The bill, titled "On the status of Russian cities holding the title of hero city," was submitted by Anzhelika Glazkova, a State Duma deputy from the Communist Party (KPRF), according to Agentstvo, Ekho and TV Rain.
Under its third article, both cities "are returned the names Stalingrad and Leningrad respectively" within a year of the law entering into force. The second article establishes that hero cities bear the names they held during the Great Patriotic War — the Soviet term for the 1941-45 war with Nazi Germany — and that renaming them "is not permitted."
The explanatory note justifies the initiative as "the restoration of historical justice." Glazkova noted that St Petersburg and Volgograd received hero city status by order of Joseph Stalin in 1945. According to her, "it would be rather strange to speak of the 'siege of St Petersburg' or the 'battle of Volgograd.'"
The bill also requires that the Order of Lenin and the Soviet Gold Star medal be placed on the coats of arms or banners of hero cities, and that an obelisk depicting those awards be installed in each of them. The document further proposes a "legal mechanism" for granting hero city status to other Russian cities.
Leningrad was renamed St Petersburg in 1991, and Stalingrad became Volgograd in 1961. Agentstvo noted that it could not find any earlier bill registered in the State Duma on returning the name Leningrad to St Petersburg. A proposal to rename Volgograd was last considered in 2015, when the KPRF submitted a draft resolution that deputies did not support.
The KPRF has returned to Soviet names since. In January 2024, Nikolai Kharitonov, then a presidential candidate, proposed putting the renaming of St Petersburg to a nationwide referendum while restoring the name Stalingrad to Volgograd without one. In August 2026, KPRF leader Gennady Zyuganov said he regretted that Volgograd was not being renamed.
Glazkova won her State Duma seat on the KPRF federal list from the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics, Crimea, Sevastopol, and the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions. In the previous convocation she represented the Altai Territory, the Altai Republic and Tuva.