Cool,
May 1 is my favorite holiday! Not out of any working-class solidarity, mind you, but because of the Dionysian ways with which it is celebrated in Greece (nudge-nudge, wink-wink).
Regarding your retorical question, I think its a bit of all three - on the one hand a few governments did owtlaw traditional names (eg. in Albania), and others changed surnames to serve political ends (eg. names ending with -ev were changed to -evski in southern Jugoslavia to sound less Bulgarian and to forge a pseudo-Macedonian ethnicity). Of course there were the idealists who named their children "Traktor" in the height of proletarian aesthetic, as well as obsequious party adulators who named their twins Vladlen and Vladlena to earn socialist brownie-points..
P.S. At what RPMs does a Celt Revolutionaries like yerself revolve?