It is a less visible battle that Ukraine and other former satellite countries have been waging since the fall of the Soviet Union: the derussification of society. And that goes through toponymy and geography in particular.
Gagarin Street has nothing to do with a great Soviet thoroughfare. It’s a peaceful little alley on a hill in Kramatorsk where Oksana lives, met while trying to restore some order in her garden. “My address is 47 Yuri Gagarin Street. But it has been renamed and will bear the name of our Ukrainian cosmonaut, Leonid Kadeniouk”, she announces proudly. It was she who proposed this name to the town hall. “It was our initiative and the city supported us!”
“I don’t understand why we didn’t notice all these Russian atrocities before and consider them our brothers.”
Oksana, a Ukrainian from Kramatorskat franceinfo
Her neighbor lost her son in battle. First she wanted to pay homage to him. “We wanted to call it ‘street of the voluntary fighters’. But they would need at least a large central street!”she believes.
On April 21, President Volodymyr Zelensky signed the law banning geographical names symbolizing or glorifying Russia and the Soviet era. To the east, in Kramatorsk, we remember in particular the fighting of 2014 and the massacre at the train station last year. Result: 300 street names, a third of the city, have just been changed this week after consultation with the inhabitants. Here, a Russian poet is replaced by a Ukrainian playwright killed under Stalin. There, the Russian city of Briansk disappears to pay tribute to the fighters of Azov in Mariupol.
Rename, but keep in mind
In the former rue Gagarin, a little lower, Vadim, 63, approves but worries about the older ones who are a little lost. “They attacked us. They are no longer our friends as we considered them before. With the aggressor, you also have to fight in this way, which is why I am for rebaptizing”. But this young crusader further does not seem delighted. “Me, I don’t care, he replies half-heartedly. The streets were named in honor of someone who was also a hero. They didn’t do anything bad, those people.”
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“I hadn’t heard of it, but I’m not against it.comments on his side Volodymir. Gagarin yes, he is a cosmonaut and I have nothing against him. Kadeniouk is also our cosmonaut, Ukrainian”. But be careful not to give up on our common history, warns Volodymir. In December, the town hall unbolted the statue of Russian poet Pushkin and is now considering dismantling the Red Army tank that liberated the city from the Nazis in 1943.
It’s too much, says Volodymir. “The tank, you have to realize that our grandparents, our parents, also fought. That’s why it must not be destroyed, it remains a memory, a relic”. However, derussification will take place over a long period of time. In Kramatorsk, still under bombardment, there are no plans yet to change official papers or street signs.
In Kramatorsk, Ukraine, the streets are being derussified – Report by Mathilde Dehimi, Arthur Gerbault and Yashar Fasylov.
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