Introduction
In September 1898, the Kyiv governor-general, Mikhail Dragomirov, asked Kyiv City Council to install two signs next to the crossroads of Desiatynna and Velyka Zhytomyrska Streets.Footnote 1 The plaques were intended to inform the city’s residents and visitors about one of the entrance gates to medieval Kyiv that was apparently located in the neighbourhood and which, following the Mongol sack of the city in 1240, was allegedly named by the locals as the Batu Khan Gate. Although the governor-general did not want to go so far as to initiate the material reconstruction of the gate, the signs aimed to recreate it virtually by inscribing the seemingly medieval name into the cityscape of late nineteenth-century Kyiv.Footnote 2
Today, a government official’s ambition to remind contemporaries of Batu Khan might seem extravagant. Commonplace understandings of the role of place names, affirmed by recent scholarship, suggest that urban toponyms act not only as tools for organizing a cityscape but also perform a symbolic function by conveying particular ideologies or commemorating important individuals or events.Footnote 3 Moreover, as Maoz Azaryahu put it, ‘in contrast to the form of historical narrative common in textbooks, which presents both “heroes” and “villains”…and provides an evaluation of their historical significance, a city-text comprises heroes only’.Footnote 4 Why then did Dragomirov want to remember someone whose army destroyed Kyiv and, according to the most celebrated late nineteenth-century historian of the Romanov Empire, turned the huge area around the city ‘into a desert with meagre remains of the former population’?Footnote 5
Historiography does not provide an answer to this question as Kyiv’s toponyms have hitherto not attracted the interest of many scholars. The available histories of the city either ignore street names or provide their etymological explanations.Footnote 6 This oversight seems quite typical for academic scholarship on the Romanov Empire, which has not yet considered urban toponymy as a research topic worthy of serious scholarly attention.Footnote 7 Therefore, the best available study of Kyiv’s toponyms so far was produced by a non-academic author, Stefan Mashkevich, who surveyed a wide range of unpublished and published sources to lead readers along seven itineraries through Kyiv, whose main heroes are not buildings but street names.Footnote 8
Building upon Mashkevich’s work and guided by recent studies of critical toponymy, this article analyses archival and published sources to answer the question why Dragomirov wanted to bring the Batu Khan Gate back virtually to Kyiv’s social space. In addition to contributing to the urban history of Kyiv, it advances critical place-name studies by moving beyond the three most salient approaches within the field as defined by Reuben Rose-Redwood, Derek Alderman and Maoz Azaryahu, namely: focusing on the relations between politics and the urban streetscape; examining the attempts of various social groups to represent their identities in the urban streetscape; and analysing toponymy’s performativity or how the residents actually used names.Footnote 9 The story of the attempt to unwittingly commemorate the leader of the Mongol army in late imperial Kyiv exposes more multifunctional historical usages of urban place names than is usually acknowledged in the literature.
The article’s argument is threefold. First, I argue that, unlike in the case of St Petersburg touched upon in the introduction to this special section, or of Vilnius analysed in the article by Darius Staliūnas, the celebration of the empire did not play a significant role in the naming of Kyiv’s streets and squares.Footnote 10 Even if by the century’s end some local place names did indeed commemorate certain individuals associated with the empire, these remained comparatively isolated cases. Second, while the municipal authorities remained lukewarm about representing the empire in their cityscape, they seem to have been more receptive to attempts to use toponymy to commercialize and commodify the streets of a rapidly developing capitalist city. Such efforts were undertaken by Kyiv’s houseowners, who sought to harness street names to increase the appeal and value of their real estate to potential renters. By adding a historical dimension to studies of the economic role of place names today, the article presents the commercialization, commodification and gentrification of the cityscape through toponyms as not solely characteristic of the ‘neoliberal age’ of the twenty-first century, as one might assume from existing scholarship, but as a much longer historical phenomenon.Footnote 11
Third, in addition to providing residents with a convenient tool for navigating the city, performing the role of lieux de mémoires, conveying an ideology of the ruling polity, or increasing the value of property, the history of place names in late imperial Kyiv presents an example of what one might call the temporalization – or, to be more precise, historicization – of urban space. Following Henri Lefebvre, Maoz Azaryahu has already pointed out how street names can be used to symbolize a break with the past and the beginning of a new era.Footnote 12 In this article, I argue that urban toponymy can also serve the opposite aim. Important as Batu Khan was, when endorsing a plaque with his name, the Kyiv governor-general and the group of experts he assembled did not intend to celebrate the medieval Mongol leader. Instead, the introduction of the Batu Khan Gate and numerous other seemingly ancient toponyms onto the contemporary mental map of Kyiv aimed to enhance the ancient temporality of the city. In turn, the attempt to age Kyiv via toponymy could have been prompted by two factors. On the one hand, at the time of emerging mass politics, such a decision could intensify the city’s conservative image as a cradle of the Russian nation, which is why some local Russian nationalists endorsed the project.Footnote 13 On the other hand, the city’s seemingly ancient landscape could attract more tourists and boost Kyiv’s economy.Footnote 14
To elaborate on these arguments, the article consists of three parts. First, I scrutinize the general principles employed by the authorities to name the streets of Kyiv in the long nineteenth century. Next, I examine the views of local real estate owners, who considered toponyms as commercial assets or liabilities and often petitioned the municipal officials to rename particular streets. In the third part, I analyse the attempt to label Kyiv as an ancient city with the help of toponyms. The project’s eventual failure, however, highlights the municipal authorities’ pragmatism when (re)naming the city’s streets and their prevailing eagerness to think of place names in terms of their economic value.
