Introduction
On 14 January 1893, Emperor Alexander III passed a law ‘On the renaming of cities: Derpt into Iur′ev and Dünaburg/Dinaburg into Dvinsk’.Footnote 1 The renaming of Dünaburg (present-day Daugavpils in Latvia), then a relatively minor district centre in Vitebsk province, sparked little public reaction. In contrast, the decision to rename Derpt or Dorpat (now Tartu in Estonia) – at the time the second-largest city in Livland province and home to one of the empire’s major universities – attracted significant attention from both contemporaries and historians alike.Footnote 2 Although the precise circumstances surrounding the introduction of the law remain unclear – and the answers can probably only be found in the currently inaccessible archives in St Petersburg – the renaming of Dorpat was widely perceived as part of broader efforts to de-Germanize the Baltic provinces and strengthen Russian cultural and political influence in the empire’s borderlands.Footnote 3
Despite scholarly consensus on the renaming of Dorpat as a pivotal event in the region’s nineteenth-century history, very little has been written about how the name change unfolded.Footnote 4 The tendency for the history of place names to pass under the scholarly radar is perhaps indicative of the common misconception, as noted by one local resident at the turn of the twentieth century, of toponymy as a rather ‘dry’ subject.Footnote 5 Yet, as the articles in this special issue persuasively demonstrate, granular studies of the ‘social life’ of place names can provide a window into how the empire functioned.Footnote 6
The story of Dorpat’s renaming offers insights into one aspect of the more multifaceted history of urban toponymy – the legal regulation of (re)naming. Legal perspectives on critical place-name studies have thus far remained relatively marginal and undertheorized, but hold enormous potential as they provide scholars with a well-documented body of sources about the real-world impacts of place names. Building on this, the article elaborates on two dimensions of what we might call a ‘legal history of (re)naming’, beginning with the legal mechanisms by which names are introduced, enacted and enforced. Reuben Rose-Redwood, one of the few scholars who has probed what it means for a name to be made ‘official’, argues that ‘place naming in general, and street naming in particular, can best be understood as a set of performative practices which political authorities seek to monopolize by devising “official” toponymic systems backed up by the force of the law’.Footnote 7 Efforts by state and municipal authorities to officially codify place names serve as attempts ‘to establish the law as the sole arbiter of legitimate practices of toponymic inscription’, assert ultimate authority and achieve ‘toponymic closure’.Footnote 8 Charles W.J. Withers exemplifies this dynamic in his study of how the British Ordnance Survey attempted to claim prerogative over ‘authorizing’ names in the Scottish Highlands.Footnote 9 Similarly, in his examination of place naming and renaming in the Habsburg Empire, Ágoston Berecz notes how ‘officials and specialists in charge of renaming campaigns […] validated the principle that place names belong to the entire nation embodied in the state rather than to the people who use them’.Footnote 10 Nevertheless, while scholarship has focused on contested jurisdiction – who has the right to name – less attention has been paid to the legal nuts and bolts of how (re)naming was implemented and regulated through laws, censorship, policing and legal proceedings.
A second legal dimension to the history of (re)naming considers how inhabitants engage in ‘toponymic resistance’ to challenge the state’s claims to authority over place names.Footnote 11 These actions expose the ‘limits to the sovereign assertion of a monopoly over naming practices, since, whether through unconscious habit or overt resistance, the users of urban space may undercut the legitimacy of officially sanctioned street names’.Footnote 12 Toponymic resistance can take multiple forms. Studies of overt toponymic resistance, defined as ‘behavior that is visible and readily recognized by both targets and observers’, have documented extra-legal protest strategies, such as defacing street plaques, posting homemade signs and altering names on maps, all of which involve some degree of confrontation with the state.Footnote 13 Alongside these conspicuous forms of resistance, scholars have also identified covert acts ‘that are intentional, yet go unnoticed (and, therefore, unpunished)’, such as counter-naming or the use of alternative pronunciations.Footnote 14 Finally, resistance studies scholars have pointed to ‘unwitting resistance’ pertaining to quotidian practices that are ‘not intended as resistance by the actor yet [are] recognised as threatening by the targets and other observers’Footnote 15 and which correspond to what Reuben Rose-Redwood, Derek Alderman and Maoz Azaryahu call ‘unconscious habits’.Footnote 16 A good example of this is found in Allan Pred’s study of nineteenth-century working-class Stockholmers, who ‘footed about’ their city according to an alternative ‘folk geography’. Their reliance on an unofficial language of spatial orientation allowed many inhabitants of Sweden’s capital to live largely outside of the framework of official toponymy.Footnote 17 Despite these various studies of toponymic resistance, existing scholarship has primarily focused on everyday practices and performances, rather than on the formal legal avenues through which residents might contest official naming.Footnote 18 We still lack historical research on how inhabitants understood the legal boundaries of permissible toponymic use, and how they may have appealed to the law in asserting their right to name.
