Introduction
In 1899, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, the imperial authorities initiated an extensive campaign to celebrate the anniversary, which was intended to show the poet as a loyal subject of the Romanov Empire, and as a religious figure.Footnote 1 The administration of the western borderlands also had to participate in this initiative. In Vilnius (Vil'na in Russian), a bust of Pushkin and a square were erected, and in Hrodna (Grodna in Russian) a street was named after the poet.Footnote 2 The governor of Kaunas (Kovna in Russian), Sergei Sukhodol'skii (1896–99), was also involved in the celebrations. He addressed the Kaunas City Council with a proposal to commemorate the forthcoming centenary of the poet’s birth. The municipal authorities, however, decided to use the opportunity to commemorate the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. The council’s commission on the commemoration of Pushkin proposed that Garnizonnaia (Garrison) Street, where the Polish poet lived for a time, should be named after him, and that Inzhenernaia (Engineering) Street, which intersected with it, should be named after Pushkin. The Kaunas Province Commission for Urban Affairs saw this initiative by the council to commemorate the anniversary of Mickiewicz as overstepping its authority. The dispute reached the Senate in St Petersburg, which rejected the Kaunas council’s complaint, but at the same time the municipal authorities did not rename the street after Pushkin. When the political regime in the empire became more liberal in 1905, the Kaunas municipal authorities fulfilled both their own idea (a street was named after Mickiewicz, the ‘genius of Polish poetry’) and the wish of the tsarist administration (a street was renamed after Pushkin).Footnote 3 This episode is telling in many ways. First of all, it shows how street names had become an important sphere in the struggle for the appropriation of urban landscape in the empire’s western borderlands. Secondly, it shows, on the one hand, the tsarist government’s attempts to monopolize naming practices in urban space but also, on the other hand, how local communities (in particular municipalities) had some agency in this area, especially in the late imperial period.
In this article, I will first briefly discuss the policy of the tsarist government at a higher level, in changing and adjusting the names of the region, as well as the names of cities. Secondly, this article focuses on the naming and renaming practices of the imperial government and municipal authorities in the cityscapes of territories of present-day Lithuania and Belarus in the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. I will try to find out whether the imperial authorities applied the same practices across different scales regarding names for the region, cities and streets. Although examples will be drawn from across this region, the main focus will be on Vilnius, the historical capital of Lithuania.
The struggle for the symbolic control of space in the western borderlands of the Romanov Empire is not a new topic, but so far scholars have been mainly interested in phenomena attributable to networks of social communication that operate in a ‘high symbolic voltage’ (different ceremonies, the erection of monuments or churches), i.e. those that require a high degree of attentiveness.Footnote 4 Meanwhile, those networks of social communication that operate with a low degree of attentiveness to the ideological messages (e.g. names of streets, cities, regions) are sometimes called ‘low-voltage’ and have received less attention.Footnote 5 This article not only partially fills this gap, but also connects recent developments of the ‘imperial turn’ in the studies of the Romanov state with critical place-name studies. The ‘imperial turn’ is important because of its focus on the analysis of empire as a specific polity, the uncovering of the mental maps that dominated Russian discourse and the problematization of the phenomenon of Russification. Most historians would agree that until around the mid-nineteenth century, many borderlands still contained considerable elements of indirect rule, while in the late imperial period the Romanov Empire took on many features of a nationalizing (or inconsistently nationalizing) state.Footnote 6 One of the most important triggers for this shift was the ‘Polish uprising’ of 1863–64, which sought to re-establish Poland–Lithuania and which provoked the so-called Russification. It was after this uprising that the Poles became the number one enemy of the empire, which is also very important for the topic of this article. At the same time, we know from critical place-name studies that in the colonial practices of maritime empires (France, Great Britain) the priority given to indirect rule or assimilationist politics also led to different naming strategies of town and cityscapes. In the first case, local histories and symbols were given a lot of space, while in the second case, the priority was given to the commemoration of the colonizers.Footnote 7 In this article, I will examine whether the shift in tsarist nationality policy in the second half of the nineteenth century also led to new strategies for (re)naming cityscapes.