Toponymic practices in late imperial Kyiv
Nineteenth-century Kyiv was a city in the making. A former imperial borderland collection of three loosely connected settlements, it gradually became a unified social space only after the second partition of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1793. The city’s development made headway from the 1830s onwards after the suppression of the 1830–31 uprising in the western borderlands, the establishment of the governor-generalship (1832) and the growth of the sugar industry around it. By the end of the long nineteenth century, Kyiv had become the fifth largest city in the Romanov Empire and a regional metropolis with a multiethnic population of around 500,000 people, comparable to Boston, the fifth largest city in the US.Footnote 15
In his study of nineteenth-century Kyiv, Serhiy Bilenky points out that the city’s rapid expansion led to two important tensions. First, the modernization of Kyiv, in which representatives of all of its ethnic groups were involved, collided with the city’s rather conservative public image. Indeed, throughout the nineteenth century, educated Romanov subjects considered Kyiv to be Russia’s eternal and holy Orthodox Rome or Jerusalem, and its ruins and churches attracted numerous visitors from all over the empire.Footnote 16 The second development mentioned by Bilenky concerned the friction between the municipal authorities, free market capitalism and the imperial administration, which became particularly visible after 1870, when municipal reform placed the self-government of cities into the hands of their wealthiest elites – a tension which was characteristic of all cities in the Romanov Empire.Footnote 17 In the case of Kyiv, according to Michael Hamm, in 1870, only 3,222 out of 70,000 inhabitants could vote to elect the municipal council; by 1910, its population grew sevenfold to over 500,000, but the size of its electorate remained at only 3,757.Footnote 18 This ‘disenfranchisement of virtually the entire population’, as Hamm called it, meant that, similarly to other Romanov cities, Kyiv’s ‘urban public administration was put into the hands of a small minority, usually poorly educated, inert and not at all inclined to place the welfare of the entire urban population above personal or class gain’.Footnote 19 Yet, even the interests of this tiny clique did not always coincide with those of the empire’s authorities, and the (re)naming of Kyiv streets and squares was one sphere of urban life where the two groups collided.
