Farewell, Tchaikovsky; goodbye, Tolstoy: Ukrainians decolonize their streets

Away from the war-torn eastern front of Ukraine, another struggle is raging, not in the trenches, but on tree-lined streets and wide boulevards.

There the enemy is called Pavlov. Or Tchaikovsky. O Catherine the Great.

Across Ukraine, authorities are launching projects to, as they say, “decolonize” their cities.

The streets and bus stops whose names evoke the history of the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union are under the control of a population eager to get rid of the vestiges of the nation that invaded them at the end of February.

“We are also defending our country on the cultural front,” said Andriy Moskalenko, deputy mayor of Lviv and head of a committee that examined 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“.

Of course, Ukraine is not the first country to take on such historic responsibility.

For example, the United States has fought for decades to rename monuments based on Civil War figures.

Furthermore, it is not the first time that Ukraine has undertaken this effort:

after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was one of many Eastern European countries that renamed streets and removed statues commemorating an era of Communist rule, which had become Synonymous with totalitarianism.

On this occasion, the decision to delete Russian names is not just a symbol of defiance in the face of invasion and Soviet history, said Vasyl Kmet, historian of the Ivan Franko National University in Lviv.

Its purpose is also to reaffirm a Ukrainian identity which many believe has been stifled by centuries of domination at the hands of its more powerful neighbor.

“The concept of decolonization is a bit broader,” explained Kmet.

“Russian politics today is built on the propaganda of the so-called Russky mir, the Russian-speaking world.

What we are doing is creating a powerful alternativea Ukrainian national speech “.

The western city of Lviv is one of many areas that are carrying out “decolonization” campaigns, such as the city of Lutsk in the north-west of the country, which plans to rename more than 100 public roads.

In the southern port city of Odessa, whose inhabitants speak mostly Russian, politicians are debating whether to remove a monument to Catherine the Great, the Russian empress who founded the city in 1794.

In Kiev, the capital, the city council is considering changing the name of the Leo Tolstoy metro stop to Vasyl Stus, a Ukrainian poet and dissident.

The stop called minsk – in honor of the capital of Belarus, which stood alongside Moscow during the invasion – may soon be renamed warsawto honor the support that Poland has provided to Ukraine.

Furthermore, it’s not just Russian names that are being scrutinized.

The Lviv committee also plans to remove street names that pay tribute to some Ukrainians.

One is named after the writer Petro Kozlanyukwho collaborated with Soviet security agencies, such as the KGB, among others.

The removal of the names of some cultural icons – which the Lviv committee claimed to have done only after consulting academics in the relevant fields – proved more polarizing.

The story of personalities like Pyotr Tchaikovsky is sometimes more thorny:

the composer’s family roots go back to present-day Ukraine and some musicologists claim that his works were inspired by Ukrainian folk music.

A few kilometers from Lviv, Viktor Melnychuk owns a sign factory which is preparing to build new poles and plaques for the renamed streets.

Even if you acknowledge that you have a business interest in any modification, you are ambivalent on some of the new names.

“Maybe we should keep some classical writers or poets if they come from another era. I’m not sure, “she said.

“We cannot totally reject everything. There have been some good things. “

But he would stick to the committee’s opinions, and their decision was unanimous:

Tchaikovsky had to be canceled.

“When we rename a city, it doesn’t mean that we say:

‘This person didn’t make this invention or it wasn’t important,’ “Moskalenko said.

“What we are saying is that this person’s work has been used as a colonization tool.”

Kmet saw the opportunity to honor some Ukrainians whose contributions have been lost in history.

He hopes to name a street in Lviv in honor of a little-known librarian, Fedir Maksymenko, who, according to him, secretly safeguarded Ukrainian culture and books during the Soviet period.

“I and the whole Ukrainian culture owe him a lot. We have to work very hard today to keep what he has saved ”.

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