The reasons varied, but largely most of the renaming in the 1920s and 30s was to eliminate the vestiges of tsardom and the old regime and replace them with names more suitable to this new epoch. For example, Tsarskoye Selo roughly means "tsar's village," and was one of the personal residences of the Romanovs. The Bolsheviks changed the town to Detskoye Selo (Children's Village) and finally to Pushkin to celebrate the centenary of the poet's death. Other cities like Yekaterinburg (also spelled Ekaterinburg) had their origins in direct patronage from the Romanovs so they were named after them; Yekaterinburg means "Catherine's City" after its patron Peter I's wife, Empress Catherine and then further expanded under Catherine the Great. Both the Bolsheviks and the Soviet regime would often rename these personalized tsarist names after departed Bolshevik leaders, such as Yakov Sverdlov, whose name replaced Catherine's in Yekaterinburg. Even though its name was rather innocuous, Lenin's birthplace of Simbirsk became Ulyanovsk after Lenin's death in 1924 to honor his original name of Ulyanov. Other replacements reflected geography such as renaming the northern port city of Romanov-on-Murman to Murmansk.

Of course Soviet internal politics did lead to second or third name changes for some cities. The most famous example of this was the transformation of Stalingrad into Volgagrad, but there were others. The small town of Dzerzhinsky renamed itself Sorsk as its namesake was the feared chekist and founder of the Soviet secret police. There were also shifts in Soviet pantheon of heroes after the Second World War. Stakhanovo was an example of this phenomenon. Named after a hero of the Soviet five year plans, Stakhanovism vanished somewhat from the USSR after the mid-1930s. The importance of aviation though only grew within the USSR and Stakhanovo's emergence as one of the USSR's central hubs of aerospace led to it being renamed Zhukovsky after Nikolay Zhukovsky, an important Russian and Soviet pioneer in aerospace science.