As claimed by Mashkevich, while the names of Kyiv’s streets first appeared on the 1803 city map, their earliest official affirmation was made only by the map of Kyiv approved by Emperor Nicholas I in 1837.Footnote 20 Subsequently, all toponymic changes in the cityscape had to be endorsed by the authorities in St Petersburg. Mashkevich contends that it was only in 1858 that the idea of officially renaming some of the city’s streets was voiced for the first time by the Kyiv governor-general, Illarion Vasilchikov. Apparently, Vasilchikov was unhappy that the names of some streets ‘did not have any relation either to their location or to the buildings next to them or overall to the remarkable ancient monuments and recent events’.Footnote 21 Ironically, it seems that the governor-general himself became the first ‘recent event’ to be commemorated in Kyiv’s cityscape when, in 1863, the Kyiv governor ordered the municipal authorities to change the names of Voznesenskyi Descent and Zolotokhreshchatytska Street to Illarionovskaia and Vasilchikovskaia Streets, respectively, in honour of the recently deceased Vasilchikov.Footnote 22
These interventions in Kyiv’s map remained isolated occurrences until 1866, when the Kyiv governor initiated a project of massive renaming of local streets. According to Mykhailo Rybakov, the guiding motivation was to make the city more legible for police in the aftermath of the 1863–64 uprising and the attempt to assassinate Emperor Alexander II in April 1866. In 1869, the three-year-long work of a special commission led to the naming of 20 squares and 41 streets, the division of four streets, and the renaming of 32 streets.Footnote 23 Importantly for this article, judging by the list of new names, the officials in charge of this process were not driven by the idea of glorifying or commemorating the empire, its history or heroes in Kyiv’s cityscape, as we might expect based on previous scholarship and in comparison to other cities, such as Vilnius. Out of 20 square names and 77 new street names, 88 were based on local topography or history, while only nine can be considered as ‘imperial’. Among them, two squares were named as Tsarskaia (Tsar) and Bogdana Khmelnitskogo to honour the emperor-liberator of peasants from serfdom and ‘the beginning of the reunification of the Southwestern region with the Moscow state’, two streets after the eighteenth-century empresses (Elizabeth and Catherine II) and five others commemorated imperial officials who had served in Kyiv (Bezak, Bibikov, Funduklei, Levashov and Pirogov).Footnote 24
The municipal authorities followed local history when naming Kyiv places until the breakup of the empire, and several explicitly imperial toponyms appeared in the cityscape only at the end of the long nineteenth century. They constituted part of the empire-wide attempts of Emperor Nicholas II (1894–1917) to become more popular among his subjects.Footnote 25 Thus, in 1911, a major island on the Dnipro was renamed from Trukhaniv to Alekseevskii in honour of the heir to the throne.Footnote 26 In 1913, the city council wanted to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty by renaming part of Aleksandrovskaia Street after the royal family.Footnote 27 Some years earlier, in 1901, Esplanadnaia (Esplanade) Street was renamed Suvorovskaia (Suvorov) to pay tribute to the 100th anniversary of the death of the famous imperial general.Footnote 28 Finally, at the end of the century, several Russian writers who were considered important for the whole empire were commemorated on Kyiv’s map. Thus, in 1899, the city celebrated the 100th anniversary of the empire’s most famous poet, Alexander Pushkin, by renaming the street already bearing an imperial name, that of the Empress Elizabeth, Novoelizavetinskaia, in Pushkin’s honour.Footnote 29 In 1902, Kadetskii Lane became Gogol Street.Footnote 30 In 1903, Ivanivska Street was renamed after Turgenev.Footnote 31 Sometimes, extraordinary events could intervene in the limited imperialization of the streetscape of Kyiv, and in 1911, Malovolodymyrska Street was renamed after the former prime minister of the empire, Petr Stolypin, who had been recently assassinated in the city’s opera house.Footnote 32 In the end, according to my calculations, in 1914 only 34 of Kyiv’s toponyms were associated with the Romanov Empire; moreover, unlike in Vilnius or St Petersburg, they commemorated not the imperial space but elites, most of whom were related to Kyiv (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Map of streets with ‘imperial toponyms’ in pre-World War I Kyiv, made by Anton Kotenko and Louis Le Douarin based on Kalendar′. Adresnaia i spravochnaia kniga g. Kieva za 1914 god (Kyiv, 1913) and on the map from Novyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar′, 21 (St Petersburg, 1914), 778.
