How Moscow was nearly renamed in honor of Stalin!
Despite already having renamed Tsaritsyn, the Soviet leader himself was not thrilled with the new idea.
The idea first arose in the late 1930s. The Kremlin kept receiving many letters from workers and collective farmers from across the country with proposals and requests to name the capital in honor of the ‘Father of Nations’.
They suggested different options: ‘Stalingrad-on-Moscow’, ‘Stalingrad-Moscow’, etc; but the most popular was ‘Stalinodar’.
“Stalin’s genius is a historical gift to humanity, its guiding star on the path of development and ascent to a higher level. Therefore, I am deeply convinced that all humanity of the globe of our era and all humanity of many future centuries will accept with satisfaction and joy the renaming of Moscow to Stalinodar,” wrote Muscovite Dmitry Zaitsev to Nikolai Yezhov, the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs.
And it was Yezhov who officially presented the project to rename Moscow in 1938. In this way, he wanted to win political points, but he did not succeed at all. Stalin called the proposal stupid and the People's Commissar himself was soon shot.