As is common practice in critical place-name studies, I do not look at street names as a means of spatial orientation, but as a commemorative instrument through which a dominant ideology is installed in society.Footnote 8 According to Maoz Azaryahu, ‘in particular, they introduce an official version of history into networks of social communication’.Footnote 9 In this article, I focus on three main dimensions. First, identifying the actors or institutions that had the power to name or rename cityscapes (the role of the local tsarist administration, local and central government) is crucial. Particular attention will be paid to the Vilnius municipal authorities, in order to find out at what point in time they had a greater influence in changing the names of streets. Second, I will look at the identity politics encoded in this process (how did they reflect the Russian mental map, the normative concept of history, the literary canon?). Thus, I examine the cityscape as a powerful semiotic text embedded in larger discourses of empire and nation. Third, I will analyse how non-dominant ethnic groups perceived the changes (did they protest, did they use the old names, did they try to legitimize their own names through municipal institutions?). Special attention will be paid here to various unsuccessful attempts by the Polish community in Vilnius to legitimize street names named after Polish cultural figures.
A historian researching the tsarist period cannot use the ethnographic method, interviews or participant observation. In the case of Vilnius, there is also a lack of visual material related to street names. Therefore, the main sources are the collections of the municipal institutions and executive authorities, which often only recorded decisions and not debates. The periodical press and other publications can help to reconstruct the public reaction to ‘semiotic revolutions’.Footnote 10
In this article, I argue that the tsarist authorities used similar practices in cities in Lithuania and Belarus as in other regions of the empire, in particular to ensure that street names reflected the broad geography of the Russian Empire. At the same time, there were also specific features in this region: there are almost no names of towns from regions with weaker ties to the empire (Poland, Finland, the Baltic provinces); there was a systematic destruction of old historical names, especially those with Catholic connotations; and in spite of the official historical concept of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as a Russo-Lithuanian state, there were hardly any names associated with the grand duchy in the street names. On the other hand, with the liberalization of the imperial regime, the municipal authorities in Vilnius embarked on many initiatives to commemorate Polish writers and other cultural figures, but most of these attempts failed. The tsarist authorities not only tried to reduce the economic and cultural influence of the Poles, but also to cleanse public space of Polish symbols.
Historical Lithuania turns into Western Russia
After the partitions in the late eighteenth century, the Russian authorities referred to the former lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as ‘provinces annexed from Poland’, but later historical Lithuania and Right Bank Ukraine came to be referred to as ‘Western Rus'/Russia’ or ‘the Western Region’. In nineteenth-century Russian discourse, especially from the 1830s, the historical lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were perceived as Russian ‘national territory’. The Russian ruling and intellectual elite used historical and ethnographic arguments to prove that the historical lands of Lithuania were part of Russian ‘national territory’.Footnote 11
In the 1830s, the minister of education Sergei Uvarov and the historian Nikolai Ustrialov developed the concept that the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was just another Rus' (in addition to Muscovy).Footnote 12 This concept became the official interpretation of the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and, as recent research by Olga Mastianica shows, had a normative force in historical writings until the end of the empire.Footnote 13 At more or less the same time, in the mid-nineteenth century, ethnographers and officials started to argue that most of the population of this region were Russian (according to the concept of the tripartite Russian nation, Belarusians and Ukrainians (Little Russians (Malorossy)) were an integral part of the Russian nation).Footnote 14
Although the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as Western Russia/Rus' took on a normative character, and in the late imperial period various Russian public figures repeatedly called for more attention to be paid to its history in school curricula, there were as many voices in opposition. Some local Russian teachers erred on the side of caution and chose not to place too much emphasis on local history, as they feared that pupils might start to think this was some kind of separate land from the rest of Russia.Footnote 15
Thus, the name of the region was changed very radically. Gone was the name Lithuania, a reminder of the previous statehood, and in its place was a name that reflected the historical and national connection of the region with Russia. This ‘semiotic revolution’ was not difficult for the Russian ruling and intellectual elite. Crucially, this change in the name of the region hardly penetrated the everyday life of the local population. In this sense, the naming and renaming of city names was much more sensitive.
