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Ruling Party Members Oppose Yerevan Street Renaming


Armenia - The Yerevan municipality building.
Armenia - The Yerevan municipality building.

An opposition proposal to rename streets in Yerevan still bearing the names of controversial Soviet-era figures met with resistance from pro-government members of the municipal council on Tuesday.

A bill drafted by council members representing the opposition Yelk alliance applies to six streets. Three of them are named after ethnic Armenian Communist leaders who were involved mass repressions in Soviet Armenia and other parts of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s.They include Anastas Mikoyan, Joseph Stalin’s Armenian-born associate who for decades held top leadership positions in Moscow. Yelk wants a Yerevan street bearing Mikoyan’s name to be named after Kirk Kerkorian, the late Armenian-American philanthropist.

Yelk is also objecting to the city’s Leningradian Street symbolizing the Soviet-era name of Saint Petersburg, Russia’s second largest city. It wants the street to be named after Leonid Azgaldian, an Armenian hero of the 1991-1994 war in Nagorno-Karabakh who was killed in action.

Yerevan Mayor Taron Markarian, who is affiliated with the ruling Republican Party of Armenia (HHK), said last month that his administration is ready to discuss the proposed changes. Markarian made clear at the same time that he strongly opposes the idea of renaming Leningradian Street. He argued in particular that Yerevan and Saint Petersburg are sister cities.

Another senior HHK figure, Armen Ashotian, also spoke out against this particular name change over the weekend. He said the street was named in memory of hundreds of thousands of civilians who died during the 1991-1994 Nazi German siege of Leningrad, rather than Vladimir Lenin.

The Yerevan council’s standing committee on culture dominated by HHK members rejected not only this but also other name changes proposed by Yelk after discussing the bill on Tuesday.

“What would ordinary Yerevan residents gain from tearing off and throwing away that page of our history apart from a waste of time and material loss?” Martin Vartazarian, one of the committee members representing the HHK, told RFE/RL’s Armenian service (Azatutyun.am).

Arayik Harutiunian, a Yelk councilor, denounced this stance. “Their main argument is that public opinion on this issue has not been examined,” he said. “As if the Republican Party gauges public opinion or holds referendums on every other issue.”

“Our initiative is about a value system,” he added. “We must not have street bearing the names of anti-state, anti-national figures.”

Harutiunian made clear that Yelk is undaunted by the committee’s negative assessment. Citing an Armenian law on local government, he said the Yelk motion must still be debated by the full Yerevan council.

The ruling HHK has a comfortable majority in the legislature.

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