Vampire feast

The boulevard in the Ukrainian capital, which for many years bore the name of the firmly forgotten Bolshevik trade union figure Ivan Leps, is now renamed Vaclav Gavel. And in Moscow they discuss whether it will be possible to name the name of Fidel Castro one of the streets in Medvedkov. And they hope that the decision of the President of Russia or the mayor of the capital will avoid a long wait - and the sign with the name of the ghoul will make expensive Muscovites.

This choice of names reflects the difference between Ukraine and Russia in a civilizational choice. The humanist, thanks to whom even the revolution was "velvet". And the bloody dictator, for the sake of power and ambition, destroyed thousands of people in his country and abroad, the killer and maniac, whose very name became a symbol of authoritarianism and obscurantism. Two streets are like two different eras in which Ukraine and Russia now live. As a difference in ideas about freedom, personal dignity, value of human life.

In Russia, they talk a lot about Ukrainian decommunization, surprised at the disappearance from the geographical map of familiar names and a fall from the codes of bronze idols. But no one says what is happening later. After the streets and squares of Ukrainian cities and villages are losing the names of killers, bandits and rapists. The fact that this or that prospect is named by the name of Stepan Bandera, Simon Petliura or Ivan Mazepa, any Russian television program will tell you. But this is only three streets in Kyiv. And what happens on other streets, in other cities and villages of the country?

The most striking example is the renaming of Kirovograd to Kropyvnitsky. The city, which has been named after one of the most odious characters of communist mythology for many years - was named after the "himself" Grigory Zinoviev, who would later be accused of the murder of Kirov, is now renamed the Coriferal of the Ukrainian Theater, a man whose performances were admired by the St. Petersburg and Moscow public, the hero of the book of Suvorin - the famous writer compared the Kropyvnitsky with another A native of Ukraine, Great Shchepkin. And, on the heart, where would you like to live in a city that bears the name of the executioner, or in the city, which is named after the person who created the National Theater?

In Kyiv, they discussed for a long time what to call Boulevard Leps - and stopped at Vaclav Gavele, as a man who symbolizes exactly the Europe in which Ukrainians would like to live. And this choice is not a whim of power: the majority of participants in the public discussion on social networks and members of the renaming commission spoke out for Gavel.

And in the small town of Tetieva near Kiev, one of the streets was named in honor of the legendary leader of the local Jewish self -defense detachments of Hirsch Turia, who defended the community during the Civil War, and the other by the name of the famous Israeli songwriter Yaakov Orlanda born here. And that it is, if not a symbol of reconciliation - at the same time not lowered from from above, but conscious and approved by the inhabitants of the modern city, where only cemeteries and these two streets resemble Jews.

And modern Russia is a dream of Castro Street. Actually, only in Moscow is a dream. In Perm, Bryansk and Kirov (again Kirov!) These streets already exist, people live on them, children are born on them who will be very difficult to explain that the model of success is not a dictatorship, not the omnipotence of the murderers gang, not a malicious ideology, not a desire to show a figure in a pocket with rich neighbors, living on a dependency of another authoritarian state. How will a child from Fidel Castro believe in this? How will it understand that murder and poverty are not romance?

I was always struck by people who, even after the collapse of communism, were ready to live on the streets of the petrified Lenin and a fooled Krupskaya, bloody countrywoman and Kotovsky bandit, who destroyed his own army of Voroshilov and mocking the dissidents of Andropov. I do not understand how the city can exist, in which residents simultaneously run to worship the relics of the murdered emperor and insist on preserving the metro station named after his killer. I think that in the heads of these people, an understanding of good and evil mixed up - also because they themselves were brought up on the streets of ghouls, in various Kirovs, Leningrad, Ulyanovsk, Kuibyshev, Molotov, Stalingrad, Kalinins, Sverdlovski and other indecentities. And now they want their children to become easy prey at this vampire feast. It will not work on Stalin Boulevard - so let at least on Fideli Street.