Moscow street named after Solzhenitsyn
As Alexander Solzhenitsyn was laid to rest last month, President Dmitri Medvedev decreed that he be memorialized "for his extraordinary contribution" to Russian culture. Among other things, a Moscow street should be renamed for the great chronicler of Russia's turbulent 20th century.
In short order, the office of Mayor Yuri Luzhkov announced that Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya Ulitsa, or Big Communist Street, actually one of the prettiest, quietest and most well-preserved streets in Moscow, full of elegant pre-revolutionary mansions, is now Ulitsa Solzhenitsyna, or Solzhenitsyn Street.
Medvedev had neither set a deadline nor singled out a street, but as Izvestia, the former Soviet government newspaper that still has close ties to the Kremlin pointed out, the Russian capital is still full of place names representing the ideology Solzhenitsyn spent a lifetime railing against.
"Why not rename Leninsky Prospekt, or Shosse Entuziastov?" Izvestia suggested, referring to a highway along which prisoners were marched off to distant Siberian incarceration both in czarist times, when it was known as the Vladimirsky trakt, and in the Soviet era.
Read entire article at International Herald Tribune
In short order, the office of Mayor Yuri Luzhkov announced that Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya Ulitsa, or Big Communist Street, actually one of the prettiest, quietest and most well-preserved streets in Moscow, full of elegant pre-revolutionary mansions, is now Ulitsa Solzhenitsyna, or Solzhenitsyn Street.
Medvedev had neither set a deadline nor singled out a street, but as Izvestia, the former Soviet government newspaper that still has close ties to the Kremlin pointed out, the Russian capital is still full of place names representing the ideology Solzhenitsyn spent a lifetime railing against.
"Why not rename Leninsky Prospekt, or Shosse Entuziastov?" Izvestia suggested, referring to a highway along which prisoners were marched off to distant Siberian incarceration both in czarist times, when it was known as the Vladimirsky trakt, and in the Soviet era.