The occupation authorities of Melitopol returned the Soviet names to the streets

The head of the Russian occupation administration of the Ukrainian Melitopol, Galina Danylchenko, announced the return to the streets of the city “previously named historically” – for example, the streets of Lenin, Krupskaya, Dzerzhinsky, Voroshilov, Ordzhonikidze, Chapaev and other figures of the Soviet revolution and power.

According to the official, the decision was made “due to numerous appeals from citizens” and in order to restore “historical justice”.

Danylchenko, announcing the changes, mentioned the previous wave renamed to Melitopol: in 2016, as part of the “decommunization” announced by the Ukrainian authorities. According to the official, then “many streets were named after Ukrainian Nazi ideologues.” At the same time, out of more than eighty streets that will be given Soviet names, only a few bore the names of representatives of the Ukrainian nationalist movement.

In Danilchenko’s published list of geographical objects subject to renaming, there are streets born in Melitopol of the Soviet film director Grigory Chukhrai and the Soviet artist Alexander Tyshler (now they will again be the streets of Artyom and Kotovsky, respectively), the streets of the “father of Soviet cosmonautics” academician Sergei Korolev (it will be renamed the street Kuibyshev), Prince Yaroslav the Wise (it will become the street of Rosa Luxemburg), film director Alexander Dovzhenko (he returned the name of the theorist of Marxism, the German Karl Liebknecht). Even Yaltynskaya street and Krymsky lane will be renamed.

• Melitopol was captured by Russian troops at the beginning of March last year. On September 30, Putin signed a decree on the “annexation” of the city, along with several other occupied Ukrainian territories, to Russia. This decision is not recognized by the vast majority of countries in the world.
• Since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Ukrainian authorities dismantled hundreds of monuments and renamed several thousand streets that were somehow connected with the USSR and Russia in dozens of Ukrainian cities. The process of “decommunization” accelerated sharply after the beginning of a full-scale armed invasion of Russian troops on Ukrainian territory in February of last year.