Charków – przeciwdziałanie dominującej komunistycznej toponimii miasta
Kharkiv – counteracting the city’s dominant communist toponymy

Summary/Abstract: Kharkiv is the second largest city in Ukraine after Kiev in terms of importance and population. From 1919 to 1935, Kharkiv was the official capital of Soviet Ukraine, and therefore Lenin’s “Communist Propaganda Plan” was most often applied in it. Most streets, administrative districts, industrial plants, community centres, schools, etc. were named after communist activists or symbols of communism. In this context, the article aims to analyse a long-term process of removing the dominant communist toponymy of the city during de-communization in Kharkiv. After the declaration of independence, the Ukrainian authorities banned the Communist Party and the propagation of communist ideology, but despite this, for around thirty years Kharkiv’s toponymy continued to be dominated by names associated with the Soviet propaganda. It was only with the onset of the war in the Donbass in 2014 that real renaming of toponymic objects with communist origins began in Kharkiv. The first major change took place in May 2016, when seven city districts, five metro stations, 52 streets and a park were renamed. The process of change accelerated after the onset of a full-scale war in 2022.

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