This article thus aims to advance legal perspectives on critical place-name studies in these two directions. On the one hand, it examines how the Romanov Empire used laws to regulate and exert control over urban toponymy in the case of the 1893 renaming of Dorpat to Iur′ev. On the other hand, it explores how local inhabitants drew on their knowledge of the empire’s legal system to identify ambiguities, exploit loopholes and go to court to defend their naming rights. By situating the history of (re)naming in a legal context, I contribute to Boris Mironov’s and Stefan Kirmse’s argument that the Romanov Empire, while not yet governed by the rule of law (pravovoe), functioned as a ‘lawful state’ (pravomernoe) and was taking incremental steps towards this ideal. In this light, the empire appears less removed from the ‘Rechtsstaat ideal’ than many historians have often assumed. At least in the realm of urban toponymy, I argue that recourse to law could play a key role in defining the limits and possibilities of what was allowed and placed checks and balances on (re)naming policy and practice.Footnote 19
The article builds its argument in three parts. First, it outlines the introduction of the Dorpat-to-Iur′ev renaming law, how the law was implemented, what impact the renaming had on different entities within the city, how the law was interpreted and which attempts were made to enforce the law through policing and censorship. Second, it presents an overview of the ambiguities in the meaning of the law and the various forms of toponymic resistance used by inhabitants – name avoidance, parentheticals, doublespeak and counter-naming – to test the boundaries of what was permissible and find ways to circumvent the renaming. The third part examines the formal legal channels available to the city’s inhabitants to engage in overt toponymic resistance and challenge the application of the renaming law, focusing on the case of one local business owner who went to court to defend his use of the city’s former name as a commercial trademark. The article draws on the discussions of the city’s renaming in the major Estonian-, German- and Russian-language newspapers of the 1890s, as well as correspondence from the archives of the governor of Livland, police files and court records, which are crucial to provide deeper insights into discussions taking place behind closed doors and the authorities’ monitoring of alleged infringements of the renaming law.Footnote 20
By (imprecise) order of the emperor: multiple interpretations of the renaming law
The 1893 Dorpat-to-Iur′ev renaming was one of the most high-profile toponymic changes in the late nineteenth-century Romanov Empire. At the time, Dorpat was the second largest city in Livland province, with a population of around 40,000, comprising a majority of Estonian-speakers (71.4 per cent), a German-speaking middle and upper class (16.7 per cent) and only a small proportion of Russian-speakers (6.89 per cent).Footnote 21 The three Baltic provinces had been annexed by the empire in the early eighteenth century, but had retained relative autonomy, with the region’s elite German nobility and landowning class ruling over the Estonian and Latvian peasantry. From the 1880s, however, alongside a shift in the new emperor’s ‘scenario of power’, the government embarked on increasing measures to weaken the German influence and further integrate the Baltic provinces into the empire.Footnote 22 The German language, which had hitherto functioned as the region’s main language of administration and higher education, was one target of these policies. In 1882, a senatorial inspection conducted by Nikolai Manasein in Livland and Kurland recommended the exclusive use of Russian in government offices. Consequently, a law mandating the use of Russian in officialdom in the Baltic provinces was passed in 1885 and extended in 1889 to municipal governments.Footnote 23 The 1893 renaming law can be seen as an extension of these anti-German and Russifying measures. According to interpretations of the Primary Chronicle of Kyivan Rus’, the name Iur′ev dates back to 1030, when the city was founded during the rule of the Grand Prince of Kyiv, Iaroslav the Wise, and called after his baptismal name, Iurii.Footnote 24 The ‘reinstatement’ of this ancient Slavic name was thus a form of imperializing renaming that was intended to strengthen the region’s association with Russian culture.Footnote 25
