Toulouse: what stories are hidden behind the avenue de l’URSS, the rue d’Ukraine or de kyiv?
Toulouse is the only major French city to have an avenue de l’URSS, an artery located in the Saint-Agne district of Toulouse. While Russia has started a war in Ukraine, is this name still debated?
Russian President Vladimir Putin provoked a major war nearly three weeks ago, bombing Ukrainian cities daily and killing hundreds. This conflict revives the pains of the past and leaves some to imagine that the boss of the Kremlin, through this conflict, wants to restore Russia to its greatness in the image of the Soviet Union. Among the more than 30,000 French municipalities, Toulouse is an exception. It is indeed the only large French city to hold an avenue bearing the name of this past history. Avenue de l’URSS, located in the Saint-Agne district, was named as such in 1944 “as a sign of thanks”. “The elected officials of Toulouse at the time had decided to attribute the name of the three allies of the Second World War to three avenues of the City in tribute to their war effort and in thanks”, says Jean-Michel Lattes, elected from Toulouse, Chairman of the street naming commission in Toulouse since 2014.
The latter explains that it is an old tradition of the Toulouse municipality to number the streets according to the various conflicts. “This is also the reason why the streets of Metz and Alsace are called so, in homage to the war of 1914-1918”, slips the president of the commission. And what stories are hidden behind the rue de l’Ukraine in the Bagatelle district or that of kyiv at the Reynerie? “Toulouse being a twinned city with kyiv, it was logical to echo it by naming certain arteries like that”, simply justifies Jean-Michel Lattes who before being president of the street names commission in 2014 was member since 2000.
But with the current conflict raging in Ukraine, have residents expressed their desire to change these names? In 2004, 13 years after the fall of the Soviet Empire in December 1991, some Toulouse residents wondered about the advisability of keeping the name “Avenue de l’URSS”. What about today ? “We have not recently been asked about this”, assures Jean-Michel Lattes.
“Part of our history”
And the elected also invokes that “by tradition in Toulouse we avoid changing the names of the streets”. According to him, this would also mean “contradicting decisions taken by elected officials in a particular context, we must not forget that the USSR worked to liberate France from the Nazi yoke”. And in this specific case, Jean-Michel Lattes also advances the argument of the administrative consequences of such a change. “60 companies located on this ax should change their domiciliation just like 400 people who live there”, he discovered. “Even if this war is unacceptable and questionable, we cannot change the street names at each event, it is part of our history which is neither all black nor all white and then we must make an important distinction: the USSR it’s not Russia,” adds François Piquemal, member of the street names commission. On the other hand, he pleads for a “contextualization” of these names like the inserts suspended in the corridors of the Toulouse metro indicating the origin of the names of the stops. “It seems to me appropriate and feasible to explain the reasons and the context in which this name was affixed. A city carries a memory and these explanatory panels will allow this work of memorial education to be carried out”.
Moreover, four women’s names, three of which are linked to Ukraine, have been proposed. They are Amina Oukuyeva, a Chechen refugee in kyiv, Anastasia Baburova, a Ukrainian journalist for a Russian newspaper who was assassinated at the age of 25 in Moscow, and Lioudmila Pavlichenko, a Red Army sniper during the World War II, also a native of Ukraine.