Bordering Time in the Cityscape. Toponymic Changes as Temporal Boundary-Making: Street Renaming in Leningrad/St. Petersburg

Abstract

Place renaming is an archetypical feature of regime change in (post-)Soviet Russia. In the case of Leningrad / St. Petersburg it is interpreted here as an attempt at temporal boundary-making: in renaming streets, local elites tried to erect a symbolic time border between ‘old’ and ‘new’. Since post-Soviet renaming mostly amounted to returning to places the maiden names they bore in the imperial period, toponymic changes since the perestroika did not imply a radically new semiotic mapping of the cityscape. In choosing memory landmarks for cultural self-identification that refer to an idealised European past, place-namers also tried to establish normative boundaries to situate St. Petersburg in a desired geopolitical space. Like other discursive constructions, these renaming processes are not free of contradictions however.