Ekaterinburg, October 2, 2019
Representatives of the Orthodox community of Ekaterinburg have been fighting for Khokhryakov Street, named after a Bolshevik revolutionary who was personally involved in the brutal murder of several clerics, to be renamed.
They initially called for and collected hundreds of signatures for it to be returned to its historical name of Tikhvin Street, though authorities refused because there is now another street in the city with that name, reports Russian Line.
“The name should not be identical or confusingly similar to the name of another object located on the territory of the same settlement,” the mayor’s office said.
The street was renamed by Bolsheviks in 1919 in honor of the sailor Pavel Danilovich Khokhryakov, who directed the punitive expedition of the Bolsheviks in Tobolsk and was involved in the murder of several clergymen, including His Grace Bishop Germogen of Tobolsk and Siberia.
He also took part in delivering the arrested Royal Family of Tsar Nicholas II from Tobolsk to Ekaterinburg, where they met their martyric end.
The Orthodox faithful are still pushing for the murderer’s name to be removed from the map of their city, even if the street can’t be returned to its historical name. It has also been suggested to rename it as “New Tikhvin Street.”
The Ural Church-Historical Society earlier petitioned the mayor to rename all streets of the city bearing the names of revolutionaries in honor of the 300th anniversary of the city. Leaflets were also recently hung around the city telling citizens about lives and personalities of the revolutionaries whose names were honored throughout their city.
Russian state deputies have also raised the issue of renaming the Sverdlovsk Province, of which Ekaterinburg is the administrative center, as it is currently named in honor of Yakov Sverdlov, who played an important role in planning the October Revolution and is widely believed to have participated in the slaying of the Royal Martyrs on July 17, 1918.
There have been several such proposals and decisions in recent years. In August 2016, the Moscow train station Voikovskaya, named for another of the Romanov murderers was renamed as “Baltic;” in January 2018, a Tyumen city Deputy called for a street named after the murderer of Bishop Germogen (Dolganov) to revert to its Christian name in honor of the Dormition of the Mother of God; the same month, His Grace Bishop James of Naryan-Mar proposed renaming the “Communist” islands of a northern archipelago in honor of the Royal Martyrs; and in December 2018, Tsar Nicholas II’s name won a contest for renaming Murmansk Airport, narrowly beating out Soviet polar explorer and Hero of the Soviet Union Ivan Papanin, who fought for the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War.