As will be shown below, however, the motivation behind these toponymic changes was more complicated than might initially appear if one judges by the etymology of the new names alone. Moreover, renaming a place was not a straightforward process, and sometimes the municipal authorities could reject proposals to celebrate an empire-wide celebrity. For instance, in 1912, sanitation workers petitioned Kyiv’s mayor to rename part of Pavlivska Street, which was located next to their station, after Mikhail Lomonosov, ostensibly to commemorate the 200th anniversary of his birth. In this way, argued the petitioners, ‘the name of the first great Russian scientist will serve as a permanent reminder to current and future workers of the city’s scientific-practical institutions of works of the Russian genius’ and would encourage them to work harder for the good of Kyiv’s population. The petition was penned by locals, but not by a privileged group of citizens; perhaps for this reason, it did not convince the council and was declined.Footnote 33
Furthermore, as has already been established by historians of other cases, spatial changes imposed by officials are not always immediately accepted by locals, who tend to cling to their personal mental maps.Footnote 34 This was also the case in late imperial Kyiv. For instance, the organizers of the first city census of 1874 attested that its inhabitants did not entirely internalize the new toponyms, which had appeared five years before, and that ‘in common usage, many streets and squares have retained their former names to this day’.Footnote 35 Kyiv’s residents seemed to have remained nonchalant towards the new toponyms. At the turn of the century, a local official explained this indifference by a rather prosaic absence of street signs, arguing that this was why ‘people refer to them with names that are distorted or of their own invention, and which have nothing in common with those that we read on the plans’.Footnote 36
Overall, it seems that the (re)naming of Kyiv’s streets remained a rather trite matter of municipal politics and did not have a high political profile. The imperial authorities do not seem to have actively intervened in this sphere of the city’s life. One of the reasons could be that, unlike the situation in Vilnius examined by Staliūnas, even though ‘the Polish question had not disappeared’ after the defeat of the 1863–64 uprising in some parts of the empire, in Kyiv ‘it had lost its centrality in local politics’.Footnote 37 Nor did Kyiv street names become a point of contention between any of its major ethnic groups – Jews, Poles, Russians and Ukrainians – who did not compete for ownership of and visibility in public space with the help of mono- or multilingual street signs.Footnote 38 The only exception that I encountered in the archives, and which only proves the rule, is related to the January 1914 decision of the city council to rename Bulvarno-Kudriavska Street as Shevchenko Street to honour the centenary of the birth of the famous Ukrainian poet. In November 1914, Kyiv’s surveying department even presented the proposed change on the city’s master map of 1874 (Figure 2), which in February 1915 was meant to be sent to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in St Petersburg for approval.Footnote 39 Even though the municipal authorities endorsed the plan, the project was not implemented, probably because of the imperial government’s hostility towards celebrating Shevchenko’s anniversary.Footnote 40
Figure 2. Extract from Kyiv’s city plan made in November 1914, depicting the street that the city council suggested renaming after Shevchenko. Despite its appearance on the plan, Shevchenko Street never materialized in imperial Kyiv. Source: DAK, f. 163, op. 39, s. 399, 224zv.
Such relative disregard towards using street names as ideological tools does not mean, however, that local inhabitants did not care about their toponyms. And even though the majority of street names in nineteenth-century Kyiv, unlike those in St Petersburg or Vilnius, were not verbatim imperial mirrors, I argue that the history of local toponymy was nevertheless indicative of an ongoing empire-wide contestation of urban space involving representatives of the emerging capitalist society, municipal authorities, imperial officials and nationalist activists.
Urban toponyms as commercial liabilities and assets
When studying archival documents related to the renaming of streets in late imperial Kyiv, one cannot help but be struck by the number of petitions on this matter received and reviewed by the municipal authorities (Figure 3). This participatory form of local politics sometimes allowed up to several dozen Kyiv houseowners of different social backgrounds and genders to put forward their proposals to give a place a new name. Contrary to the seemingly lukewarm top-down renamings described in the first part of the article, the petitions reveal the high interest of some Kyiv residents in this process.Footnote 41
Figure 3. Petition of the ‘Kyiv property owner’ and peasant ‘Dmitrii Prochukhaev’, signed by 19 peasants, which they submitted in January 1909 to request that the city council rename Aleksandrovskaia (Alexander) Street to 19 Fevralia (19 February) Street in honour of the abolition of serfdom in the Romanov Empire. In March 1909, the council rejected the petition. Source: DAK, f. 163, op. 39, s. 399, 203–203zv.
