Far from the stormy eastern front of Ukraine, a new struggle is taking place, not from the trenches, but through leafy side streets and wide avenues. That’s where the enemy is called Pavlov. The Tchaikovsky. Or Catherine the Great.
Across Ukraine, officials are starting projects to, as they say, “decolonize” their cities. Subways and subway stops whose names evoke the history of the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union are under scrutiny by a population eager to get rid of the traces of the nation that invaded in late February.
“We are defending our country, also on the cultural front line,” said Andriy Moskalenko, Lviv’s deputy mayor and 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 undertake such historical accounting: the United States has struggled for decades with the renaming of Civil War-era monuments. Nor is it the first time Ukraine has made such an effort: after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was one of the many countries in Eastern Europe that changed the name of the streets and removed statues commemorating a era of communist rule that became synonymous with totalitarianism.
This time, the decision to erase Russian names is not just a symbol of a challenge to the invasion and Soviet history, said Vasyl Kmet, a historian at the Ivan Franko National University in Lviv. It is also about reaffirming a Ukrainian identity that many believe has been repressed for centuries by domination by its most powerful neighbor, he said.
“The concept of decolonization is a little broader,” Mr. Kmet. “Today’s Russian politics is based on the propaganda of the so-called Russky mir, the Russian-speaking world. It’s about creating a powerful alternative, a modern Ukrainian national discourse.”
Preparing new traffic signs last month at a factory outside Lviv. Credit … Diego Ibarra Sánchez for The New York Times
The western city of Lviv is one of the many areas carrying out “decolonization” campaigns. So is the northwestern city of Lutsk, which plans to rename more than 100 streets. In the southern port city of Odessa, whose majority is Russian-speaking, politicians are debating whether to remove a monument to Catherine the Great, the Russian empress who founded the city in 1794.
In Kyiv, the capital, the City Council is considering changing the name of Lev Tolstoy’s metro stop to the name of Vasyl Stus, a Ukrainian poet and dissident. The “Minsk” stop, named after the Belarusian capital, which was next to Moscow during the invasion, could 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 the names of streets in honor of some Ukrainians. One is named after writer Petro Kozlaniuk, who collaborated with Soviet security agencies, including the KGB.
The removal of the names of some cultural icons, which the Lviv committee said it did after consulting with academics in the relevant fields, has resulted in further division. The story of characters such as Pyotr Tchaikovsky can be complicated: the classical composer’s family roots were in modern-day Ukraine, and some musicologists say that his works were inspired by Ukrainian folk music.
A few miles from Lviv, Viktor Melnychuk owns a sign factory ready to make new plaques and poles for the renamed streets. While acknowledging that he has a business interest in every change, he is ambivalent with some of the new names.
“Perhaps we should keep some classical writers or poets if they are from other eras. I’m not sure, “he said.” We can’t completely dismiss everything. There was something good there. “
But he planned to uphold the committee’s decisions. And his decision was unanimous: Tchaikovsky would go.
“When we change the name of a street, it doesn’t mean we’re saying, ‘This person didn’t make that invention or it wasn’t important,'” said Moskalenko, Lviv’s deputy mayor. “It means that this person’s work has been used as a colonization tool.”
Mr. Kmet, the historian, 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 in honor of an obscure librarian, Fedir Maksymenko, who said he secretly safeguarded Ukrainian culture and books during the Soviet era.
“I and the Ukrainian culture owe a lot to him,” he said. “We have to work hard today to preserve what he saved.”