The announcement of the law sparked a range of reactions across the empire. Some greeted the news positively, viewing it as a model for how renaming could advance the Russian nationalization of the empire. For example, the pro-government Novoe Vremia, one of the empire’s most widely circulated newspapers, applauded the news that there is ‘Derpt [distorted German Dorpat] no more, instead Iur′ev’.Footnote 26 The renaming was presented not only as a vindication of the city’s ‘historical right’ to have its Russian name ‘restored’, but also a necessary corrective to reflect how the university had transformed in recent years from a ‘German university’ to ‘Russian Iur′ev University, a centre of Russian enlightenment and the engine of the Russian state and national idea in the provinces’.Footnote 27 Inspired by the example of the Dorpat-to-Iur′ev renaming, discussions of name changes spread through various regions of the empire. In the ensuing months, authorities in Kherson province contemplated giving Russian names to 136 settlements with German names, while Mennonites in Katerynoslav province reportedly asked the governor to change the names of their settlements from German to Russian.Footnote 28 The Slavophile publicist, Aleksandr Kireev, proposed continuing the renaming ‘in a north-eastern direction, until one comes to the magnificent city that rises up from the swamps – the “Nordic Palmyra”, “St Petersburg”. And when one arrives at that city, one proudly asks oneself: why should a large, well-known city in the Russian Empire have a German name?’Footnote 29 The 1893 law served as a reference point until the last days of the empire; for example, in 1916, the authorities of Bendery in Bessarabia pointed to the precedent set by the Dorpat-to-Iur′ev renaming in their appeal to ‘return’ the city’s earlier Moldovan name, Tiagin or Tegina, instead of the current ‘non-Russian name, awarded by the government of the state currently hostile to Russia’.Footnote 30
Not everyone, however, perceived the renaming favourably. In the international press, the toponym change was widely regarded as a ‘persecution of any kind of Germanness’ and a sign that ‘all areas of public and cultural life are being forcibly Russified’.Footnote 31 Ridiculing the government’s policy towards German names, a local paper from Saxony went so far as to ironically suggest that, while discussions of renaming St Petersburg to Petrograd were already underway, ‘It is a pity that Moscow already has a Russian name. Otherwise, it could have been called “Retrograd”!’Footnote 32 The French press reacted with similar outrage, denouncing the renaming of Dorpat as a ‘grotesque or odious’ move and calling Iur′ev ‘an impossible name [… that] can make us laugh’.Footnote 33 A rebuttal in Novoe Vremia noted that ‘German newspapers strongly attack the returning of old Russian cities to their former names (Derpt to Iur′ev), considering this almost a crime of Russia against the entire German nation’ and pointed to the allegedly much harsher approach of the Prussian authorities to ‘invent’ Germanized names for Polish towns that had no historical basis.Footnote 34
While overt opposition to the renaming was not openly voiced within the Romanov Empire, the city’s inhabitants made several tentative efforts to negotiate the scope of the law’s application. The first attempt came from the municipal authorities. The wording of the law stipulated that the renaming was to be accompanied by ‘a corresponding change in the names of the districts and the institutions and authorities existing in them’.Footnote 35 Yet, in February 1893, the City Board asked the governor of Livland, Mikhail Zinov′ev, whether the introduction of the new name could be confined to the government level, since the law had mentioned the district and ‘the institutions and authorities existing in them’, but had not explicitly stipulated that the renaming also applied to the municipal level. The Board argued that it was ‘deeply concerned about the interests of the population’ and the ‘numerous difficulties and misunderstandings’ inflicted by a change in the city’s name.Footnote 36 The authors also appealed to the prestige of Dorpat University, arguing that changing its name could threaten its ‘honourable scientific reputation’.Footnote 37 They concluded by asking the municipal authorities to be exempt from the law and permitted to continue using the old name.Footnote 38 The request, however, was rejected by the governor, and Iur′ev became the city’s official name at all levels of the administration, the university and military units.Footnote 39 Moreover, the renaming was also extended to the private sphere, and numerous organizations and voluntary societies also had to change their name, including the Dorpat Chess Club, the Dorpat Benevolent Society and the Dorpat Bicycle Club.Footnote 40
Another limited way in which locals initially interpreted the law concerned the use of the new city name in different languages. On 11 February 1893, the Estonian-language newspaper Postimees presented the renaming law as a concern only for those writing in Russian: ‘The Imperial Highness has ordered that Tartu’s name in Russian will no longer be “Дерпт” (Derpt), but rather “Юрьев” (Iur′ev). This is something our readers should also note, especially if they write correspondence in Russian, so that the letter reaches the right place…’.Footnote 41 The newspaper’s use of Cyrillic letters when reporting the issue emphasized that the law was understood as pertaining only to the Russian ‘graphosphere’.Footnote 42 The Russian-language law was interpreted as a de-Germanization measure and as there was no mention of the city’s Estonian name – Tartu – Estonian-speakers presumed that it did not concern them.