As might be expected, on the one hand, similarly to the authorities, petitioners considered (re)naming as a way to reduce the orientational confusion caused, for instance, by the existence of several streets bearing the same name. For example, on 12 December 1900, the owners of houses on Kryvyi (Crooked) Lane petitioned the city council to rename it because a nearby lane bore the same name, which ‘constantly caused different misunderstandings and inconveniences’.Footnote 42 In July 1910, property owners and residents of Mala Dorohozhytska Street complained that the existence of Velyka Dorohozhytska Street just one block away caused ‘unwanted mistakes and confusion of addresses which are detrimental to the dwellers’ business relationships’.Footnote 43 In May 1908, the landlords of Dmytrivska Street asked for their street to be renamed to Peterburgskaia, Nekrasovskaia, Lermontovskaia or Dvorianskaia because, allegedly, local cab drivers trying to charge passengers higher fees were driving them to another Dmytrivska Street located at the opposite side of the city.Footnote 44
On the other hand, in addition to topographic considerations, petitions from Kyiv houseowners to the authorities concerning the naming of streets reveal that one of the primary motivations for the appeals was the growing commercialization of the city. ‘Wrong’ street names could not only cause problems for delivery and postal services, firefighters and police, but were also thought to influence the housing market by dissuading or attracting potential tenants and thus impacting the financial well-being of the property owners. For this reason, for instance, in 1892, landlords of Kozyne Boloto (Goat’s Swamp) Street asked the city council to give it a new name, which would be more appropriate for a street with ‘three-storeyed houses, continuous pavement, gas streetlamps, and electric lighting in hotels’. Unsuccessful in their attempt, two years later the petitioners tried again, this time specifically pointing out that the current name of the street ‘projects a false image of the hygienic conditions of the area’, thereby doubly diminishing the price of their apartments in comparison to neighbouring streets with ‘more pleasant sounding’ names.Footnote 45 Similarly, in 1901, property owners of Bolotna (Swamp) Street requested to rename their street to Mitrofanovskaia (after a local church) because their investments ‘do not bring us any income at all’. Apparently, people interested in buying their houses judged the street by its name and considered the whole area swampy, ‘making us extremely unprofitable offers that do not cover even the construction costs’.Footnote 46 In 1903, a group of landlords asked for Chorna Hriaz (Black Mud) Street to be renamed to Florovskaia (after a local monastery), ‘considering that at one time the street was covered with impenetrable mud and had insignificant buildings, but now it has a well-maintained pavement, and beautiful buildings have been constructed’.Footnote 47 Likewise, in 1913, the property owners of Kozhumiatska (Tanner) Street requested that it be renamed to Shveitsarskaia (Swiss) Street. First, they argued that the street’s topography apparently resembled a Swiss landscape because it was ‘located in a gorge and is surrounded on three sides by picturesque mountains’. Second, perhaps more importantly, they hoped that the street’s new name would ‘raise the fallen prices of both real estate and apartments’.Footnote 48 In the petitioners’ opinion, their houses undoubtedly deserved to be occupied by more affluent tenants as they were equipped with a sewer and water supply system.Footnote 49
Other applicants asked to rename certain Kyiv toponyms, which they perceived as driving away tenants by their ‘frightening’ names. For example, in 1901, the signatories of an appeal from Kyianovskyi (Cudgel) Lane complained that prospective renters were ‘falsely afraid’ that their street was inhabited by ‘some bandits, who fight with cudgels’.Footnote 50 Similarly, in 1907, property owners of the Vovchyi Iar (Wolf Ravine) Street petitioned the mayor to ‘provide us with God’s mercy’ and rename their street. Although it was already ‘paved and had streetlights’, the current name was ‘scaring away people who want to rent inexpensive apartments, and our houses remain empty’. They reasoned that even though the city council had already declined their earlier petition making the same request, recent support for some other appeals to rename streets with similarly disagreeable names gave them hope that this time the council would ‘save us from a moniker of wolf-like people’.Footnote 51
Occasionally, even seemingly neutral toponyms could have an ostensibly bad reputation, and therefore, by replacing them, interested parties hoped to amend Kyiv’s moral landscape and gentrify the area.Footnote 52 For instance, in 1906, 38 landlords of Iamskaia Street asked the municipal authorities to change the name of their street, apparently still known as a red-light district. Even though the brothels had long since been removed, their memory was allegedly encapsulated in the toponymy and ‘defiled the street, decreasing the value of flats of their owners and making it inconvenient for decent tenants to rent their apartments’. ‘In the interests of property owners’, petitioners contrived to improve the street’s reputation by ‘necessarily’ renaming it after the famous Russian fabulist Ivan Krylov.Footnote 53 The council rejected this idea, apparently