MOSCOW ESCHEWS TIT-FOR-TAT STREET NAME CHANGES

The Moscow authorities on March 24 threatened to change the name of Moscow’s Klimashkin Street, where Poland’s embassy is located, to General Mikhail Muravyov Street, after the tsarist general who brutally suppressed the Polish uprising of 1863. The move followed the Warsaw city council’s decision to name a traffic circle in the Polish capital after Dzhokhar Dudaev, Chechnya’s first separatist leader, who was killed by a Russian airstrike in 1996. The Russian Foreign Ministry had denounced the Warsaw city council’s decision as “an insult to the memory of Russians, to the victims of terrorist acts in Moscow and other Russian cities and as a virtual declaration of support for international terrorism, a disciple of which was killed 10 years ago in the North Caucasus, the leader of the Chechen separatists and a nationalist extremist.”

On March 23, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov and Moscow City Duma Speaker Vladimir Platonov signed a joint statement calling the Warsaw city council’s move “an unfriendly and openly provocative gesture.” Platonov suggested that Moscow might consider changing Klimashkin Street to General Mikhail Muravyov Street, MosNews reported on March 24. However, Kommersant on March 25 quoted Platonov as saying that “the Moscow authorities have too much respect for their Polish colleagues to name the street on which the Polish embassy is located after Muravyov.” Platonov added that a Moscow Duma deputy had come up with “this extravagant humorous suggestion…during the course of discussing an appeal to our Polish colleagues not to name the square after Dudaev.”