“Iron Ukrainization”

This article examines the historical names of railways in Ukraine by employing cultural-geographic and critical approaches. More specifically, this research describes semantic categories of railway names in Ukraine and highlights how railway names are explicitly or implicitly used as political instruments and forms of discursive power. The empirical part of the research is based on a database of the names of the railways in Ukraine throughout the history of the national railway network. The data was collected using modern reviews and directories, media screening, as well as archive sources. Throughout history most of the names of Ukrainian railways were not commemorative and performed primarily orientation function. Still, most of the names had potential political implications. Focusing on certain cases of politically-driven renaming of railways in Ukraine, including the ongoing project of “Iron Ukrainization”, this research demonstrates how place names related to transport networks may function as geospatial projections of hegemonic political power, by legitimizing specific centers of political power in the linguistic landscape of a country.