and the graceful Ninel. A few people called their daughters Stalina or Stalinka. But this was not very common, and there was no boom in the name Iosif (Sta- lin’s first name) for boys.”

Name changes had to be registered with ZAGS, the office of births, deaths, and marriages; and for a few years the newspaper Isvestiia regularly carried lists of such changes. Looking at them, we find that, as always, some people were abandoning undignified or embarrassing last names, often choosing a literary or scientific name to replace them—Svinin to Nekrasov, Kobylin to Pushkin, Kopeikin to Fizmatov (derived from “physics and mathematics”). Ethnic name changes were less common. In contrast to the late Tsarist period, not many people were dropping foreign names in the mid 1930s (a few even acquired them), and changes of a non-Russian name, for example, a Tatar one, to Russian were also infrequent. Jews were the exception, for many Jew- ish names redolent of the pale were being dropped in favor of Russian names: Izrail to Leonid, Sarra to Raisa, Mendel and Moisei to Mikhail, Avram to Arkadii. During the Great Purges, some people changed their last names because they were the same as notorious “enemies of the people” and thus dangerous. A Bukharina was one who changed her name in 1938, a Trotskaya (female form of Trotsky) another.”

Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s