Names of cities
While in Russian discourse the historical lands of Lithuania became Western Rus', i.e. Russian ‘national territory’, the names of towns or cities were rarely changed.Footnote 16 In this region, as far as is known, imperial officials did not entertain any plans to change the names of the larger cities.Footnote 17 This may sound paradoxical, especially in view of some rather drastic changes in the Baltic provinces, which were almost never considered Russian ‘national territory’. There, for example, Dorpat was renamed Iur'ev in 1893.Footnote 18 However, the rare attempts to change city names in Lithuania appear at first glance to have been the result of the inconsistent policy that characterized the imperial government’s control of symbolic space. According to the official version, most place names in this region were of Russian origin. The only problem, according to some government officials, was that some of them had been ‘polonized’ in the past. This topic became particularly relevant in the second half of the nineteenth century when officials of the Vilnius Education District criticized a map published by the Il'in cartographical publishing firm in St Petersburg, where ‘the old Russian Orthodox historical homesteads and villages are written in Russian and in Cyrillic but with Polish endings’.Footnote 19 The Polish endings of toponyms sent a signal that the place name, and thus the region, was Polish. Dropping ‘Polish word endings’ had the same symbolic meaning as giving completely new names.
Although in the second half of the nineteenth century the Polish form Vil'no (Wilno in Polish) became less frequent in official documentation and publications, and the Russian form Vil'na became more frequent, there were still some exceptions to this trend. In St Petersburg in 1903, there was concern that some official institutions, such as the Ministry of Transport and Communications, used the Polish rather than the Russian name for the ‘capital’ of the Northwestern Region. Russian publicists claimed that the city’s name (Vil'na) was of Russian origin. It came from the River Vilija or Vil'na, which flows through the city, because Lithuanians called it something else, the Neris. This etymological theory stated that the name of the river was derived from a ‘southern Russian dialect’ very similar to the Belarusian word vil'na, for ‘free’.Footnote 20
Adjusting city names into different languages, as in the case of Vilnius, or complete changes (e.g. Novoaleksandrovsk) had little impact on the oikonyms used by non-dominant groups. Changing the ending of the name of Vilnius had no effect on the way non-Russians referred to the city. They all had their own similar-sounding city names (Vilnius, Wilno, Vilnia, Vilne), which were not influenced by official rhetoric. The name Novoaleksandrovsk did not catch on. The old name of the town, Zarasai, continued to be used in the Lithuanian press.Footnote 21
Reflections of the geography, history and Russian culture of the empire in Vilnius’ street names
Systematic changes of street names began during the suppression of the 1863–64 uprising. At that time, the tsarist authorities, in particular the new governor-general Mikhail Murav'ev (1863–65) and several of his successors (Konstantin Kaufman (1865–66) and Eduard Baranov (1866–68)), pursued a policy of ‘Russification of the land’, as it was often called at the time. The main aim of this policy was to reduce the influence of Poles, and to increase the influence of Russians. This was achieved through repressive measures against participants in the uprising, as well as through a systematic policy of reducing the amount of land owned by Poles, limiting the role of the Catholic church, which was considered to be a Polish religion and prohibiting Poles from working as teachers or civil servants.
The tsarist authorities were also concerned about the appropriation of the cultural landscape. In 1868, an anonymous author claimed in the local official newspaper Vilenskii vestnik that Vilnius was probably more Russian than Moscow.Footnote 22 Russian guidebooks published in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries portrayed Vilnius as an important centre of Orthodoxy.Footnote 23 Behind such proclamations, however, there were often serious doubts about the Russianness of Vilnius. Here one has to agree with Mikhail Dolbilov, who argued that Vilnius’ Russian past could not compete with Kyiv, another city in the western borderlands of the empire.Footnote 24 Another measure taken by the Russian government after the 1863–64 uprising was the elimination of Polish from public life. Murav'ev, the governor-general of Vilnius, banned all Polish signs and banners. The Polish language was to be replaced by Russian. In public places, announcements appeared saying ‘It is forbidden to speak Polish.’
