During the twentieth century, a number of places in Romania had their names changed for various reasons. For instance, Brașov was called Orașul Stalin by the Communist regime in order to pay homage to the Soviet leader. Some of those names were changed back to the original; Brașov regained its old name as Romania's leadership began to develop policies more independent of the Soviet Union. The reason for many Transylvanian name changes was to give a more "Romanian-sounding" name to certain settlements, since in many case the original Romanian name was too close to the Hungarian or German one, from which it was derived (usually a simple re-writing of the name according to Romanian phonetics).