Revisionism and dishonesty - Changing names won’t change past

WHEN Peter the Great decided, in the early 1700s, that Russia needed access to the Baltic Sea, he built a port city on the river Neva, on the Gulf of Finland. 

It is not surprising that the scale of his ambition was recognised when the city was named St Petersburg. Since then, the city, Russia’s second-largest and occasional capital, has had various names, each bending to the political needs of the day.

During the First World War, Russians thought Sankt Peterburg too German, so Tsar Nicholas II renamed it Petrograd, just in time for the 1914 October Revolution.

A decade later, five days after Lenin’s death, the city became Leningrad. Almost seven decades later, in 1991, after the Soviet Union imploded, it was renamed again, as St Petersburg, hinting at Russia’s ambitions to recapture its imagined imperial grandeur.

Those hopes have not been realised, unless you believe that imperialism and kleptocracy are one and the same thing.

The name changes did not alter the history of the great city in the slightest way. Tens of thousands of press-ganged serfs — little more than slaves — died building it. The city sent a women-only Death Batallion to the First World War front line in 1917 to shame wavering Russian troops into being more steadfast. In the Second World War, 632,000 people died during a siege that lasted for 29 months. That pattern is repeated all around the world.

It’s been a while since Constantinople fell to the Ottomans, in 1453, but that seminal event is an accepted part of Istanbul’s history. Equally, the story of Queenstown and Cobh are indivisible. Changing names may change perceptions, but it does a disservice to an honest and useful understanding of history.

A campaign is underway in Cork to purge the city of place or street names that reflect its past. This exercise in green revisionism is a minority issue, though campaigners have taken it upon themselves to vandalise street signs by painting over the names they find so offensive. Despite these publicity-seeking provocations, the campaign has not gathered any momentum, because, thankfully, a more nuanced understanding of history prevails.

That every chance to rebalance the issue has celebrated a particular strand of what it is to be Irish is a factor, too. The Jack Lynch Tunnel, the Christy Ring Bridge — a mile downstream from Wellington Bridge — Bishop Lucey Park, Kent Station, and Páirc Uí Chaoimh celebrate a culture that might not wish to honour Queen Victoria or the dukes of Marlborough or Wellington. But to try to amputate these figures, and their memory, from our history is foolish wishful thinking.

It may not be wise to rely, either, on the city council to hold the line. After all, in 2009 it allowed itself be part of a developer’s marketing exercise, when it renamed Faulkner’s Lane Opera Lane to aggrandise and boost property values. That was revisionism in the name of commerce.

The current campaign speaks to anachronistic values and is unworthy of today’s inclusive, tolerant Ireland. Its proposals should be rejected. New, as yet unnamed developments are unlikely to be named after Kate or William, so it is an issue that time will settle without unnecessary division.