Cathedral of St. Alexander Nevsky, Tsaritsyn

The city on the banks of the Volga now known as Volgograd, was named Stalingrad from 1925 to 1961, and with this name it entered world history for the climactic battle of the Soviet-German war in 1942-43. But from 1589 and up to 1925 the city bore its original name, Tsaritsyn. The reason Tsaritsyn was renamed to Stalingrad is another battle, as decisive for the Russian Civil War as that of Stalingrad was for World War II.

In the early 20th century, Tsaritsyn was an important river-port and commercial centre. The population expanded rapidly, increasing from fewer than 3,000 people in 1807 to about 84,000 in 1900. The first railway reached the town in 1862. The first theatre opened in 1872, the first cinema in 1907. In 1913 Tsaritsyn got its first tram-line, and the city's first electric lights were installed in the city centre.

In 1917 Tsaritsyn rose up together with the whole of Russia, under the leadership of a local revolutionary named Sergey Konstantinovich Minin. In 1918 the Don Cossacks of Ataman Krasnov and the White Army of Denikin started the siege of Tsaritsyn. The city's importance for the survival of the revolution was pivotal, as the capture of Tsaritsyn by the Whites in 1918 would mean the loss of the Caucasus for the Reds right after the loss of Ukraine and Siberia; the army of Denikin from the West would be united with that of Kolchak from the East, and the loss of supplies from the Don and Volga Basin would lead Bolshevik-held Moscow and Leningrad to starvation. See this video to more easily understand the situation of Russia in 1918:



To keep Tsaritsyn "red" at all costs, the Bolshevik leadership sent to the city the People's Commissar for Nationalities of the Soviet government, a revolutionary by the name of Joseph Stalin. His role would be to turn Tsaritsyn into a fortress, a "Red Verdun" to withstand a long siege by the combined White Army-Cossack forces.


The young Joseph Stalin in Tsaritsyn c. 1918

On the day Stalin arrived in Tsaritsyn, 22 September 1918, the Cossacks launched another attack toward the city. At that time the Red leadership of the city consisted of Minin (chairman of the city Soviet) and Voroshilov as acting chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council, by his capacity as commander of the Tenth Army). Stalin promptly designated himself chairman and began issuing orders in the name of the South Front RMC. In one of the first, Order No. 118 of 24 September, he placed all South Front forces under I. L. Sorokin, an ex-noncommissioned officer and partisan detachment commander, and instructed him to report directly to Tsaritsyn. In another, he ordered Sorokin to dispatch the 1st Steel Rifle Division, a recently converted partisan unit under D. P. Zhloba, to Tsaritsyn. On the 27th, ignoring Sytin (the military advisor sent by Moscow), whom he dismissed as being interested only in the Povorino sector, he sent the RMCR an elaborate plan for defeating Krasnov by 150-mile-deep thrusts from the vicinity of Voronezh to Kantemirovka and Millerovo and out of the North Caucasus to Rostov, accompanying it with a list of weapons and ammunition ‘absolutely essential’ to the plan’s execution. If those requirements could not be met in short order, he concluded, ‘we will have to cease fighting and withdraw to the left bank of the Volga’.


Ataman Krasnov, who lost the 1918 battle of Tsaritsyn to Stalin, joined the Wehrmacht in WW2 and recruited a corps of "volunteer" Cossacks for Hitler

The second encirclement of Tsaritsyn was in the making on early October. Stalin told Sverdlov that the Cossacks were five versts (about four miles) from the Volga south of the city. According to later Soviet accounts, the Cossacks had 45,000 men to Tenth Army’s 40,000. The Cossacks’ main thrust had been in the south. On the 12th, they stepped up the attacks in the center and in the north; and in another two days, they were threatening the outlying settlements, Sarepta, Beketovka, and Voroponovo, after having reached the Volga north of the city and crossed it on the south. Voroshilov was sufficiently desperate by the 15th to establish contact with Sytin via the telegraph, and when Sytin asked for a situation report, Minin told him it was ‘tragic’ and the evacuation of Tsaritsyn was beginning. Late in the day on the 16th, Minin told Sytin that Voroponovo, the settlement closest to Tsaritsyn, had been lost, the situation was ‘most serious’ and would have been worse had Zhloba’s Steel Division not arrived at Sarepta during the previous night and encircled some 1,500 White Guards there. In another day, the Cossack offensive subsided, and on the 18th, Stalin told Lenin and Sverdlov that the front was firm, Tenth Army’s troops were attacking, and if the situation did not worsen in the meantime, he would leave for Moscow ‘tomorrow’.



