Where the Streets Have Two Names

Muscovites still confused by the dozens of streets and squares that have shed their Communist-era names since 1990 may soon have more changes to contend with, from the renaming of Pushkinskaya Ulitsa to the dedication of a new Martin Luther King Square.


On Tuesday, the Moscow government will consider a draft decree renaming over 120 streets, mainly restoring prerevolutionary names changed under Soviet power, city hall spokesman Igor Zverev said Monday.


Zverev said most of the new changes had been approved by the Soviet-era Moscow City Council but were never carried out.


The increasingly hardline council, backed by Muscovites who complained they no longer recognized their city, halted many of the changes before it was dissolved last October.


The decree states that while more than 160 streets, alleys and squares were renamed on paper between 1990 and 1993, only in 40 of those locations had city authorities posted new street signs and rewritten inhabitants' residence permits. In common parlance the remaining streets still go by their Soviet-era names.


The half-baked changes, the decree continues, have complicated apartment privatization, registration of new businesses and distribution of city benefits.


Explaining that "the Moscow government considers it inexpedient" to retain the Soviet names, the decree orders city officials to post new street signs to complete the changes, 76 of which aim to restore old names to preserve Moscow's historical center.


If the measure is adopted, Ulitsa Gertsena will become Bolshaya Nikitskaya; Pushkinskaya and Chekhov-skaya will become Bolshaya and Malaya Dmitrovka; and Ulitsa Stanislavskogo would become Leontyevsky Pereyulok.


The lane named for Arkady Gaidar, a Soviet writer and the grandfather of reformist economist Yegor Gaidar, would revert to Bolshoy Kazyonny Pereulok, so called because the royal treasury, or kazna, was located there in the 17th century.


Far from purging all reminders of the Soviet era, the decree would preserve Leninsky Prospekt and post a plaque on the newly named Ulitsa Chayanova honoring the "famous Soviet scientist Alexander Chayanov." The original order of 1993 aimed to head off controversy over changing for the sake of historical consistency street names that do not seem particularly Soviet.


Pushkinskaya Ulitsa, renamed during the celebration of the writer's 100th birthday in 1937, is "in no way linked to the activities of the genius of Russian poetry" it says, but was named Bolshaya Dmitrovka by "our forefathers," as an important 14th-century trade route to Dmitrov. Similarly, the order argues that although Chekhov did once live on Ulitsa Chekhova, "it was far from his only place of residence in Moscow."


The new decree would also name the square near metro Belyayevo in southern Moscow after American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and the square outside the hotel Kosmos in the north after French president Charles de Gaulle.