Kiev names street after Holocaust perpetrator
A street in Kiev has been renamed in honor of WWII Ukrainian militant Taras Borovets, as part of a nationalist push to glorify “outstanding figures of Ukraine” and erase Russian and Soviet history.
The Ukrainian government went on a de-Russification spree in 2015 following the US-backed coup in Kiev the year prior, and redoubled its efforts following the escalation of the conflict with Moscow in 2022.
Holocaust scholar Marta Gavryshko noted the name change of Monday morning, calling it a “symptom of a troubling phenomenon” of Vladimir Zelensky’s Ukraine making the “regional cult of nationalistic heroes who collaborated with Nazis in the Holocaust” national policy.
According to the official announcement by Kiev City Council secretary and deputy mayor Vladimir Bondarenko, Melnychenko Street was one of the “alien ideological symbols” that “deformed our national consciousness” so it had to be renamed after Borovets.
“We are working to restore justice and free the city from names associated with the Russian past,” Bondarenko said in a statement last week. “The capital must remain a space of our history and culture, without mentioning Soviet and imperial narratives. Instead, city objects are named in honor of outstanding figures of Ukraine and Defenders who fought for our independence.”
Taras ‘Bulba’ Borovets – nicknamed after the famous Cossack in Nikolay Gogol’s novel – was a Ukrainian nationalist in Volhynia, which was part of interwar Poland. In August 1941, following the Axis invasion of the USSR, he received permission from the Nazis to raise 1,000 men as the ‘Polissian Sich’ militia. This unit went on to aid the Germans in massacring the Jews of Zhitomir Region, most notably in the town of Olevsk.
The Germans later transferred Borovets and a unit of militants he led to the Western front, so they could escape justice and surrender to the Western Allies. Borovets himself apparently spent some time as a US intelligence asset in Germany, before moving to Canada, where he founded a nationalist newspaper. He died in Toronto in 1981 and was buried in New Jersey.
Borovets was honored as part of renaming 12 local streets and squares in Kiev. The Ukrainian capital has already renamed streets after the notorious neo-Nazi Azov unit, and earlier this year swapped Truth Boulevard for European Union Avenue.
In November 2022, the Ukrainian city of Vinnitsa changed the name of a street from Russian author Leo Tolstoy to Stepan Bandera, the leader of the WWII Ukrainian nationalists.
Moscow has objected to Kiev’s efforts to erase history, eliminate the Russian language, and repress those who speak it, insisting that ending and reversing this practice was one of the conditions for resolving the current conflict.