Six months later, however, on 10 June 1893, the Ministry of Interior (hereafter MVD) wrote to the governor of Livland to point out that ‘the city should be called Iur′ev in official documents and in Russian language, but that Germans still use the name “Dorpat,” and on this basis […] advertisements, posters etc. are printed in Russian text as Iur′ev, and in German as Dorpat’.Footnote 43 There was no mention in the correspondence about which name was being used by Estonians, revealing how the imperial authorities fixated on de-Germanizing urban toponymy and paid less attention to naming practices in Estonian print culture. Nevertheless, to clarify the situation, the MVD issued a circular specifying that ‘the city of Iur′ev in all cases should be called by this name within the limits of the empire by everyone and in all languages’.Footnote 44 Indeed, this was the message relayed in the Estonian press on 12 August 1893, when Postimees notified readers of this change to the interpretation of the law. The newspaper emphasized that whereas previously the renaming law had been thought to only apply ‘in official correspondence and, in particular, when writing in Russian, while in other languages the old name (Dorpat in German, Tartu in Estonian) could continue to exist’, henceforth the new name ‘must be used in all languages everywhere. That is why we [Estonians] must also write Iur′ev instead of Tartu.’Footnote 45
Overt, covert and unwitting practices of toponymic resistance
Even after the imperial authorities clarified the meaning of the law in the summer of 1893, disregard for the name change abounded. Officials reported that German-speakers were the most reluctant to switch to the new name, with the Iur′ev chief of police reporting to the governor of Livland that ‘I can judge from the information reaching me about conversations among various German circles and societies that the local Germans interpret the law to mean that the name only changed in Russian, and continue to use Dorpat in German language’.Footnote 46 According to the policeman, these activities were ‘interfering with the calming of the minds of society regarding the renaming of the city’.Footnote 47 Even though Estonian-speakers were the majority population in the city, the absence of cases related to languages other than German in the files of the governor of Livland and local police suggests that the renaming was primarily conceived of as a de-Germanizing measure. However, while the police identified a problem with naming practices in the city, they seemed to have been limited in their ability to enforce the use of the new toponym in the private sector, and infringements persisted for many years.
The city’s inhabitants found creative ways to get around the top-down imposition of the new name, which, following Allan Pred, can be seen as ‘in some measure a form of conscious and subconscious resistance to the attempt at ideological domination’.Footnote 48 One overt way to resist the name-change law involved refraining from using the new name at all. For example, on 7 August 1893, the Iur′ev city police informed the governor of Livland that the German language newspaper Neue Dörptsche Zeitung had failed to respond to repeated requests to change their naming practices. Not only did the newspaper continue to use the old name in its title, but when pressed by the police, the editors indicated that they preferred not to mention the city’s name at all in its articles, rather than deign to print the name ‘Jurjew’.Footnote 49 The police report described that when ‘“Dorpat” was crossed out by me and corrected to “Jurjew”, in the evening, there was no announcement either about Dorpat or Jurjew’. A similar incident occurred regarding an announcement about railway timetables: ‘Where previously it was indicated “from Dorpat to St Petersburg” now it is written “from here to St Petersburg, from St Petersburg to here”’.Footnote 50 The editors of Neue Dörptsche Zeitung held out until 1 January 1897, when the Iur′ev police ordered the newspaper to change its title. Even then, however, the paper was renamed Nordlivländische Zeitung to avoid using the city’s new name.
Another form of overt resistance involved placing different language versions of names alongside one another in parenthetical phrases, whereby the official name Iur′ev was used first and then Dorpat was added in parentheses or following a dash. As Nicole Dehé and Yordanka Kavalova explain, ‘Parentheticals typically function as modifiers, additions to or comments on the current talk. They often convey the attitude of the speaker towards the content of the utterance, and/or the degree of speaker endorsement.’Footnote 51 In the case of ‘Iur′ev–Dorpat’, the old city name could still be printed – albeit in second place in the hierarchical relationship between the host and parenthetical clause – under the pretext of being a clarification and/or functional, explanatory addition. For example, parenthetical clauses were used in the titles of publications about the history of the university, which used the formulation: ‘Imperial Iur′ev, formerly Dorpat, University’.Footnote 52 Parenthetical naming was commonplace in the German press. For instance, a search for ‘Jurjew (Dorpat)’ for 1893–1905 yields over 500 results in the Estonian Digital Periodical Database and more than 350 hits in the Latvian National Digital Library.Footnote 53 The perceived widespread misuse of parentheticals was specifically brought to the attention of the Iur′ev police in 1897 concerning an almanac, Kalendar für Nordlivland, published by the H. Laakman printing house ‘in Jurjew’, which adhered to the requirements on its cover, but inside continued to use a hyphenated name for the city ‘Jurjew – Dorpat, estnisch Tartu’.Footnote 54 The fact that these naming practices were not picked up by censors but troubled the police reveals the inconsistencies in how toponymic policy was applied and enforced across different branches of the imperial administration, resonating with Sally West’s argument that ‘censorship is also potentially more flexible than legislation, allowing for changing standards based on personal interpretation of the guidelines’.Footnote 55
A third, more covert, naming practice was to differentiate between toponyms used in public and private contexts. Postcards, as in the example in Figure 1, could use ‘Jurjew’ in the title and the official postal stamp, but the Estonian name ‘Tartu’ in the message. An even starker example of the divide between public- and private-facing names was pointed out by Anton Kotenko, who noted how the local university society of Ukrainian students was officially named the ‘The Musical and Drama Society of Little Russian Students in Iur′ev’, which also appeared on its official seal. On the unofficial letterhead and seal of the society used for internal correspondence between members and other Ukrainian activists, however, they went by the name ‘Society of Ukrainian Students in Dorpat’, thereby committing a double transgression by using two non grata terms in the imperial official rhetoric – ‘Ukrainian’ and ‘Dorpat’.Footnote 56 As these private naming practices were not remarked upon in the files of the governor of Livland or the city police, they perhaps functioned as a more clandestine form of resistance or were simply beyond the capacity of the authorities to monitor.
