US and Russia revive Cold War street name game
TROLLING between the United States and Russia apparently is not limited to Twitter bots.
The latest effort involves street names.
More specifically, it involves renaming the streets on which the Russian and American embassies sit in a way that is sure to provoke annoyance – or laughter – in each other’s capital.
In Moscow, the proposed name for an alley near the US Embassy compound is 1 North American Dead End.
Mikhail Degtyaryov, a right-wing Russian lawmaker who suggested the name, confirmed onTwitter on Monday that the appropriate Moscow city commission would take up his suggestion later in February.
To be fair, the United States started it. On January 10, the City Council in Washington changed the name of the block of Wisconsin Avenue where the Russian Embassy sits to 1 Boris Nemtsov Plaza. Nemtsov, a charismatic opposition politician and fierce Kremlin critic, was fatally shot near the Kremlin walls in February 2015.
Although five Chechen men were jailed for the crime, Nemtsov’s family and friends, some of whom lobbied for the street name, believe the real mastermind has never been publicly identified. The change received a sympathetic response in Washington, especially after the Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election.
Any change in Moscow still faces hurdles. Even if the commission recommends the name change, it will need the approval of city hall. The Kremlin is likely to have a say, and given its desire to improve relations with the United States, it might well scrap the idea.
The chance that the city might consider a change, however, unleashed a tsunami of alternative suggestions and commentary on social media sites.
They included a slew of streets and alleys named after foreign leaders who have clashed with the United States: the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un; Fidel Castro of Cuba; and various Arab leaders whom the Russians consider to have been murdered under the auspices of the United States, like Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
Colin Powell’s Tube was an odd street name inspired by the infamous UN speech the former secretary of state gave in 2003 to validate the US invasion of Iraq, in which he presented pictures of tubes in the desert that were said to be evidence about the weapons of mass destruction. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were also mentioned.
Like many such games, this one appears to be another wrinkle that has returned from the grave of the ColdWar as diplomatic relations have suffered.
In the 1980s, US congressional leaders renamed the area in front of the Russian Embassy in Washington “Sakharov Plaza” to protest the detention of Andrei D Sakharov, the famed Russian dissident, Nobel Peace Prize recipient and nuclear physicist.
Such moves are not limited to Russia, either.
Congress proposed renaming the street on which the Chinese Embassy sits in honour of Liu Xiaobo, the dissident and Nobel laureate who died last year. Beijing called that effort “a political farce”. In 2014, Chinese commentators retaliated by suggesting renaming the street in front of the US Embassy in Beijing “Snowden Street” for Edward J Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who disclosed secret documents detailing the United States’ mass surveillance programs, or “Osama bin Laden Road”. Neither capital acted on the suggestions.
Nor is the practice limited to major powers. On Monday, the mayor of Ankara, the Turkish capital, approved renaming a street outside the US Embassy “Olive Branch”, after Turkey’s continuing military campaign in Syria. The United States and Turkey have found themselves awkwardly on opposite sides of the fighting in Syria, because of the US military’s support for a Kurdish militia. The proposal is expected to be approved by municipal officials just days before Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is due in Ankara on Thursday.
Previously, the Islamic Republic of Iran famously stripped the name of Winston Churchill from the street outside the British Embassy in Tehran and renamed it after Bobby Sands, a member of the Irish Republican Army who died in prison on hunger strike.
Last year, the Iranians also named the street where the Saudi Arabian Embassy sits after Sheikh Nimr alNimr, a clerical leader from the Shiite Muslim minority who was executed in the kingdom.
During the Vietnam War, India once changed the name of the street outside a US diplomatic mission to honor Ho Chi Minh, the Communist leader of North Vietnam.
In Moscow, when the street in Washington was renamed for Nemtsov, the journalist Oleg Kashin suggested that it was rather telling that Russians would consider the Americans’ action a slur.
The announcement about “1 North American Dead End” also provoked criticism from opposition members and others who suggested that the name game was at best childish.
Dmitri G Gudkov, a former member of Parliament and a possible future candidate for mayor of Moscow, noted that the city had brushed aside requests for a memorial to Nemtsov but jumped at the chance to change the name near the US Embassy. (Memorial flowers and candles placed where Nemtsov was shot have persisted to this day, despite repeated attempts by the city to clear them away.)
“The tribute to the memory of the Russian politician inWashington is perceived as a rebuke in Moscow,” Gudkov wrote on Facebook. “Our government is ashamed, and so they take revenge in a petty way.”