RUSSIA: Leningrad

One of the first victims of the curious cult that sprang up after the recent death of Nikolai Lenin was the name of the former capital of Russia. The city built 200-odd years ago by Peter the Great on the banks of the Neva flourished under the name of St. Petersburg. But the War taught us that St. Petersburg was a naughty German way of saying what the Russians, who were then our brave and gallant Allies, called Petrograd. So Petrograd it became. Maps were being changed so much that cartographers did not object.

Lenin’s successors paid adulation to their defunct leader by renaming the city Leningrad. Western editors didn’t take much notice. The Soviets, by transferring the capital to Moscow and by their economic policies towards foreign trade, have depressed Leningrad, nee St. Petersburg, from a population of 1,250,000 to 400,000. Leningrad, ruined, shrunken, wizened, is an appropriate memorial to the man whose political and economic philosophies plunged Russia into the greatest social experiment of modern times.