the death of Lenin. Lenin towns appeared all over Russia and were interspersed with places such as Sverdlovsk, Zinovievsk, Trotsk, Stalingrad, Dnepropetrovsk, Luxemburg, Uritsky, and Pervomaisk (May Day). Catherine the Great had ordered the levelling of Pugachev’s birthplace on the Don, the removal of its villagers across the river, and the renaming of the settlement Potemkinskaya – in addition to renaming a river and a Cossack community associated with the revolt; now the dozen towns honoring her fell victim to the same impulse. Bolsheviks were not alone in this habit: during the Civil War, Gulyai – Pole was known locally as Makhnograd.
Inside towns, a similar practice prevailed. In Petrograd-Leningrad, for example, the Nevsky Prospect became for a while the Prospect of the 25th of October, a cumbersome name that never caught on (though during the 1920s it was sardonically called “NEPsky Prospect” in droll reference to the commercial elements associated with the New Economic Policy). Names like Bakunin and Marat Streets appeared; and names like “Senate” and “Resurrection” gave way to “Decembrist” and “Insurrection”. Millionaya Street, adjacent to the Winter Palace and the locus of royalty, now took on the name of the terrorist who had tried in 1880 to blow up the palace and the royal family. Two short streets north of the Nevsky, near the site of Alexander II’s assassination, were rechristened Zhelyabov and Perovskaya in commemoration of their common deed and their mutual love. In Kiev, Vorovsky Street replaced the ancient Kreshchatik and to some, even devoted Communists, “it just [didn’t] sound right.” Renaming became so common that citizens could hardly learn the new names, and the practice was the frequent butt of jokes in satirical literature. In 1921, a group of poets led by Esenin and Mariengof went around the central streets of Moscow, pulling down nameplates and putting up their own names. Yet Moscow and the Kremlin were never renamed; the Winter Palace was too closely associated with royal power to allow it to be endowed with the name of a virtuous revolutonary; and Smolny was too redolent of the euphoric October days to change it. The Nevsky and the Kreshchatik eventually retrieved their original names.”