20th Century Russia’s History through Settlement Names

Abstract

The article is devoted to research of settlement names as a primary source reflecting the history of the Russian 20th century society. Wide-scale cases of re-nomination testify to the deepness of social and mental transformations in society as a result of the revolution, Stalin’s cult of personality, collectivization and industrialization. Besides political and ideological factors, changes in names of rural communities and villages were entailed to a greater extent by a new perception of the countryside, which was formed under the influence of urbanization process. The article suggests a periodization of oikonymy transformation processes and considers the main reasons and general results of re-nomination.

Keywords

• Russian language
• Baltic languages
• Baltic-Finnish languages
• substrate
• hydronymy
• areal
• Russian northwest
• reverse dictionary
• etymology
• comparative historical method
• oikonymy
• settlement names as a historic source
• 20th century Russia’s history
• character and reasons for re-nomination of oikonyms