Goodbye Lenin, Hello St. Peter

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin must be turning over in his mausoleum. He was never one for personality cults, but to strip his name from the city that gave birth to the communist revolution is the ultimate repudiation of what he stood for. That is precisely what the residents of Leningrad resolved to do last week. According to preliminary results of a referendum organized by the reformist city council, 55% voted to restore the town's old name of St. Petersburg.

Actually, that should be Sankt-Peterburg, which is the Dutch name Peter the Great gave the city when he founded it in 1703 on a swamp on the shore of the Gulf of Finland. Choosing a European version of his patron saint's name to underscore his cosmopolitan ambitions, Peter built the elegant port as a window to the West, intending to yank his fusty country toward the future. When the Russians went to war against Germany in 1914, the city's Teutonic appellation suddenly became politically incorrect. Emperor Nicholas II's solution was to Russify the name, making it Petrograd. So it remained until 1924, when Lenin died, prompting the Bolshevik government to rechristen the city in his honor. It was there, after all, that worker revolts paved the way for the communist uprising.

The communist establishment adamantly opposes another name swap. Reluctant to rally behind the widely discredited Lenin, apparatchiks have focused their argument on the dubious notion that a rechristening would dishonor the martyrs of the brutal siege of Leningrad, in which the city withstood a Nazi blockade for 900 days without falling. Functionaries also complain that altering the city's name on street signs, documents and official insignia would cost 150 million rubles.

The voters want Lenin excised, nonetheless, in the well-established Soviet tradition of exorcising demons of the past by rewriting place names. The city of Lugansk has flip-flopped titles four times: Stalin made it Voroshilovgrad, after Marshal Kliment Voroshilov; Khrushchev restored the original name in his anti-Stalin campaign; his successors -- deciding that purge had gone too far -- changed it back to Voroshilovgrad; and finally (well, at least for now), the city is called Lugansk again.

Still, Leningraders may not get their wish. The Russian parliament must approve the change, and the Supreme Soviet insists that it will have the last word, in this case nyet. Come what may, nothing is likely to change the way the city's dwellers refer to their hometown. They have always called it, simply and affectionately, Peter.