In 1864, having received information about street names in Vilnius, Murav'ev ‘ordered the preparation of a historical study [on this subject] and to restore the names of the streets that existed at the time of the Russian domination of the region’.Footnote 25 Thus, Murav'ev was following what had by then become the normative concept of the history of the region, which was that the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a Russian state dominated by the Poles for the last few hundred years. At Murav'ev’s initiative, the names of several ‘Catholic’ streets were removed (Dominican Street and Lane (pereulok), Missionary and Franciscan), while in other places, Orthodox streets appeared next to the Orthodox churches (e.g. Prechistenskaia, Blagoveshchenskaia and others). This is an interesting case, because in addition to its symbolic function (to reinforce the image of Vilnius as an Orthodox city), the renaming also had a utilitarian function (to show where a particular Orthodox church was). At that time, there was only one street name that reflected the geography of the empire, Moscow Lane. Other imperial names appeared alongside them, such as Gubernatorskaia (Governor’s) Street.Footnote 26 These changes to street names were made by the governor-general of Vilnius without any consultation with the local authorities. Even in 1868, Vilnius City Council did not have a city plan with the new street names that had been prepared on Murav'ev’s instructions.Footnote 27
In the following years, the number of imperial reflections in Vilnius city street names significantly increased. Imperial reflections are names that refer to the Russian ruling elite, including the military, its culture, and history. The distinction between imperial and local is not as straightforward as, for example, in the case of Liona Bigon’s description of the assimilationist policy in French Dakar,Footnote 28 because, as we have seen, the normative conception of history in the Russian Empire also incorporated episodes of local history, and the concept of the core of the empire and its borderlands was unstable.
The expansion of the city’s boundaries to incorporate the suburbs played a major part in the appearance of many new imperial reflections in the streets. In the late 1860s, the local administration started to draw up a new plan for Vilnius, but due to various circumstances, this took a long time and was only approved by the tsar in 1875. In the future, changes to the plan had to be initiated by Vilnius City Council, a local government body, but its decisions had to be approved by the minister of internal affairs.
As a result of this process, walking around late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Vilnius, one could feel as if one was travelling through the vast Russian Empire, especially its inner provinces. Outside the Old Town of Vilnius, in the newly developed districts, especially in the district called New city (Novyi gorod in Russian) streets were named after Arkhangel'sk, Arzamas, Petersburg, Petrozavodsk, Rostov, Riazan', Saratov, Simbirsk, Suzdal', Tambov, Tver', and Iaroslavl', etc. Streets in Vilnius were also named after other cities in the borderlands of the empire, such as Bukhara, Kazan', Sevastopol', Kherson, Khiva and others (Figure 1). Kavkazskaia (Caucasian) Street can also be included in this group. A couple of streets (Warsaw and Lomża) were reminiscent of the Kingdom of Poland.
Map of major streets with imperial names in pre-World War I Vilnius by Anton Kotenko and Louis Le Douarin, based on ‘Alfavitnyi ukazetel' ulits i pereulkov g. Vil'ny’, Vsia Vil'na: adresnaia i spravochnaia kniga goroda Vil'ny (Vilnius, 1914), 97–102, and on the base map from A. Vinogradov, Putevoditel' po gorodu Vil'ne i ego okrestnostiam (Vilnius, 1904).
Another reflection of the empire in Vilnius’ streetscapes was the commemoration of individuals, such as the military commander Alexander Suvorov. In 1900, the city council decided to name one street after him.Footnote 29 In 1912, the anniversary of the ‘Fatherland War’ of 1812 was commemorated throughout the Romanov Empire by the authorities and Russian society. A number of publications on the subject also appeared in Vilnius. The local Russian narrative of the ‘Fatherland War’ had local overtones: it not only recalled the heroic struggle against the invaders, but also had anti-Polish connotations. Local Russian activists used the war of 1812 narrative to compromise Polish separatist aspirations.Footnote 30 In 1912, Vilnius City Council decided to name one of the city’s streets after Mikhail Kutuzov, the commander-in-chief of the Russian military forces in that war.Footnote 31 However, this was delayed, and by 1914 Kutuzov’s name was not yet on the list of streets in Vilnius.