A postcard bearing the name ‘Jurjew’ on the front. On the reverse side, the official postage marks identify that the card was sent from Iur′ev to Revel′ on 27 July 1909, yet the author used the Estonian names of Tartu in the message and Tallinn in the address. Source: Estonian National Library Digital Archive, http://www.digar.ee/id/nlib-digar:63407.
A fourth form of noncompliance involved using competing, informal counter names to claim and reinscribe the city as part of a German cultural space. With this aim in mind, among German speakers in the Baltic provinces, the alternative signifier ‘die Embachstadt’ – derived from the German name dating back to the Middle Ages for the Emajõgi (Embach) river running through the city centre – gained rapid popularity in the 1890s and 1900s. For instance, this nickname was printed on German-language postcards, which wished the recipients ‘Gruss aus der Embachstadt’ (Greetings from the Embachstadt) (Figure 2). A similar, but less popular, variant was to call the city ‘die Musenstadt’ (City of Muses).Footnote 57 The preference for ‘die Embachstadt’ rather than ‘Jurjew’ is also frequently seen in news reporting and other published texts. Düna Zeitung, one of three major German-language daily newspapers published in Riga in the late imperial period and a mouthpiece for conservative Baltic Germans, popularized the use of ‘die Embachstadt’ in a variety of different contexts.Footnote 58 For example, an 1898 announcement for a charity event promised readers that the ‘popular gingerbread from the Embachstadt will be offered again’, which might ‘tempt you to take part in the raffle’.Footnote 59 News about the celebration of the Fourteenth Livonian Doctor’s Day informed readers that the event would take place in ‘the Embachstadt’ in August 1904.Footnote 60 The nickname was not only used to report on cultural and social events, but also when relating news of the latest political developments. For instance, when describing the revolution of 1905, the paper noted that ‘the departure of students and veterinarians from the Embachstadt continues […] with the closure of the university, professors and other teachers decided to leave the city of the Embachstadt “for a few days”’.Footnote 61 Other newspapers also used the term, albeit with less frequency. For example, in 1900, Rigasche Rundschau reported that the newspaper’s editor, Paul Kröger, president of the Riga Chess Club, had been appointed as an honorary member of ‘the Chess Club of our Embachstadt’.Footnote 62
Postcard ‘Gruss aus der Embachstadt’ (Greetings from the Embach City) c. 1900–04. Source: Tartu City Museum, TM F 902:59. http://www.muis.ee/museaalview/1476900.
The social function of ‘die Embachstadt’ parallels Pred’s working-class Stockholmers’ colourful ‘folk geography’.Footnote 63 The name was almost always accompanied by the definite article ‘the’ (die), a grammatical marker signalling that it was a nickname and geographical signifier rather than a conventional toponym in the form of a proper noun. The frequent use of the possessive pronoun ‘our’ (unser) also hints that the name might have gained traction as a playful way of conveying local patriotic sentiment in the context of broader cultural trends of the time to rediscover and reclaim the region as a Baltic German Heimat. Footnote 64 Pred explains the rise of Stockholm’s ‘folk geography’ as ‘a response to the melting of all that was solid’, prompted by the rapid expansion of nineteenth-century cities and sense of disorientation experienced by working-class urban dwellers dislocated from their rural backgrounds, which prompted them to seek out new languages of spatial orientation.Footnote 65 In the case of the Baltic Germans, a similar argument might be made about the emergence of popular geographical names as one of the ways in which they unwittingly attempted to preserve a feeling of their position, status and privileges in the world amid a modernizing and nationalizing empire.Footnote 66 At the same time, as whimsical and unconscious as these ‘folksy’ naming practices may appear on the surface, the empire’s Russian-language press interpreted them as a deliberate strategy of toponymic resistance, commenting on how the German-language press preferred to write ‘our region, our city’ to avoid mentioning the official name.Footnote 67 Whether intended or not, the nickname ‘die Embachstadt’ conveyed a clear sense of ‘toponymic attachment’ and gave the city a particular German ‘psychological profile’.Footnote 68
Naming goes to court: overt defence of a toponym as a brand name
Another interpretive grey area which emerged in response to the 1893 Dorpat-to-Iur′ev renaming law concerned organizations and businesses that used ‘Dorpat’ in their name. In Iur′ev, there was a ‘Dorpat Hotel’ and, until 1896, a ‘Dorpat Bank’. In late 1896, the newly appointed governor of Livland, Vladimir Surovtsev, was notified that the newspaper Felliner Anzeiger was advertising a performance by the ‘Dorpat Drama Ensemble’.Footnote 69 In 1897, a similarly problematic case was brought to the governor’s attention when the newspaper Pernausche Zeitung announced a forthcoming performance by the ‘Opera Ensemble of the Dorpat Summer Theatre’.Footnote 70 A catalogue for a trade fair held in the city from 27–31 August 1893 included organizations bearing the names ‘Livland Domestic Work Association – Dorpat Boys’ Workshop’, ‘Dorpat Drug and Dye Shop’ and ‘Dorpat Spirit and Yeast Factory’.Footnote 71 By the time of the Livland trade fair of 1898, however, only one exhibitor retained ‘Dorpat’ in its name – the ‘Dorpat Spirit and Yeast Factory’.Footnote 72 The story of how the Spirit and Yeast Factory was able to continue using Dorpat in its trade name presents an extraordinary case, which reveals, on the one hand, the legal ambiguities surrounding renaming laws and, on the other, how imperial subjects used legal mechanisms to challenge the state’s authority over naming.
