Far from Ukraine’s embattled eastern front, a new battle is being waged – not from the trenches, but across leafy side streets and broad avenues. That’s where the enemy is called Pavlov. Or Tchaikovsky. Or Catherine the Great.
All over Ukraine, officials are launching projects to, as they say, “decolonize” their cities. Streets and metro stops whose names evoke the history of the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union are scrutinized by a population eager to get rid of the traces of the nation that invaded in late February.
“We are defending our country, including on the cultural front lines,” said Andriy Moskalenko, Lviv’s deputy mayor and the head of a committee that has reviewed the names of each of the city’s more than 1,000 streets. “And we don’t want to have anything in common with the killers.”
Ukraine is far from the first country to do such historical accounting – the United States has struggled for decades to rename Civil War monuments. Nor is it the first time Ukraine has undertaken such an effort: after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was one of many Eastern European countries to rename streets and remove statues commemorating an era of communist rule that became synonymous with totalitarianism.
This time, the decision to erase Russian names isn’t just a symbol of resistance to the invasion and Soviet history, said Vasyl Kmet, a historian at Lviv’s Ivan Franko National University. It is also about reaffirming a Ukrainian identity that many believe has been suppressed under centuries of rule by its more powerful neighbour, he said.
“The concept of decolonization is a bit broader,” said Mr Kmet. “Russian politics today is built on the propaganda of the so-called Russky mir – the Russian-speaking world. This is about creating a powerful alternative, a modern Ukrainian national discourse.”
The western city of Lviv is one of several areas campaigning for decolonization. So is the northwestern city of Lutsk, which plans to rename more than 100 streets. In the southern port city of Odessa, whose residents mainly speak Russian, politicians debate the removal of a monument to Catherine the Great, the Russian empress who founded the city in 1794.
In Kiev, the capital, the city council is considering renaming the Leo Tolstoy metro stop after Vasyl Stus, a Ukrainian poet and dissident. The “Minsk” stop – named after the Belarus capital, which Moscow stood in during the invasion – may soon be renamed “Warsaw”, in honor of Poland’s support for Ukraine.
And it’s not just Russian names that are under scrutiny. The Lviv committee also plans to remove street names in tribute to some Ukrainians. One is named after the writer Petro Kozlaniuk, who collaborated with Soviet security forces, including the KGB
Removing the names of some cultural icons – which the Lviv committee said it did after consulting with academics from the relevant fields – turned out to be more divisive. The history of figures like Pyotr Tchaikovsky can be tricky: The classical composer’s family roots lay in contemporary Ukraine, and some musicologists say his works were inspired by Ukrainian folk music.
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A few kilometers from Lviv, Viktor Melnychuk owns a sign making factory that is preparing to make new plaques and bollards for renamed streets. While acknowledging that he has a business interest in any change, he is ambivalent about some of the new names.
“Maybe we should keep some classic writers or poets if they come from other periods. I’m not sure,” he said. “We cannot reject everything completely. There was something good in that.”
But he intended to stick to the committee’s decisions. And the verdict was unanimous: Tchaikovsky would go.
“When we rename a street, it doesn’t mean we say, ‘This person didn’t make this invention, or wasn’t important,'” said Mr Moskalenko, Lviv’s deputy mayor. “It means that this person’s work has been used as a tool for colonization.”
Historian Mr. Kmet saw an opportunity to honor the contributions of some Ukrainians whose contributions have been lost to history. He hopes to name a street in Lviv after an obscure librarian, Fedir Maksymenko, who he said secretly protected Ukrainian culture and books during the Soviet era.
“I and Ukrainian culture owe a lot to him,” he said. “We have to work very hard today to keep what he saved.”