Name-Dropping

A hero one day, a bum the next. It’s a cruel but not unfamiliar story in the competitive worlds of sports, entertainment, big business and even--if fate happens to deposit you in the right place--politics. Role reversals of this kind threaten in fact to become the boring norm for dead Communist bosses. Josef Stalin thought that he had perpetuity assured when he caused scores of cities, villages, dams, factories and public privies to be named in his honor. Yet within a few years of Stalin’s death in 1953 virtually all his eponymous self-glorification had been erased. Now it’s the turn of the late Leonid I. Brezhnev, the top gun in the Soviet Union for 18 years. Brezhnev isn’t officially a nonperson yet, as Nikita S. Khrushchev became before him. But recent events suggest that he may be rapidly heading toward that distinction.

As of the other day, the city of Naberezhnye Chelny in the Tatar Autonomous Republic, which since 1982 had been named Brezhnev, is back to being Naberezhnye Chelny--an action that may cheer tradition-minded locals but doesn’t do any favors for their letter-writing friends elsewhere. Brezhnev’s name has also disappeared from a district in Moscow and a major square in Leningrad. There may be more to come. All this is the Communist Party Central Committee’s way of letting it be known that Brezhnev is no longer considered worthy of fond remembrance. Instead, he is to be seen as a loser on whose doorstep, or gravestone, has now been deposited responsibility for much of the corruption and economic malaise that his eventual successor, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, has pledged to end.

Of course, other than keeping Soviet sign painters busy and assuring that gazetteer revision will continue to be a growth industry, this display of posthumous name-dropping has few practical consequences. It’s a good guess anyway that a Naberezhnye Chelny by any other name remained a Naberezhnye Chelny. Brezhnev can fairly be blamed for doing nothing to alleviate the Soviet Union’s economic mess; by any honest measure he can’t be held accountable for inventing it. The problem, as Gorbachev’s domestic policies sometimes hint at recognizing, is essentially systemic. Until fundamental changes in the ideologically hidebound Soviet system occur it’s a sure bet that things will go on not working. If Gorbachev is in fact able to effect those changes, he, at least, can count on his name being remembered.