Administrative-Territorial Changes and Renaming of Kalmykia’s Rural Settlements in 1957–1977: the Aspect of Governance and Management

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to study the administrative and territorial changes and the process of renaming settlements in Kalmykia in the period from 1957 to 1977 from the standpoint of the public management aspect (reflected in regulatory and legal acts, documents of party bodies, in official correspondence, minutes of meetings). Methods and materials: Published legal and regulatory acts of Kalmykia for the specified period, collections of documents, data of the National Archive of the Republic of Kalmykia were used as input for the article. Results and conclusions: Since the restoration of autonomy in 1957 and before the adoption of the new Constitution of the USSR in 1977, the administrative and territorial division of Kalmykia had undergone a number of fundamental changes. A kind of territorial rehabilitation of the Republic, though maybe incomplete, took place. One of the aspects of this process was renaming of some settlements through restoring to them their former national names. Administrative and territorial changes were also conditioned by management reforms in the USSR in the late 1950s – the first half of the 1960s. (consolidation and unbundling of rural areas), as well as by the development needs of new branches of agriculture.

Keywords

• administrative-territorial division
• kalmyk autonomous oblast
• kalmyk assr
• renaming of settlements
• toponymy