In addition to the military heroes of Russia, the list of Vilnius’ street names also included the names of Russian cultural figures. A street named after Nikolai Gogol appeared in the Zverinets (now Žvėrynas) district, which was made part of the city at the beginning of the twentieth century, at a time when the 50th anniversary of his death was being commemorated throughout the tsarist empire.Footnote 32 At the end of the nineteenth century, Pushkin Square was created in Vilnius, with a bust of the poet.
The names of some streets in the Old Town were no longer transliterated by tsarist officials, as before, but were translated into Russian. In 1864, the list of streets still included Ostrobramskaia (in Polish Ostra brama, literally ‘sharp gate’) Street, while in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries we already find Ostrovorotnaia (in Russian Ostrye vorota).
The last attempt to change the names of streets in the tsarist period probably dates from the outbreak of the war in 1914, when unidentified persons, probably local Russians, initiated a change in the names of several streets in the city through the governor of Vilnius: Nemetskaia (German) Street was to be renamed Frantsuzkaia (French) or Tsentral'naia (Central), and Vengerskaia (Hungarian) Lane and the Springs were to be renamed Bel'giiskaia (Belgium) Lane and the Springs. In this way, the tsarist authorities sought to erase all toponyms associated with the enemy, especially the Germans. The Vilnius City Welfare Commission, which was tasked by the city council with making decisions, refused to change the name of Nemetskaia Street, and suggested replacing Hungarian urbonyms with the historical name of Vingri.Footnote 33
Similar processes took place in other cities and towns in the Northwestern Region. In the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, for example, the number of imperial reflections in the centres of the provinces in Hrodna and Minsk increased significantly. As in Vilnius, the changes in these Belarusian urban centres were caused by both rapid urban development (Minsk had 42 streets in 1852, and 305 in 1911) and the policy of Russification. In 1866, the tsarist government changed a number of street names in Minsk in particular, where streets were renamed after Moscow, later New Moscow, Samara, Ufa and Viaz'ma; and in Hrodna after St Petersburg and Viatka, while others were named after Orthodox churches. In Minsk, Sobornaia Street was named after the Petropavlovskaia Orthodox Church. Another street was named Ekaterinovskaia after the Orthodox church there dedicated to the Empress Catherine II of Russia. Russian statesmen and cultural figures were not forgotten either. In Hrodna, streets were named after the military commanders Mikhail Kutuzov and Sergei Suvorov and the writer Pushkin, and in Minsk after Alexander (in honour of Alexander I), Zakhary Korneev (the first governor of Minsk (1796–1806)), and General Mikhail Skobolev (a participant in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78).Footnote 34 The same logic was followed by the local administration in Kaunas. In Panevėžys, a district centre, Moscow and Vladimir appeared in the list of newly designed streets, although most new street names did not have clear ideological connotations.Footnote 35 Local society met this ‘semiotic revolution’ with hostility.