The Dorpat Spirit and Yeast Factory was founded in 1883 in the city centre on the banks of the river Emajõgi. Its owner, Johann Hans Post (1843–1923), was a local merchant who had previously run the poudrette factory family business. The yeast factory sold its wares throughout the western part of the empire: in December 1896, for instance, it fulfilled orders from as far away as St Petersburg and Warsaw.Footnote 73 Lea Leppik describes the Post family as ‘Juniper Germans’ – Estonians who had become ‘Germanized’ due to their social mobility and use of the German language.Footnote 74 By 1909, Post had achieved significant social standing in the city, becoming a merchant of the first guild, owning a house and a public sauna; upon his death, he left a sizable bequest of 3,000 rubles to the local Alfred Walter German gymnasium.Footnote 75
Post’s altercation with the authorities over naming began on 9 December 1896, when a policeman was sent to his factory with an order requiring the owner to replace the factory’s sign, which allegedly violated the 1893 renaming law.Footnote 76 Post consented to modify the sign to ‘Dorpat Spirit and Yeast Factory in Iur′ev’ (my emphasis) to indicate the geographical provenance of his products in accordance with the official toponymy. However, he refused to remove the adjective ‘Dorpat’ (Dorpater/Derptskii), claiming that it was his factory’s tradename and that changing the name of the business would incur considerable financial expense. Moreover, Post claimed that the factory’s sign had been approved by the local police after the 1893 law was passed.Footnote 77 The controversy surrounding the factory’s sign suggests, as Simon Franklin has argued, that whereas signposts and street signs projected information from the state, the proliferation of trade and shop signs in the nineteenth century represented a reversal of the communicative dynamic of the ‘graphosphere’ and injected ‘bottom-up’, private naming initiatives into streetscapes.Footnote 78 The visibility of the yeast factory sign in the cityscape constituted a prominent public challenge to the ‘official city-text’ (Figure 3).Footnote 79
Photograph of the Dorpat Spirit and Yeast Factory taken by Johannes Pääsuke in June 1914. The bilingual Russian and German sign bearing the former German toponym as an adjective in the factory’s trade name matches the description in the 1896 police report. Source: Estonian National Museum, ERM Fk 349:399, https://opendata.muis.ee/object/659562.
The chief of police informed the governor of Livland on 11 December of Post’s refusal to remove ‘Dorpat’ from the sign. Moreover, he sent the governor samples of advertising placards for ‘Dorpat Yeast Factory’, which had been printed in St Petersburg in June 1896 (Figure 4).Footnote 80 Upon receiving this news, the Livland governor wrote to the governor of St Petersburg to inform him that local merchants were travelling to other cities to obtain permission to print trade signs. The letter requested that the St Petersburg police be instructed to prohibit print shops in the capital from printing advertisements mentioning Derpt or Dorpat.Footnote 81 Simultaneously, the Livland governor also instructed the Iur′ev chief of police to take Post to court if he failed to remove the sign.Footnote 82 Several weeks later, the policeman informed the governor that on 15 January, the magistrates’ court had found Post guilty of violating the 1893 renaming law, fined him 50 rubles and given him three days to remove the sign from his factory.Footnote 83
Trade sign samples from the Dorpat Spirit and Yeast Factory, which were approved by the Chief Administration of Press Affairs in St Petersburg on 21 June 1896. The address printed on the Russian language sign reads ‘from Iur′ev, Lifliandiia province’, revealing how the charges were specifically related to the use of the former city name as an adjective (Dorpater/Derptskiie) in the factory’s trade name. Source: RA, EAA.296.6.4897 (unpaginated).
