In Kyiv, the street of Mikhail Bulgakov, who lived there for 13 years, was renamed

The authorities say they did this together with the residents of the capital

The website of the so-called “Kiev City Military Administration” (blocked in the Russian Federation for obvious reasons) reports that at the plenary session of the 2nd session of the 9th convocation, the majority of deputies “continued to get rid of names that influenced the distortion of our (that is, Ukrainian) national identity.” Moreover, this was done “jointly with the residents” (in the original source all this is written in Ukrainian).

In total, ten names underwent national “rebranding,” but we will present the most important ones.

Belgorodskaya Street (named after the city that Ukraine constantly shells) now bears the name of dissident Vasily Ovsienko.

The deputies also did not spare the figure of Soviet Kyiv, the head of the partisan detachment during the Second World War, Nikolai Mateyuk – but now the Desnyansky district can “boast” of the street of Vasily Ivanis, an officer of the Volunteer Army, a participant in the Ice Campaign, who ended his days in Canada in the status of a Ukrainian historian. (Ivanis headed the separatist “Kuban People’s Republic” in 1920, so the use of his name is a clear echo of Ukraine’s “territorial claims” to Russia.)

Go ahead.

Bulgakov Street (who lived in Kyiv for thirteen years, from 1906 to 1919) is now the street of the late actor Vakhtang Kikabidze, who supported Ukraine.

The former library named after them was also “cleansed” of connections with Russian literature. Alexandra Blok (now the Ignatius Yura Library).

To be honest, it is useless to look for logic in the renaming, given that Ignatius (Gnat) Petrovich was a figure exclusively in Soviet Ukraine, a laureate of several Stalin Prizes (!), who died 25 years before Ukrainian independence.

Because there was Chernigovskaya Street, but now it has become a street named after two brothers, servicemen of the Armed Forces of Ukraine who died in the Donbass. The second part is clear – but what did Chernigov do wrong?

And then it’s completely out of the realm of absurdity. Pavel Skoropadsky Street (since 2003, before that – Novy Proezd) in the Pechersky district was also “cancelled” – from now on it became Bessarabsky Proezd.

But you can breathe out. The general of the army of the Russian Empire, who in 1918, with the help of the Germans, became the hetman of the “Ukrainian state” (which had a yellow-blue flag as a state symbol, although of a slightly different shade, and used the modern anthem “It’s still dead…”) the Ukrainian authorities did not stop loving. It’s just that on March 23, 2023, Lev Tolstoy Street (Shevchenkivskyi district), without looking at the existing map, was designated Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky Street, and now they simply got rid of the “extra” one.

It remains to explain what “city residents” have to do with it.

It turns out that in the “Digital Kiev” application, since the winter of last year, a “popular vote” was held, where 26% of participants wanted Bulgakov to be replaced by Kikabidze, and the Tbilisi citizen, who became famous under the USSR, even beat out the wonderful classic of Ukrainian literature of the late 19th – early 20th centuries, actor and playwright Ivan Karpenko-Kary. Let us leave aside the idea of ​​how such voting is done on the Internet.

Let’s try to understand something else.

Maybe the people of Kiev really stopped considering Mikhail Afanasyevich as one of their own? It’s possible, but in any case, they got rid of Bulgakov right now, because after Lokshin’s film, the author of “The Master and Margarita” (in whose works Kyiv is no less than Moscow) is again a household name. So we will consider the decision of the Kiev City Council deputies an original “PR campaign” with a minus sign, in response to which it is worth picking up not a banner, but a book.