Efforts by members of the Vilnius City Council and the public to give non-Russian names to cityscapes
It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that local authorities started to play a more active role in naming or renaming townscapes. At the very end of the nineteenth century, out of 54 elected members in the Vilnius City Council, only 8 were Russians, and another 5 were Jews (both they and 2 Russians were appointed by the governor). In 1905, the elections were initially boycotted by Jews, so that of the 65 new members of the council, as many as 56 were Poles.Footnote 36 That year, the council elected Michał Węsławski, a Pole, as the head (president) of Vilnius city, a position he held until 1917. The 1892 Municipal Statute severely restricted the rights of local government. The governor was not only empowered to supervise the activities of the council, the legality of council resolutions and the expediency of resolutions in the national interest, but also to approve all council resolutions, and the elected members of the council and of the board, and the president was obliged to inform the governor of the agenda of the council’s meetings, etc., in advance. In 1899, the same council set up a commission to revise the 1875 city plan.Footnote 37 It is possible that they planned to introduce at least a few Polish names in the city. If such hopes did exist, they were only partially fulfilled.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Vilnius City Council decided, and the emperor agreed, that the suburb of Žvėrynas (in Russian Zverinets) should be part of Vilnius. The municipal authorities, the Vilnius City Administration and the City Improvement Commission drew up and the city council approved a plan for the district, together with street names. In choosing the street names, these authorities wanted them to reflect ‘local and other topographical features’.Footnote 38 Some ‘imperial’ street names disappeared from the list of streets in the suburb, such as the names of Murav'ev and Alexander Pushkin.Footnote 39 This was not, of course, an anti-imperial action, but simply a practical step to ensure that there was not more than one street in the city with the same name. At the same time, the local municipality also legalized two names which, in the context of Vilnius’ cityscape of the tsarist period, departed from usual naming practices of the time. These were the streets named after the Polish composer Stanislaw Moniuszko and the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas. As we shall see below, all other attempts by Vilnius residents to name a street after a Polish cultural figure failed. The year 1902 may have been a success because of the efforts of the Vilnius municipal authorities to commemorate the memory of Murav'ev in the late 1890s.Footnote 40 It might be that Moniuszko’s street was given as a favour to the Poles of Vilnius for the loyalty they had just demonstrated. Meanwhile, the emergence of Gediminas Street should not be attributed to Lithuanian efforts, or to the local authority’s tribute to the Lithuanian historical narrative in which Gediminas was one of the central figures in the national pantheon.
The naming of a street after Gediminas, the founder of the city, may have occurred, as mentioned above, according to the normative concept of history at that time, whereby the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a Russian state just like Muscovy. Russian publicists claimed that in Gediminas’ time half the townspeople were Russian, the ‘state language’ was Russian and the wives of this ruler were Russian.Footnote 41 In 1899, the local official newspaper Vilenskii vestnik published an article by an anonymous author proposing a radical reorganization of the city’s street names. The author felt that Vilnius’ street names contained too much imperial geography and not enough history (see Figure 1). A proposal was made to name the streets of Vilnius not only after the many Russian emperors (Peter I, Catherine II, Alexander I, Nikolai I) or Russian figures connected with the history of Vilnius and the region (Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, who captured Vilnius in 1656, Daniil Myshetskii, who defended Vilnius’ castle from the Lithuanian–Polish army in 1660–61, Prince Konstantin Ostrozhskii, the defender of Orthodoxy, Bohdan Khmelnitskii, the ‘great fighter of the Southern Russians’, etc.), but above all to commemorate names that would recall the ‘Lithuanian–Russian’ state. An anonymous author provided a list of rulers from the early history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania after whom the streets of Vilnius should be named. According to this idea, Gediminovskaia, Ol'gerdovskaia, Vitovtova, Keistutova and Svidrigailovskaia streets would have appeared in the city.Footnote 42 Thus, Grand Duke Gediminas had his place in the Russian historical narrative.
In 1905, a more liberal era began in the Russian Empire, and in Vilnius, as in the case of Kaunas discussed at the beginning of the article, local communities had a little more opportunity to leave a non-Russian imprint in the city’s urbonyms. In 1905, articles criticizing Vilnius street names appeared in a Polish Vilnius periodical.Footnote 43 Its author, Michał Brensztejn, a cultural activist and historian, denounced the previous policy of naming streets in Vilnius after cities in the Russian Empire. He also disliked naming the square after Pushkin, who ‘never visited Vilnius’. At the same time, Brensztejn missed the urbonyms in Vilnius named after important Lithuanian historical and cultural figures.Footnote 44 This disapproval was then addressed to the Vilnius City Administration, which seems to have set up a commission to review the city’s list of streets and to increase the number of Polish urbonyms.Footnote 45
Except for denouncing the naming of street names in Vilnius, the local Polish community took steps through the council to ensure that the city’s streets commemorated the names of Polish cultural and social figures. The Polish elite in Vilnius did not even try to propose that Polish political and military heroes be commemorated in Vilnius’ street names. Such attempts would have been pointless, as the Ministry of the Interior would simply not have approved them. The appearance of Moniuszko Street in Vilnius suggested, however, that the names of Polish musicians, writers and artists might slip past the censorship of the tsarist authorities.
