In Defense of Stalingrad

According to latest dispatches, the citizens of Stalingrad have spontaneously written letters to their local newspaper urging that their city be rechristened. Signs bearing the present name of the city have reportedly been taken down from a railroad station, a major hotel, and other public places.

Call us bourgeois utilitarians, if you will, but we must speak out against such a change, for it is deplorably wasteful. Think of all the maps, almanacs, signs, dictionaries, histories, and treatises that will have to be altered. Think of the schizoid effects on those who hold local roots dear, and of the effort of those who fought the Battle of Stalingrad and celebrated it in song and prose. Time and money all wasted.

But if justice must be served, whatever the expense, let it be served properly. The original name, Tsaritsyn, will not yet do. The current favorite, Volograd (after the Volga River), is a bit dull, although it does. To be truly fitting the new name of the city should rehabilitate a genuine folk hero to take Stalin's place.

And who is more deserving than the man who, even before Khrushchev, alerted the Soviet people to the darker side of Stalin's personality--Lev Davidovich Bronstein? If Stalingrad must be renamed, let it hence-forth be known as Trotskygrad.