Why Do Russia’s Streets Carry The Names Of Killers?
- From: treped <wynnkey@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2009 10:36:19 -0700 (PDT)
Why Do Russia’s Streets Carry The Names Of Killers?
July 21, 2009 – 1:18 pm
RFERL, July 21, 2009
Why Do Cities, Streets Of Russia Continue To Carry The Names Of
Executioners?
by Vladimir Kara-Muza
I never thought I’d find myself agreeing with Vladimir Yakunin.
A product of the “organs” (it is widely believed that in the 1980s he
worked as a KGB agent in New York), a member of Vladimir Putin’s
shadowy Ozero dacha cooperative, the director of several commercial
firms, a trustee of a “patriotic-Great Power” organization, the head
of Russian Railways – Yakunin’s biography is a model portrait of the
elite of Russia’s current chekist kleptocracy.
But, as they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Earlier this month, Yakunin signed an order restoring the historical
name of Moscow’s Leningradsky railway station – Nikolayevsky vokzal.
And he promised that this rechristening would not be the last.
However, the order stood for only a few hours – after an urgent
telephone call, it was rescinded and the map of the capital continues
to show a station bearing the name of a city that no longer exists, a
name that honors the pseudonym of the founder of one of the cruelest
and most bloody regimes in world history.
I imagine the incident with Leningradsky station will stifle Yakunin’s
urge for reform for a long time to come.
Covered In Blood
No one is surprised that the map of today’s Berlin does not show an
Adolf-Hitler-Platz (which was what the current Theodor-Heuss-Platz was
called from 1933-45) or a Hermann-Goering-Strasse (as Ebertstrasse was
called from 1935-45). So why do the cities and streets of our country
continue to carry the names of executioners who are covered in blood;
who plundered its riches; who profaned its spiritual and cultural
heritage; who executed and deported its peasants, priests, and
writers; who destroyed all that was best and living and creative in
the Russian people?
Why are regions of Novosibirsk, Volgograd, and Perm still named after
Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the creator of the machinery of state terror under
whose personal leadership more than 1.5 million people were destroyed
in the first years after the October Revolution?
Why is the largest region of the Urals region still named after
Mikhail Sverdlov, the author of an October 2, 1918, order declaring
that terror against “the enemies of the revolution” was the official
policy of the Soviet government?
Why is there still in St. Petersburg – the birthplace of Russia’s
parliamentary tradition – a street named for Anatoly Zheleznyakov, the
symbol of the Bolshevik coup against the first and only session of the
All-Russian Constituent Assembly (“The workers don’t need any more of
your blabbering! The watchman is tired!”)?
Why does the map of Moscow stil show a Prospekt Andropova, named for
the father of punitive psychiatry and the initiator of the exile of
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Bukovsky, and Aleksandr Galich and of
the internal exile of Andrei Sakharov?
Or maybe that last question isn’t appropriate…
Symptom Of The Illness
After the coming to power of Andropov’s disciples in 2000, a memorial
plaque dedicated to him was installed on Lubyanka Square, while new
monuments to him were erected in Rybinsk and Petrozavodsk. In 2007,
when the opposition was promoting Bukovsky as a presidential
candidate, he returned to Moscow after many years abroad and had to
travel from the airport into the capital along Prospekt Andropova.
The naming of streets is not a trivial matter.
The preservation of Soviet toponyms is a symptom of the illness of our
society, which has still not been able to cure itself of the
totalitarian infection. We were able to take the first step – in
August 1991, the power of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was
broken and in 1992 the Constitutional Court declared the communist
regime “criminal.” But we were afraid to take the second step by
condemning these crimes at the state level, by banning totalitarian
ideologies and their symbols, by undertaking a process of lustration
aimed at all the former prison guards.
No, back in 1991 and 1992 a false nobility of the victors prevailed.
“We don’t need to rock the boat,” people said. “We don’t need witch
hunts.” So why should we be surprised when just eight years later the
witches returned and began their own hunting?
Our current authorities showed their true face better than ever in
their reaction to a recent resolution by the Parliamentary Assembly of
the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which
stated a banal truth: “Two powerful totalitarian regimes – Nazi and
Stalinist – brought genocide, the destruction of human rights and
freedoms, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.”
Over the last nine years, the regime of Vladimir Putin has lost the
ability to surprise, but I think even Kremlin apologists were at least
irked by the public defense of Stalinism coming from the mouths of
officials in the Foreign Ministry and the Federal Assembly.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko called the resolution “a
perversion of history.”
I wonder which feature of Stalinism our state bureaucrats consider
“perverted.” “The destruction of the human rights and freedoms”? After
all, that description does seem somewhat “perverted” considering that
we are talking about the literal destruction of millions of human
beings. Or maybe our officials are upset about the very fact of
comparing these two totalitarian systems, which were in fact all-but-
identical in cruelty, in political structure, and even in style.
“On the entire planet and throughout all of history, there has never
been a regime more evil, more bloody, and, at the same time, more
shrewd and cunning than the Bolshevist regime. No other earthly regime
– not even the apprentice Nazi regime – can compare with it in terms
of the numbers of its victims, or the depth of its infection over so
many years, or the scope of its design, or its thoroughly unified
totalitarianism.”
These words don’t come from any OSCE resolution. They were written by
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “The Gulag Archipelago,” Volume 3, Chapter 5.
The restoration of historical names and ridding ourselves of the
legacy of Soviet totalitarianism is not matter for politicians. It is
the business of all of society to see to it that the names of our
streets and cities reflect the history of Russia and do not glorify
its executioners.
Vladimir Kara-Muza is a journalist and historian and a member of the
Solidarity opposition movement. The views expressed in this
commentary, which originally appeared on the website “Yezhednevny
zhurnal” are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of
RFE/RL.
.
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