(Reuters) – Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that it was up to the volgograd residents to decide whether the city was to return to the name of Stalingrad, as it was called when the Soviet forces defeated the Nazi invaders in the most bloody battle of the Second World War.
Before the commemorations of next week of the 80th anniversary of the victory of the Soviet Union and its allies on Nazi Germany, the question was raised to restore the war name of the city of southern Russia.
Putin, quoted by the Ria press agency, was questioned during a forum on the restoration of the old city name – a sensitive problem taking into account the association with the horrors of the rule of the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
But he said that the idea was “logical” given the historical meaning of the battle.
“It is for residents to decide. We can think about it. Residents will have to be questioned,” said Ria.
“There is certainly a logic in there. If you delete the ideology as much as possible, the name is of course linked to victory. But we still have to clarify what a majority of residents think.”
Putin published a decree on Tuesday to rename the Volgograd Stalingrad airport “in order to perpetuate the victory of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War”. The veterans groups led calls to the restoration of the name in wartime.
The Russians refer to the Second World War, from 1941 to 1945 dating from the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, such as the Great Patriotic War.
The authorities are preparing sumptuous ceremonies to mark the birthday, although the leaders of most Western states remain away from more than three years after the invasion of Ukraine by Moscow.
Putin compared the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 to the fight against the Nazis, presenting war on the Russians as a “special military operation” to “demilitarize” and “Denazify” Ukraine.
Stalingrad, renamed Volgograd in 1961 as part of a process of “destroying”, was the bloodiest battle of war, when the Soviet Red Army, at a cost of more than a million victims, broke the back of the German invasion forces in 1942-1943.
It is estimated that some 22 million at 25 million Soviet citizens were killed during the war. Soviet Ukraine has undergone mass destruction and historians say that at least 8 million died.
(Report by Reuters; edition by Stephen Coates)