in order not to profane the writer’s name. One year later, however, the houseowners repeated their appeal and stressed that ‘already for a quarter of a century they had suffered in moral and material terms from brothels located on this street’. The removal of the latter allowed the street to only ‘partially assume a morally favourable appearance’, and ‘the partiality’ was caused by the street’s name, which had not changed and ‘still has a strong material impact’. Disagreeing with the council’s reluctance to rename the street after Krylov, property owners found nothing blasphemous in such an act, comparing it to the erection of Christian churches on the place of former pagan sanctuaries. In the end, however, the petitioners conceded that they did not care about renaming the street after the writer and were willing to agree on any new name capable of improving the street’s reputation and attracting tenants. In November 1906, the council conceded to the argument and renamed the street as Batyieva.Footnote 54
The request to rename the former brothel street after a famous Russian fabulist hints that at least some renamings of the time, which from the perspective of the twenty-first century might seem ideological, were driven by commercial motives and the perceived prestige associated with the names of local or statewide celebrities. Even if the empire provided a structural framework for the pool of acceptable names, the appearance of such names on maps of its cities was not necessarily driven by ideology. In yet another case from Kyiv, in 1903 the landlords of Ivanivska Street petitioned to rename their street and, as their main argument, they claimed that they were driven by a desire ‘to commemorate someone useful and dear to the majority of enlightened people’, in their case – ‘one of the most talented Russian belletrists’, Ivan Turgenev.Footnote 55 In fact, the petition started by describing the street’s recent transformation from being ‘generally uncomfortable, without pavement, sidewalks, lighting, front gardens etc.’ to one with ‘a good pavement, sidewalks along its entire length, and with well-constructed two-storey, three-storey and four-storey houses’.Footnote 56 Obviously, such an improved space now deserved a new name matching the quality of its real estate.
The denial of the request to rename Iamskaia Street to Krylov shows that contemporaries realized that the gentrification of streets by changing their names could also work in a different direction: unworthy streets were perceived as capable of downgrading the reputation of people. As in other cities of the empire, this made the municipal authorities particularly careful when renaming streets after the ruling dynasty. For example, in 1911, the property owners of Pidhirna Street, ‘driven by loyalist feelings’, appealed to the city council to rename it as Romanov Street. The council declined the petition and decided to celebrate the upcoming anniversary of the ruling dynasty by picking ‘a more suitable street’.Footnote 57 In 1913, the same negative decision awaited a similar petition from property owners of Verkhnii and Nyzhnii Val Streets.Footnote 58
Nevertheless, representing the interests of the wealthiest residents of Kyiv, the arguments about the need to commercialize and gentrify streetscapes chimed with the council and thus the municipal authorities very often fulfilled requests to rename streets according to the desires of property owners.Footnote 59 At the same time, the city council’s readiness to align with the interests of local landlords, which subsequently led to the disappearance of Kyiv’s old place names, also caused bitterness among some contemporaries. These tensions were most explicitly revealed in the creation in 1898 of the governor-general’s special commission, which was placed in charge of a project not just to protect but also to ‘revive’ the historical nature of Kyiv’s cityscape.
Urban toponyms as a tool to historicize Kyiv’s cityscape
‘“Kyiv is the mother of Russian cities”, they used to say in the old days. “Kyiv is the Jerusalem of the Russian land”, declared Emperor Alexander II…And indeed, Kyiv is the only city in Russia remarkable for its ancient, historical role in the fate of the Russian people.’Footnote 60 These tropes, which opened a six-page-long description of Kyiv in an illustrated album published in 1900, aptly summed up the city’s image inside and outside the Romanov Empire.Footnote 61 On the one hand, as pointed out by Bilenky, throughout the nineteenth century, the government promoted the idea of Kyiv as an ancient Russian city to counter the claims of Polish nationalists on the three provinces of the Southwestern region, including Kyiv.Footnote 62 On the other hand, according to the album, at the turn of the century, Kyiv attracted more than 100,000 Christian pilgrims annually, arriving ‘from all ends of our fatherland to bow to the relics of past statesmen and educators’.Footnote 63 The number of travellers visiting Kyiv was increasing from year to year due to the development of the empire’s railways, and the municipal authorities undoubtedly understood the importance of tourism for the local economy. For example, in 1910, during discussions about the project to establish a permanent zoological garden in Kyiv, one of the council members endorsed the initiative by highlighting that a zoo ‘would attract travellers’.Footnote 64 Kyiv’s antiquity could thus be part of its appeal for prospective visitors.
