Prague street called after Soviet general to be renamed
In the latest in a series of moves by the city to rid itself of reminders of its decades of Soviet occupation and oppression, Prague City Hall voted on Monday to rename Koněvova Street, which is called after the controversial Soviet military commander Ivan Konev.
This week, Prague city councillors approved a proposal from the Prague 3 district to rename the busy Koněvova Street to Hartigova. The new name is after Karel Hartig, the first mayor of Prague 3’s Žižkov district, where the street is located.
Prague 3 had already approved the change of name last year, although, according to news site novinky.cz, a survey of residents in the street conducted shortly before Russia invaded Ukraine found that 70 percent did not want the street to be renamed, largely because of the administrative and bureaucratic burden associated with it.
The 5,000 or so people who live in the street will have to update their mailing address, re-register their permanent addresses, and get their official ID cards and other documents changed to reflect the name change within six months from the date it comes into effect, October 1.
As a small recompense for their trouble, locals will be able to replace their ID cards for free, rather than for the usual CZK 200 administration fee, and the town hall did its best to make the task as simple as possible, says the mayor of Prague 3, Michal Vronský:
“We plan to extend the town hall opening hours on some days during those six months and to digitise our queue management system. The residents of Koněvova street will have priority registration for appointments to exchange their personal ID cards.”
Ivan Konev was lauded as a hero during Czechoslovakia’s communist era for liberating the country from Nazi occupation at the end of World War II. However, since then, historians have uncovered evidence implicating Koněv in the 1968 Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, and controversy also surrounds his role in the bombardment of the city of Mladá Boleslav, which claimed the lives of dozens of civilians on May 9, 1945 – after Nazi Germany had already been defeated.
Former Prague Mayor Zdeněk Hřib cited this as the reason for the city’s decision to strip Konev of his honorary citizenship in May last year.
“Over time, facts have come to light proving that Konev wasn’t an upstanding man, therefore he cannot be an honorary citizen. For example after the end of the Second World War he decided to bomb Mladá Boleslav, murdering 150 civilians, including children.”
He was also involved in crushing uprisings and dissent in other Eastern Bloc countries, leading the bloody suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising and, as commander of the Soviet forces in East Germany in 1961 – the year the Berlin Wall was built – ordering the closing of the border between East Berlin and West Berlin.
In addition to the street's name change and being stripped of his honorary citizenship, the Prague 6 authorities took down a statue of Konev in the district in April 2020.
Other streets in Prague have also been renamed over the last few years – the name of the street in front of the Russian embassy was changed to Ukrainian Heroes Street last year, and a bridge nearby was renamed in honour of a Ukrainian soldier. In 2020, a square next to the Russian Embassy was renamed after assassinated Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov, and a promenade in a park behind the embassy was named after murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, another outspoken Putin critic.
