Doesn't it strike you as strange that in a country which has renamed the cities named after Lenin and Stalin there still remains a city named after Togliatti, a third-rate historical figure from the Communist Party of Italy?
True, not every settlement named after a Communist functionary has had its historical name restored. We still have Noginsk, named after Viktor Nogin, a revolutionary now known to almost nobody, and we have Kirov, Ulyanovsk and Kaliningrad. All these men, at least, had some direct connection with the history of the country. But the ideologue of European communism Palmiro Togliatti: for what services is he immortalised on the map of Russia?