It was in this context of conceiving Kyiv as a place of Russian heritage and a tourist destination that on 24 September 1898, Governor-General Dragomirov penned a proposal to the Kyiv governor, following a meeting of four experts on Kyiv’s history – Volodymyr Antonovych, Mykola Petrov, Pavlo Zhytetsky and Volodymyr Shcherbyna – which he had chaired 10 days earlier. During the meeting, the participants agreed on ‘the desirability of restoring some ancient names of regions and places in Kiev as well as assigning new historically based names to some of its streets’.Footnote 65 The commission’s members proposed to achieve their aim in three steps. First, to visualize the borders of medieval Kyiv, they suggested renaming one street and adding signs, which would point to the location of five ancient gates, including the one named after Batu Khan mentioned in the introduction. Second, they wanted to formalize several unofficial ‘ancient’ names and install commemorative plaques marking the locations of 10 places mentioned in medieval and early modern chronicles. Third, they singled out 14 streets and squares in need of renaming with ‘historically based’ names to ‘resurrect in the people’s memory the names of famous figures and the names of buildings that no longer exist’.Footnote 66
On 10–11 November 1898, the council members discussed the report, but most speakers, whose opinions were subsequently published by the local newspaper, doubted whether the proposal was necessary. On a very practical note, one attendee, Otto Eikhelman, a professor of law at Kyiv University, pointed to the high economic cost of the endeavour and reasoned that to produce the necessary number of plaques would cost the city around 4,000–5,000 rubles, which he found to be an unreasonable expense.Footnote 67 On the contrary, another council member, Nikolai Chokolov, a local merchant and future member of the Club of Russian Nationalists, pointed out that there was no easily accessible information about Kyiv’s historical places for visiting tourists. ‘If tourists had such clear instructions’, argued Chokolov, ‘they would stay longer, which even from a practical point of view is not useless for Kyiv.’Footnote 68 In the end, the council decided to create a special ‘Commission for the restoration of the ancient names of Kyiv’s streets and squares’, which consisted of eight members and was headed by a historian, Aleksei Rozov.Footnote 69
The commission began work, and on 26 November 1898, an official from the governor-general’s office, Aleksei Merder, supplied it with a more detailed report about the prospective plan to historicize the city’s streetscape. Besides repeating the expert committee’s suggestions about the renaming, the report included an additional page outlining the motivation behind the whole project. On the one hand, it criticized the municipal authorities of Kyiv for being strict and vigilant about proposals to change street names that they had received from ‘the state administration or the lovers of antiquity’. On the other hand, Merder stipulated that the city council was much more lenient towards the proposals to beautify a street name put forward by local houseowners, or when the municipal authorities themselves wanted to commemorate some person (instead of, the report suggested, a more expensive establishment of a scholarship, or extension of a hospital). Merder further argued that the neglect of the city’s past by property owners and municipal authorities, who wanted to rename, for instance, Kozyne Boloto or Chorna Hriaz Streets, even contradicted the attitude of the Moscow and St Petersburg municipal authorities, who had no problems preserving their own similarly ‘undignified’ toponyms like Sobachii (Dog), Vshivaia (Flea), Tarakanovka (Cockroach) or Griaznyi (Muddy).Footnote 70
The suggestion that Kyiv City Council was too willing to follow the requests of the property owners at the expense of the city’s ancient identity was shared by other heritage enthusiasts. For example, on 1 April 1913, the head of the Kyiv Society for the Protection of Monuments of Antiquity and Art, Mikhail Sukovkin, responded to news of a recent petition to rename Reitarska (Reiter) Street after Ivan Susanin by writing a letter to the mayor of Kyiv. Having explained the historical origins of the current street name, he criticized ‘the recently visible desire to erase the memory of Kyiv’s past by renaming its streets, squares, lanes, depriving the city of certain characteristic features peculiar to it alone and turning it into an ordinary European city’. Sukovkin finished the letter with a call to the council ‘to put an end to the rampant desire of the people of Kyiv to destroy the last remains of this dear past’.Footnote 71 Local Russian nationalists were more adamant about their concerns. Thus, Filipp Iasnogurskii contested the very fashion of ‘distorting the names of streets of our ancient city. One sees a desire to destroy ancient historical reminiscences about Kyiv, to cross out the names of streets that have existed since time immemorial and replace them with names consistent neither with the region’s history nor current events’.Footnote 72 As a result, Iasnogurskii was afraid that ‘not only will all the streets in Kyiv lose their historical names, but even the word Kyiv will disappear and [the city] will be known as Berdichev, or under another suitable Jewish name’.Footnote 73