These hopes were not destined to be fulfilled. At the end of 1906, the city council decided to name one of the city’s streets after the famous Polish writer Eliza Orzeszkowa to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of her work,Footnote 46 but the tsar’s administration refused to approve this decision.Footnote 47 In 1907, the city authorities were approached by several citizens who asked them to design a new street to be named after the Polish writer Władysław Syrokomla (real name Ludwik Władysław Franciszek Kondratowicz). This idea was supported not only by the city administration but also by the council. However, the Vilnius province administration refused to give this name to the new street, claiming that the writer had not been born in Vilnius and had never lived on the street. The fact that Syrokomla was one of the most prominent figures in Vilnius’ cultural life in the mid-nineteenth century did not play any role here. The Vilnius province’s Commission for Urban Affairs, suggested naming that street Suvalkskaia (after the Suwałki province). The residents of Vilnius who initiated the naming after Syrokomla agreed with this change because they wanted a quick decision so that they could build houses on the new street.Footnote 48 In yet another case, in 1912, the owners of a housing project petitioned the Vilnius municipal authorities to rename part of Arzamas Street after Józef Montwiłł, and also to rename a previously unnamed street after him. Montwiłł’s role in the life of Vilnius in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was so great that both the city administration and the council supported this initiative. The Vilnius City Administration addressed the governor on this issue on 10 November 1914, when World War I was already under way, and the historic Lithuanian capital was occupied by the German army in September 1915. A final decision on the matter was therefore probably never taken. As far as available sources show, no street named after Montwiłł, who died in 1911, appeared during the tsarist period.Footnote 49
Quite a common practice was to use old or even new street names that had never been approved by the government but were well known to the city’s inhabitants.Footnote 50 Polish guidebooks to Vilnius would also remind people of them.Footnote 51 Wacław Gizbert (Studnicki), the author of one of the guides, even claimed that the official street names were not known by the inhabitants of Vilnius, and published a map of the city in Polish with the old urbonyms.Footnote 52 In 1910, the Archaeological Section of the Vilnius Friends of Science was preparing to publish an 1808 Vilnius city plan, which would include not only the new street names given by the tsarist administration, but also the old ones.Footnote 53
Conclusions
In this article, I have tried not only to record how the names of the cityscape changed but also to show how streets became an arena for identity politics to be put to work. The tsarist authorities had the greatest agency in determining street names in Vilnius and other cities in Lithuania and Belarus from the first serious changes in 1864 following the uprising until World War I. The ‘toponymic cleansing’ that followed the 1863–64 uprising, when the tsarist authorities eliminated the majority of ‘Catholic’ street names, took on new forms in the 1875 city plan, when many of the geographical names of the Romanov Empire appeared, and then was only sporadically supplemented with ideologically relevant names by the annexation of new districts to the city, or by the commemoration of anniversaries of significance to the whole empire. The outbreak of World War I saw the beginning of a new phase, when Russian nationalists initiated the elimination of the names of foreign adversaries. Most of the initiatives taken by Vilnius residents to commemorate famous Polish cultural figures in the names of streets were blocked by tsarist officials.
Unlike the common practice described in critical place-name studies, where the historical master narrative is the most important element in the selection of street names, in the case of Vilnius, little attention was paid to history (or to the literary canon). Particularly surprising is the scant attention paid to local history, which had already been ‘Russified’. In other words, the question might be raised as to why there were not more streets commemorating the past of the ‘Russian–Lithuanian’ state. After all, such changes would have been in line with the Russian master narrative of the region, which led to the change of the region’s name. There might be more than one explanation for this. Although Ustrialov’s concept of Lithuanian history took on a normative character, there were voices in Russian society that said there was no need to put too much emphasis on local history, as it could give the impression that this was a separate land from Russia. Moreover, the tsarist administrators and Russian publicists were well aware that Lithuanians and Poles were constructing their own master narratives, in which the image of the Lithuanian dukes was different to that of the Russian historical narrative. Tsarist officials could not hang a historical narrative with the ‘correct’ interpretation on every street sign. This suggests that the Romanov imperial government itself did not trust the power of the narrative it was promoting.
