Soviet Place Names Still Dominate Russian Landscape, Elevating Soviet Period Above All Others, ‘Dzen’ Commentary Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 24 – “To judge by the names of streets, the thousand-year-old Russia was born only under Lenin and the Bolsheviks,” according to an unsigned commentary on the Dzen news agency, something that keeps the Soviet legacy alive and legitimate while ignoring the larger contributions of earlier leaders.

            At the present time, the commentary notes, there are still 5781 streets in Russian cities and towns named for the founder of the USSR; but there are only 52 named for the tsar who founded the Russian empire. And that pattern holds for lesser figures in both periods (dzen.ru/a/aUqRbyhR5FNUVD4Y).

            For example, there are 2811 Kirov streets, 2260 Kalinin streets, 2071 Chapayev streets, 1496 Karl Marx streets, 1151 Sverdlov streets, and 1141 Frunze streets; but there are only 849 Suvorov streets, 488 Kutuzov streets, Aleksandr II, no streets but one square, and 52 streets names in honor of the founder of the empire, Peter I.

            “Thirty years ago, in the 1990s, a massive renaming took place throughout the country,” the commentator says. “Gorky became Nizhny Novgorod, Sverdlovsk Yekaterinburg, and Leningrad St. Petersburg … part of a historical catharsis as society freedom from ideological oppression sought to remove its traces from daily life.”

            “But today there is no such energy.” On the one hand, renaming is viewed by the bureaucracy as an expensive luxury, something which at a time of stringency there is now money or time. And on the other, the authorities oppose renaming because they see it as breaking the continuity of Russian history they celebrate.

            Talk about continuity seems noble, “but then the question arises: if we really respect all the leaders from Rurik to Putin, then why have Russian rulers, who created a centuries-old power almost disappeared from the map?” The reason is “simple: toponomy isn’t a mirror of history but an archive of ideology.”

            And as such, “Soviet ideology has turned out to be very much alive. It has been removed from the Constitution but remains in the names of streets. And today, under the cover of ‘uninterruptedness,’ it is being legitimated anew” but now requires “not faith in communism but only silent acceptance of the Soviet inheritance” as “natural” and greater than all others.

            But the commentator continues, “It is impossible to simultaneously revive churches, erect monuments to Emperors, and at the same time claim that renaming is a ‘break in continuity.’ Continuity lies not in preserving the imbalance, but in restoring proportion.” And that isn’t happening.

 

And he concludes: “As long as Russian cities remain a museum space where Lenin is the main character, and the Emperors are rare exhibits, talking about ‘continuous history’ means misleading people. True continuity is not cultural schizophrenia, when we pray to saints and walk down Dzerzhinsky Street.”

What must be recognized and acted upon is this: “True continuity is the harmonious presence of all eras in the urban fabric. And for now, yes, you haven't gone crazy. But perhaps it's time to stop pretending that ‘everything is normal’when the urban environment still lives in a Soviet way.”