Reading just this correspondence from the archives of the Livland governor, which ends with the court’s ruling against Post and in favour of the imperial authorities, would lead us to interpret these events as evidence of the success of the Russian nationalizing regime and a testament to the deep penetration of Russification policies into multiple spheres of everyday life, including business activities. The story, however, did not end there. A separate court file from a different archival collection about the continuation of the case recasts the incident in an altogether different light. As it turns out, the decision of the magistrates’ court was not final, and Post was allowed to appeal two weeks later.Footnote 84 With this aim in mind, Post solicited the services of a lawyer, Heinrich (Harry) Johann Alexander von Broecker, who opened his appeal to the magistrates’ court by defending Post’s use of the adjective ‘Dorpat’ for commercial purposes:
These very serious considerations prove that we are not discussing a mere whim of my client, but that we are discussing his commercial interests, because anyone who is slightly familiar with trade knows what a huge impact in the trading world a brand name has, under which an industrial enterprise is known to the public and merchants. And when one changes a trademark, lots of time passes before buyers and merchants are persuaded that the new trademark is the same as the old one, which was familiar to them, and that this new trademark does not belong to an unfair competitor who tries to deceive the clients of a different company. Except for these purely practical considerations, which definitely have to be paid significant attention to, a whole number of legal arguments point to the clear wrongness and unlawfulness (nezakonnost′) of the police demands.Footnote 85
Broecker then proceeded to make two legal arguments in Post’s defence. First, he referred to the law of 14 January 1893 about the renaming of Dorpat to Iur′ev, which contained the statement that ‘from now on Dorpat will officially be renamed into Iur′ev’, but did not say anything about an absolute prohibition on using the word Dorpat in all contexts.Footnote 86 Second, Broecker cited the law on the protection of trademarks of 26 February 1896, according to which the placement of trade signs was to be left to the discretion of manufacturers and merchants, except for trade signs about which some special rules existed.Footnote 87 Paragraph 3 of this law stipulated that ‘it is prohibited to use trade signs with inscriptions and images that are contrary to public order, morality, or decency, and inscriptions and images which are deliberately false or intend to mislead customers’.Footnote 88 As the inscription on Post’s sign ‘Dorpat Spirit and Yeast Factory’ did not violate this prohibition, there was no evidence of ‘unlawfulness’. Broecker reasoned that ‘If one can have a sign in Iur′ev with an inscription “English”, “Japanese”, or “Moscow” shop, then I can have a sign with an inscription “Dorpat Spirit and Yeast Factory in Iur′ev”’.Footnote 89
On 6 February 1897, the case once again went before the magistrate. The court found Broecker’s explanation that Dorpat was a commercial trademark to be ‘groundless’ and complained that the lawyer was contradicting his own statement, since Paragraph 4 of the 1896 law stated that if a manufacturer or merchant wanted to have an exclusive right to use a trademark, permission had to be obtained from the Department of Trade and Manufacturing at the Ministry of Finance, which Post had not done.Footnote 90 Moreover, the magistrate found the combination of the two names illogical ‘as everyone already knows that Dorpat is renamed into Iur′ev’. Post was reprimanded for noncompliance with the ‘lawful demands’ (zakonnye trebovaniia) of the police, fined 50 rubles, or sentenced to three weeks of arrest if unable to pay, and ordered to remove and destroy the sign within three days.Footnote 91
On 18 February, Post and Broecker appealed against the ruling for a third time. Broecker considered the court’s decision to be ‘wrong’ (nepravil′noe), as ‘According to Article 47 of the Digest of Laws Vol. 1 Part 1, “The Russian Empire is governed by the solid foundations of positive laws”, and thus, according to Article 29 of the Charter of Punishments imposed by justices of the peace, it “prosecutes for the failure to comply with legal orders, demands, or decrees of governmental authorities”’.Footnote 92 Thus, reasoned Broecker, ‘Since we live in a lawful state, which is governed on the firm foundations of positive laws, everything should be considered permissible that is not positively forbidden.’Footnote 93 This time, Broecker’s appeal to lawfulness and insistence on the governing principles of positive laws, inspired by European legal systems which prioritized ‘consistency, predictability, and independence’, resonated with the magistrate.Footnote 94 In the absence of positive laws prohibiting the sign because of its contents or a law that would give the police the right to arbitrarily intervene in private affairs of the public without lawful reason, the judge threw the case out and dismissed all charges.
Zooming out, the story of the yeast factory illuminates several aspects of the legal regulation of naming practices in the Romanov Empire. First, it provides a stark example of toponymic commodification and of how, in an era of a competitive capitalist spirit at the turn of the twentieth century, place names were converted into economic capital.Footnote 95 In the decade since the factory’s founding, Post claimed that the adjective ‘Dorpat’ had become a signifier not only of his products’ geographical provenance but also a renowned marker of their quality and reputability.