The archival files contain the minutes of only one meeting of the commission, which took place on 23 December 1898. Having reviewed the proposal of the governor-general, its members considered the plan ‘inconvenient for execution’ for four reasons. First, they found that the number of names to be changed was so extensive that it would be too difficult for people to remember and too confusing for the postal and notary services. Second, they considered the new names appealing ‘only for archaeologists but not for the mass of residents’. Third, they criticized some of the suggested names for being too detached from contemporary Russian-language phonetics rules. Finally, they pointed out that according to the recently introduced regulation, all owners had to put a streetlight in front of their houses with the street’s name on it: replacing the lights meant additional expenses for houseowners, while keeping them would hollow out the whole project. In the end, the members of the commission suggested renaming one or two streets from the governor-general’s list and decorating the walls of buildings with special plaques with information about historical landmarks. ‘Such inscriptions’, argued the commission, ‘will serve much better to guide tourists and teach the local inhabitants about our city’s ancient history and topography than simple names of streets and squares’.Footnote 74
Even though the commission did not endorse Dragomirov’s project, nor did it bury it indefinitely, and three years later, in July 1901, the Kyiv governor made a fresh inquiry into its activities. The commission’s head, Rozov, replied that he had recently tried to convene his colleagues, but only one of them showed up, and therefore he asked the Kyiv mayor to appoint new members.Footnote 75 In April 1902, a new commission was established, but it does not seem that it was any more active. One more year later, in June 1903, the Kyiv mayor addressed the new head, Ivan Sikorsky, another prominent Russian nationalist, about the commission’s activities, but received a report only in June 1906.Footnote 76 This document sought to chart a middle ground between the initial project and the negative evaluation by the council members: it recommended renaming 19 streets, commemorating six ancient landmarks with special plaques, and leaving four toponyms for the council’s consideration. In September 1906, council members voted ‘to take the report into consideration’.Footnote 77 This is the last document about the commission’s activity, which allows one to assume that over the eight years, Dragomirov’s project was not realized. Commercialization seems to have been the guiding principle for the municipal authorities when dealing with urban toponymy. Despite the efforts of the governor-general, promoters of tourism and Russian nationalists, the interests of landlords remained the primary concern in deliberations over the naming and renaming of Kyiv’s streets.Footnote 78
Conclusions
The history of late imperial Kyiv reveals that any naming is ‘a difficult matter’.Footnote 79 This article has argued that over the course of the nineteenth century, the city’s streetscape was not an object of passionate ideological discussions: the municipal authorities were not overly zealous in intervening in the city’s toponyms or interested in changing them according to current political considerations. When they did get involved, however, it was done for other reasons, which points to the multifunctionality of urban place names. Even though on the eve of World War I Kyiv’s city plan bore several unmistakably ‘imperial toponyms’ celebrating different dimensions of the empire, most (re)naming discussions among the municipal authorities were related to the city’s ongoing modernization and were initiated by the local landlords seeking to raise the value of their real estate.Footnote 80
In addition to providing basic spatial orientation, partially reflecting the reigning political ideology, commemorating important people or events or serving as a means of commercialization, urban toponymy could also be used to endow a city with a specific temporality. In the case of Kyiv, which since the early nineteenth century was known around the Romanov Empire and outside it as a cradle of Russianness, street names could be used to reaffirm and deepen this image in the age of mass politics and tourism. Urban toponymy thus became an arena where two approaches towards urban development – capitalism and heritage protection – clashed.
These tensions became visible in 1898, when the highest imperial official in the region suggested that the city council members should consider using street names to further develop the image of Kyiv as the ‘mother of Russian cities’. The municipal authorities, however, rejected the idea. This pragmatic attitude towards place names neatly corresponds to Michael Hamm’s evaluation of Kyiv’s urban policies of the time as benevolent towards the affluent, revealing Kyiv’s streetscape not as a reflection of the imperial ideology but as a mirror of the empire-wide tensions between the imperial officials, municipal authorities, and capitalist society.Footnote 81
Funding statement
My work on the article was carried out as part of the project ‘Zootopia: Geschichte derzoologischen Gärten im Romanow-Reich’, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Projektnummer 522242213.
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