Vitaly Portnikov: "Feast of Vampires"

“A boulevard in the Ukrainian capital, which for many years bore the name of the long-forgotten Bolshevik trade unionist Ivan Lepse, has now been renamed in honor of Vaclav Havel. And in Moscow they are discussing whether it will be possible to name one of the streets in Medvedkov after Fidel Castro. And they hope that the decision of the Russian President or the mayor of the capital will avoid a long wait - and a sign with the name of a ghoul will make dear Muscovites happy,” writes a columnist in a column on the website “Grani.ru” .

“This choice of names reflects the difference between Ukraine and Russia in the choice of civilization. A humanist, thanks to whom even the revolution was “velvet.” And a bloody dictator, for the sake of power and ambition, who destroyed thousands of people in his country and abroad, a murderer and a maniac, the name itself which became a symbol of authoritarianism and obscurantism. Two streets are like two different eras in which Ukraine and Russia now live."

“In Kyiv, they debated for a long time what to name Lepse Boulevard, and settled on Vaclav Havel as a person who symbolizes exactly the Europe in which Ukrainians would like to live. And this choice is not a whim of the authorities: the majority of participants in the public discussion spoke for Havel social networks and members of the renaming commission.

And in the small town of Tetiev near Kiev, one of the streets was named after the legendary leader of the local Jewish self-defense units, Hirsh Turiya, who defended the community during the Civil War, and the other was named after the famous Israeli songwriter Yaakov Orland, who was born here. And what if this is not a symbol of reconciliation - not descended from somewhere above, but conscious and approved by the residents of a modern city, where only cemeteries and these two streets remind of Jews.

And modern Russia is a dream about Castro Street. Actually, only in Moscow is it a dream. In Perm, Bryansk and Kirov, these streets already exist, people live on them, children are born on them, to whom it will be very difficult to explain that the model of success is not a dictatorship, not the omnipotence of a gang of murderers, not a misanthropic ideology, not a desire to show off the fig in your pocket rich neighbors, living at the expense of another authoritarian state. How will a child from Fidel Castro Street believe this? How will he understand that murder and poverty are not romance?

I have always been amazed by people who, even after the collapse of communism, were ready to live on the streets of the petrified Lenin and the stupefied Krupskaya, the bloody Zemlyachka and the bandit Kotovsky, who destroyed his own army Voroshilov and mocked Andropov’s dissidents. I don’t understand how a city can exist in which residents simultaneously run to venerate the relics of the murdered emperor and insist on preserving the name of his killer for the metro station. I think that in the heads of these people the understanding of good and evil is mixed - also because they themselves were raised on the streets of ghouls, in various Kirov, Leningrad, Ulyanovsk, Kuibyshev, Molotov, Stalingrad, Kalinin, Sverdlovsk and other obscenities. And now they want their children to become easy prey for this vampire feast. If it doesn’t work on Stalin Boulevard, then at least on Fidel Street.”