(Reuters) – Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday it was up to residents of Volgograd to decide whether the city should revert to the name of Stalingrad, as it was called when Soviet forces defeated Nazi invaders in World War Two’s bloodiest battle.
Ahead of next week’s commemorations of the 80th anniversary of the victory of the Soviet Union and its allies over Nazi Germany, the issue has been raised of restoring the wartime name of the southern Russian city.
Putin, quoted by state news agency RIA, was asked at a forum about restoring the city’s former name – a sensitive issue in view of the association with the horrors of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s nearly three-decade rule.
But he said the idea was “logical” in view of the historical significance of the battle.
“This is for residents to decide. We can think about it. Residents will have to be asked,” RIA quoted him as saying.
“There is certainly logic in this. If you remove the ideology of this 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 issued a decree on Tuesday renaming Volgograd airport Stalingrad “in order to perpetuate the Victory of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War”. Veterans groups have led calls for the restoration of the wartime name.
Russians refer to World War Two, from 1941 to 1945 dating from the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, as the Great Patriotic War.
Authorities are preparing lavish ceremonies to mark the anniversary, though leaders of most Western states are staying away more than three years into Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Putin has compared the 2022 invasion of Ukraine to the fight against Nazis, presenting the war to Russians as a “special military operation” to “demilitarise” and “denazify” Ukraine.
Stalingrad, renamed Volgograd in 1961 as part of a process of “destalinisation”, was the bloodiest battle of the war, when the Soviet Red Army, at a cost of more than 1 million casualties, broke the back of German invasion forces in 1942-43.
Some 22 million to 25 million Soviet citizens are estimated to have been killed in the war. Soviet Ukraine suffered mass destruction and historians say at least 8 million died.
(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Stephen Coates)
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