Second, there is no way of knowing whether Post was purely motivated by business interests or whether he was using commercial arguments as a pretext for other, more ideological forms of toponymic resistance. If his actions did indeed have an underlying political meaning, the case could potentially reveal how the business sphere – specifically issues surrounding entrepreneurial rights and the law on the protection of trademarks – provided opportunities to overtly challenge the state’s authority over naming at a time when other avenues for toponymic resistance on cultural grounds were limited.Footnote 96 Reading between the lines, the public response to the case suggests that the political meaning was apparent: Post’s court proceedings gained considerable media traction in the German-language press, the news most likely appealing to Baltic Germans as a thrilling success story of a legal battle against a law which, behind closed doors, was widely perceived as restrictive.Footnote 97
Finally, Post’s successful overturning of the charges against him can be situated in the context of broader debates about lawfulness in the Romanov Empire. As Samuel Kucherov argued, ‘lawyers were not only the first ones to raise their voices in free speech; they were, for a long time, the only ones permitted to do so in Russia’.Footnote 98 Post’s vindication in court also chimes with Stefan Kirmse’s assertion that while ‘the launch of a civil lawsuit […] may not have been everyday phenomena, these forms of legal activity are noteworthy and striking in the context of the Russian Empire, where state power has often been viewed as arbitrary and where popular attitudes towards state institutions have been framed in terms of resistance or indifference’.Footnote 99 The case of the Dorpat Spirit and Yeast Factory, thus, is a clear example of how the legal system could, at least partially, function as a successful mechanism by which the empire’s inhabitants challenged the state.
Conclusions
The case of the 1893 renaming of Dorpat to Iur′ev underscores the complex ‘social life’ of urban toponymy and demonstrates the underutilized potential of archival-based studies of (re)naming processes to open a vista on various aspects of life in the empire. Examining both the implementation and reception of the renaming law brings to light a more complex story that goes beyond it being just a one-off event and a top-down instrument of the empire’s de-Germanization and Russification policies. Instead, I have argued that the renaming of the city operated within the wider system of a lawful empire. Locals, particularly its German-speaking inhabitants, creatively exploited ambiguities in the wording of the law and engaged in various practices of overt, covert and unwitting toponymic resistance. They trod a careful line to stay within the limits of what they interpreted as being legally permissible within the context of the renaming law and censorship regulations. These resistance practices ranged from avoiding using the city name altogether in print and parenthetically inserting the former name alongside the new, to utilizing alternate names in private or informal contexts, and adopting ‘folksy’ counter names, such as ‘die Embachstadt’, to evoke a sense of place attachment in a world that might have appeared to some as increasingly alienating.
Despite the provincial government’s and local police’s active monitoring of toponymic resistance going on in the city, they were limited in their ability to enforce naming practices. They intervened in the activities of newspaper editorial offices, printing houses, local businesses, clubs, and voluntary associations, since these were the most visible forms of allegedly ‘illegal’ naming in the cityscape. As Jeffrey Brooks notes, ‘the city, with its shop signs and street names, window displays and price tags, newspapers and kiosks, announcements and bookstalls exhibited the written word to all who walked its streets’.Footnote 100 Yet, it was far beyond their capabilities to enforce the use of a singular, official name across all languages and private spheres of life, thereby exposing the limited powers of the state to bring about ‘toponymic closure’ or to have the final say on ‘authorizing’ naming.
Finally, the remarkable case of the Dorpat Spirit and Yeast Factory reveals how, on the one hand, the Romanov Empire’s de-Germanizing policies of the 1890s extended far beyond mere cultural and political Russification in the strict sense of mandating Russian language in the administration and education in the region, but also spilled over to impact on business activities, right down to the level of tradenames. On the other hand, Post’s and Broecker’s recourse to laws protecting trademarks and entrepreneurial autonomy, and their references to the foundational principles of positive law to argue for the right to retain the adjectival form of the previous city name in the factory name, ultimately proved more successful than other lines of counter argumentation, such as those put forth by the City Board. This court case thus reveals how business could provide a successful platform for embarking on overt toponymic resistance in an era when opportunities for challenging renaming laws on other legal grounds were more limited.
Acknowledgments
I thank all the participants of the workshop ‘Imperial Mirrors: Streetscapes of the Romanov Empire, 1860s–1917’ held at the Nordost-Institut in April 2024, the Urban History reviewers, Marju Luts-Sootak and Azniv Tadevosyan, who all provided valuable feedback to help improve the text.
Funding statement
This work was supported by the Estonian Research Council grant PSG1042.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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