Renaming Soviet Toponyms in Russian Cities: Contemporary Conflicts, Their Spatial Features, Actors, and Meanings

In the 2020s, the process of de-Sovietization of the toponymy in Russian cities intensified again, accompanied by manifestations of social activism and political competition. Based on an analysis of media coverage of several dozen such conflicts over the last 5–7 years in the study, their spatial characteristics were identified and a significant change in the motivation of their participants was shown compared with previous periods of post-Soviet history. Although ideology still remained the primary motivation for those who initiated the change of Soviet urban names, its importance began to diminish. It began to face significant competition from historical and cultural motivations, as well as marketing and other pragmatic factors. In the arguments of those opposed to the renaming, pragmatic motives clearly pushed ideology into the background. After 2022, both supporters and opponents of de-Sovietization began to actively use arguments related to a special military operation. The traditional composition of actors in toponymic conflicts has become blurred and more complex. The identified spatial patterns describe the dependence of the intensity of conflicts on the following factors: center–periphery, spatial competition, transfer of location, spatial diversification of motives, locality of symbols, memoriality and function of place. It is shown that it is the overlapping effect of the listed patterns that complicates both the structure of the motivations of the parties to the conflicts and the geographical differences in their outcomes. The latter became less dependent on regional combinations of the ideological orientations of the population and the political orientations of the ruling elite. This was facilitated by the increased importance of non-political motivations and the diversification of local combinations of the described spatial patterns.