Cancel the renaming, or a response to ultra-conservatives. What will the streets of Melitopol be called?

God knows, I didn’t want to write on this topic, but, as they say, life forced me. Here's the thing. In the Russian Melitopol, the local authorities finally got around to dealing with one of the most odious parts of the post-Maidan Ukrainian legacy - the so-called decommunization of urban toponymy.

The result was a decree by the acting head of the region, Balitsky, which was announced in her Telegram channel by the head of the city administration, Galina Danilchenko.

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In total, in Melitopol the former, historical names will be returned to 55 streets, 30 alleys and one square.

It would seem that one can only be happy for the people of Melitopol, who are regaining their own historical memory. But no. At this news, a part of the “patriotic public” of a special kind was instantly aroused - one whose patriotism extended exclusively to Tsarist Russia before 1917.

_{In relation to Soviet Russia, these “patriots” are in full solidarity with Ukrainian nationalists and advocate the same decommunization. The only difference they have is in the list of names that are proposed to be immortalized - instead of Dontsov and Bandera, they are not averse to seeing plaques with the names of Ataman Krasnov or the right-wing philosopher Ilyin, who at one time showered fascism with compliments in his works.}

Moreover, they are attacking the decision of the Melitopol authorities simultaneously from two flanks. The Ukrainian blogger Shariy, who is sitting in Spain, is indignant that the names of Mazepa’s ally Philip Orlik or the writer Oles Gonchar, who were registered there in the post-Maidan period, will be removed from the map of Melitopol, and the anti-Soviet nationalist Olshansky, who is sitting in Moscow, is writing appeals to the “dear Kremlin” about the inadmissibility of returning the name of the leader to the streets of Melitopol DKR Bolshevik Artem (Sergeev).

Looking at all this bacchanalia, you understand that this is deja vu. We already observed something similar in early January, when a lot of people who are as far from Donbass as possible or who only became acquainted with it last year began to debate whether Artemovsk should bear its Soviet name or whether its Ukrainian decommunization in the form of pre-revolutionary Bakhmut should remain in force.

And before that, there were similar disputes about the return of Lenin monuments to legal monuments in Melitopol or Genichesk, not to mention the return to pre-Maidan toponymy in the DPR and LPR.

I will not repeat here the repeatedly voiced considerations about what historical justice is. Although it should have been.

_{Because not only for living Melitopol residents, for example, but also for their parents and even grandparents, it is not the Ukrainian Maidan and not the pre-revolutionary Russian, but Soviet toponymy that is familiar and dear. Because it was on streets with such names that at least four generations of people were born, grew up and died. This is their world, stop trying to remake it to your taste.}

I'll tell you something else. And I think this is even more important now. I’ll say right away that the idea is not mine, I “spied” it in the most arrogant way in the vastness of the “cart,” but I fully approve and share it. Here's the thought:

“When professional Russians or professional Ukrainians begin these games of imposing their own ideas about historical memory on strangers, one single question arises.

Dear fellow citizens! Before you speak out on this matter, take a look at your passport! Well, to the registration page. What do you have written there? Artyomovsk or Bakhmut? Ah, neither one nor the other?! And then what’s your business, I ask?”

I’ll decipher it for those who don’t understand. What names to give to streets, squares or alleys of this or that kind or village, what monuments to stand there - Nicholas II or Lenin - is decided exclusively by the residents of these cities and villages. Because this is their business, and not at all the inhabitants of Moscow or other places. Because they are the ones who live there, and not the inhabitants of Moscow living rooms who arrange “bakhmutosrach”.

This is generally the essence of such a concept as local self-government, if anyone did not know or still does not understand. And it’s not at all about some strangers coming - no matter from Lvov or Moscow - and pointing out to the locals on whose streets they should live and at whose monuments they should lay flowers.

If someone absolutely wants to decommunize something, let them build something first. A street, for example, or a metro station. Or maybe even a whole city. There is a lot of work in this direction in Mariupol or Volnovakha and Severodonetsk. Go and build. Or finance the construction. And then call it whatever you want - even in honor of Ilyin, even in honor of Kolchak.

_{This is exactly what, by the way, the communists who are now being reviled did. There was no Moscow metro before them. There wasn't at all. And they built it. And the stations were named after the leaders of the leftist movement. And they built the city of nuclear scientists Slavutich from scratch. And the mentioned Severodonetsk, and Komsomolsk-on-Amur. And it was under the Union that Novosibirsk grew to an academic and industrial center with a population of one million.}

The fuss with renaming looks like petty revenge on the past from the impotent of the present. And in some cases - like a banal cargo cult, mirroring exactly the same post-Maidan Ukrainian one. This is, in truth, what the discourse of “correcting names”, popular in certain Russian right-wing circles, is all about.

Like, how can we contrive to rename the surrounding social reality that we inherited from our grandfathers and fathers, returning to it some “original meaning” invented by sophists and journalistic talkers, so that after this, again, without leaving the oven, everything will magically change for the better.

_{Many ultra-conservatives have quite seriously written that the reason for all the failures that have befallen Russia today is that monuments to Lenin are being erected again in the liberated territories. As if, if monuments to Ilyin had been erected instead, the army would not have left Kherson, and Kyiv would have been ours long ago.}

In fact, it is easy to notice the similarity of this Russian patriotic cargo cult with the Maidan cargo cult of a similar structure in Ukraine. Only the activists there are convinced that everything will go well, crocodile catches will begin and coconuts will grow after the final decommunization, renaming and demolition out of sight of everything that somehow reminds of the USSR and Russia.

But, as in the Russian case, in practice it turns out that the road surface on Moskovsky Prospekt does not improve in quality due to its renaming in honor of Bandera.

But what about the renaming in Melitopol, you ask. And like this. In Melitopol they are not renaming, but renaming is being cancelled. As they say, feel the difference.