What is in a name
Do words matter or don’t they?
In St. Petersburg, Russia, back in 2005, I sat on an uncomfortable bench in an uncomfortable classroom, a radiator baking my back as the outside air hinted of growing cool. One day, in “Civilization” class, a sort of mix between history and sociology, our instructor, Nina, split the class in half and gave us a task: debate whether the city we sat in should be called St. Petersburg or Leningrad.
History had already decided the question in favor of the former, but I suppose the exercise was to give us a chance to experience life in the middle of the end of history.
I was placed on the “Leningrad” side.
We argued that it was the name of Leningrad that defined the city’s most defining experience: the 3 year siege the Wehrmacht visited upon it, unspeakable horror and suffering for nearly 900 days, including driving starving people to cannibalism. Erasing that memory for the sake of some anti-Soviet political correctness was folly.
The “St. Petersburg” group argued that the siege was a story of the people, the survivors. They struggled for each other, not for the city’s name. Besides, changing the nature of the country required changing the names of places honoring those responsible for its disreputable past. Changing the name was a step towards changing the country.
The debate didn’t have any official winners, but Nina did share her own opinion.
She was absolutely against any memorials to Lenin, Stalin, and the like. For those insisting on the historical reality and significance of such prominent monsters, she argued, wasn’t Hitler an extremely significant historical figure? Where in the civilized world is his contribution to the record of human events reverentially memorialized?
I rolled my eyes at what seemed like a gross and false equivalence. But no matter — the question was just academic.
Standing at the back of a Metro car in what is decidedly St. Petersburg just last week, I saw how it was any thing but.
Writing in the New Yorker, American historian Jill Lepore details how the Union allowed Confederate President Jefferson Davis to die peacefully at the age of 81, suffering no punishment for leading the Confederacy. Lepore suggests that these generous terms did not reckon with the relevant legal or moral realities of the day, to say nothing of the demands of justice.
Indeed, not only did Davis escape a hanging, but was honored quite posthumously with statues in the Confederate capital of Richmond, VA.
In 2020, Black Lives Matter protesters pulled down an eight-foot-tall statue of him that had been made by Edward Valentine and erected on Richmond’s Monument Avenue in 1907. The fifteen-hundred-pound statue — defaced, toppled, and streaked with paint — is currently on display in a room at Richmond’s Valentine museum, whose founding president was the sculptor himself. In 2021, a group calling itself White Lies Matter stole a stone chair dedicated to Davis from a cemetery in Selma, and held it for ransom.
Charitably-minded Black Americans from the era considered granting an amnesty to Davis and his ilk but only on condition that their own freedom and liberties be similarly guaranteed. This did not happen, and the Confederacy’s sympathizers, today spread throughout white America, are eager to remake the United States into a land for the Christian white man.
Indeed, in December 2023, official US government efforts to do the bare minimum in terms of honoring Union veterans and the freedoms they secured remained controversial:
A Confederate memorial is to be removed from Arlington National Cemetery in northern Virginia in the coming days, part of the push to remove symbols that commemorate the Confederacy from military-related facilities, a cemetery official said Saturday.
The decision ignores a recent demand from more than 40 Republican congressmen that the Pentagon suspend efforts to dismantle and remove the monument from Arlington cemetery.
In protest of the proposed removal of the monument, Georgia Republican Congressman (gun store owner, election truther, and insurrection supporter) Andrew Clyde penned a letter to Lloyd Austin, the Defense Secretary.
Just as their Southern Democratic forbears resisted efforts to guarantee equal rights to Black Americans after the Civil War, today’s neo-Confederate Republicans resist even superficial corrections to the country’s image. If these names were of no consequence, why bother fighting to preserve them? Wouldn’t that put you in the same category of overly sensitive “snowflakes”?
Those who believe in the Lost Cause have, with some success, sanitized and rehabilitated their public image over the last one-and-a-half centuries. Today, just as in the 1800s, their cause was the cause of a minority. Their hope is that insidiously infiltrating popular culture and the halls of power can let the South rise again. Reacting with anything but extreme prejudice to these efforts is suicidal for anyone with an egalitarian bone in their body.
This is who they are; that is what they want.
Back in the stuffy classroom, I was wondering if anyone else had read Christopher Hitchens reflections on St. Petersburg. His article had been published the month before we touched down in Pulkovo International Airport. On the question of what to call the place, he offered this:
Joseph Brodsky, the only native to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, said that he preferred his hometown to be named after a saint rather than a devil.
The devil’s partisans are out in full force. Who is going to meet them?