At the same time, this article is also important in the wider context of the Russian Empire. The systematic politicization of street names in Lithuanian and Belarusian cities occurred earlier than in many other regions of the Romanov Empire. The beginning of the systematic ‘imperialization’ of toponyms can be seen after the suppression of the uprising of 1863–64, when names relating to the Catholic church were systematically eliminated from street names, and an increasing number of names appeared relating to the space of the empire, its history or Russian culture. As we have seen, the street names of Vilnius and other cities in the Northwestern Region were dominated by the names of cities in so-called Inner Russia (ethnic Russian lands), supplemented by other oikonyms from the borderlands of the empire. However, apart from a few exceptions (Warsaw, Lomża, Suwałki streets in Vilnius), there were hardly any city names from regions that were less integrated into the political body of the empire (the Grand Duchy of Finland, the Baltic provinces and to some extent the Kingdom of Poland). This was no coincidence. Jolita Mulevičiūtė’s research has shown that trips by pupils from the Vilnius Education District to Finland, the Baltic provinces or the Kingdom of Poland were very rare. Mulevičiūtė’s conclusions about the geography of the trips also apply to the policy of choosing street names: ‘School tour organizers adhered to a similar principle, attempting to associate the cultural experiences of students in the Northwestern Region with the central and more distant territories of the Romanov Empire, hoping to prevent the rise of any new separatist sentiments among local communities in the process’.Footnote 54 Only in this case, of course, the target was not only the pupils, but the entire population of the city.
Reflections of Russian geography first of all appeared in the new districts of Vilnius, whereas in the Old Town officials were less likely to change the street names. At first glance, it may seem that the tsarist authorities viewed the list of streets in Vilnius as a deciphered palimpsest showing all the stages of the city’s history. There is no archive-based evidence to support this interpretation as there is a severe lack of sources that would reveal the debates of the decision-makers, but it is very plausible because, as already mentioned, Vilnius was historically a Russian city according to the official master narrative.
The degree to which street names were imperialized in order to culturally appropriate Vilnius also stands out as an extreme case when situated alongside the other case-studies in this special issue (Orenburg, Kyiv and Tartu). This was probably because even though the Northwestern Region was seen in Russian discourse as Russian ‘national territory’, the empire’s ruling elite was also aware that in this region, and in Vilnius in particular, the Polish influence, especially culturally, was still very strong. This discrepancy between the ideological construction and the actual situation may have encouraged more intensive strategies of symbolic appropriation of space than elsewhere in the empire.
The new street names did, of course, permeate to some extent the everyday life of citizens and visitors. They were used to describe the way to somewhere in the city or when using the postal service. However, the attempts of the Poles of Vilnius to immortalize the names of various public and cultural figures in the names of Vilnius streets, the criticism of the official policy in the periodical press and, finally, the efforts to remember the old urbonyms, show that in this area the tsarist policy of appropriation of the cultural landscape faced serious obstacles among the non-Russian part of the city’s population (especially the Polish community).
If in Vilnius, walking on foot or riding a horse-drawn tram, one could feel as if one were travelling through the vast Romanov Empire, especially its so-called inner provinces, or getting acquainted with the Russian literary canon, one could at the same time feel as if one were in a Polish city, or even in Western Europe or North America. All one had to do was to ignore the official street names, and walk around the city with the help of a Polish guide, such as Gizbert’s (Studnicki’s) guide to Vilnius in Polish, published in 1910, which gave the old street names. At the same time, one could choose from a wide range of hotels and guesthouses in Vilnius reminiscent of Western Europe or North America: Austria, America, Berlin, Venice, Versailles, Germany, Europe, Italy, London, New York, Paris, Rome, Saxony, Switzerland, etc.Footnote 55 This indicates that hotels, as private enterprises, were regarded differently by the tsarist authorities from municipal street names. In this respect, the tsarist government was less strict than the Soviet government in regulating public spaces. The latter had imposed much stricter controls on all public names.
Open access