Mitrofan Grekov "The defense of Tsaritsyn" (1934 painting)

The Steel Division’s arrival after a 16-day march marked the turning point in the second encirclement and came later to be regarded as the outstanding early manifestation of Stalin’s prescience in military affairs, he having had the foresight to defy Trotsky and call in the division. Order No. 118, which Trotsky had countermanded on 5 October, does appear in that respect either to have been a stroke of genius or of great good luck. Stalin dispatched a telegram to ‘Commander, Tsaritsyn Front, Voroshilov’ on 22 October. It read:

"Give the Morozovsk, Tikhoretsk, 3rd Revolutionary and other regiments that have encircled the enemy and beaten him over the head my fervent communist greetings. Tell them that Soviet Russia will never forget their heroic deeds and will give them their due reward. Long live the gallant troops of Tsaritsyn Front!"


Voroshilov, Budyonny and Minin in Tsaritsyn

Soviet Russia would indeed not forget while Stalin lived or after. The reward for most of those who had been there would be small; for some, for Voroshilov, Budyonny, Semyon Timoshenko (who commanded the Crimean Regiment, a converted partisan detachment), and G. I. Kulik (Voroshilov’s chief of artillery), it would be enormous. As for Tsaritsyn, in 1918 it had saved itself and the revolution. When in mid-1919 the White armies of Denikin and Wrangel managed to capture it, it waa too late, as by that time the Bolsheviks had gained large areas in Russia and Siberia that they didn't possess in 1918, and many more supply routes to Moscow and Leningrad were secured, making the 1919 White capture of Tsaritsyn irrelevant. The Reds finally recaptured it in January 1920.

The Renaming of the City and Stalin's Reaction

In 1925, Alexei Rykov, chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, proposed that Tsaritsyn be renamed "Stalingrad" to honor "the savior of the city" who had meanwhile become General Secretary of the CPSU after the death of Lenin. We have a direct response from Stalin to this question.



It says:

“To the governor of Tsaritsyn comrade Sheboldaev.

I found out that Tsaritsyn is being renamed to Stalingrad. I also learned that Minin* wants to rename it to Miningrad. I also know that you postponed the congress of Soviets** due to my non-arrival, and you are thinking of starting the renaming procedure in my presence. All this creates an awkward situation for you, and especially for me. I beg you to keep in mind that:

1) I did not seek and do not seek to rename Tsaritsyn to Stalingrad;

2) This business started without me and besides me;

3) If it is so necessary to rename Tsaritsyn, call it Miningrad or whatever;

4) If you have already bragged too much about Stalingrad and now it’s hard for you to abandon the case you started, do not drag me into this matter and do not demand my presence at the congress of Soviets - otherwise it may seem that I am seeking renaming;

5) Believe me, comrade, I do not seek neither fame nor honor and would not want the opposite impression to emerge.

With communist greetings, Joseph Stalin.”

*Minin was the aforementioned Sergei Konstantinovich Minin, the chairman of the Tsaritsyn Soviet during the 1918 battle, who thought the city should be named after himself.

**Congress of Soviets is a local parliament.

So we see that originally Stalin had a totally negative reaction to the idea that Tsaritsyn would bear his name, and that he was by no means the one who forced this renaming. As time passed, it is possible that he understood the enormous value this name would have for his personality cult and didn't change it back to Tsaritsyn until Khrushchev in 1961 renamed it "Volgograd" during the process of de-Stalinization. And so, it was under the name "Stalingrad" that this beautiful city on the banks of the Volga was to endure the greatest onslaught in human history in 1942-43, and it was under this name that it entered world history, a name familiar with people around the world until today.