Try finding the American embassy in Moscow by its address and you now hit a political statement. Russian authorities have renamed the open ground outside the compound “Donetsk People’s Republic Square,” after the breakaway region in eastern Ukraine that Moscow backs. NPR reported on the change in July 2022, a month after the new street signs went up.
Washington does not recognize the Donetsk “republic,” like most of the world outside Russia, and it has not adopted the address. The embassy’s old listing was Bolshoy Deviatinsky Pereulok No. 8. This week, NPR noted, the embassy website replaced its contact line with map coordinates, “55,75566° N, 37,58028°E,” though at least one section still carried the traditional street. An embassy spokeswoman declined to comment.
How the name was picked
The idea first appeared in April, when Mayor Sergei Sobyanin put the choice to an online poll that seemed built to provoke. Donetsk People’s Republic Square won with 45%, amid accusations of vote rigging. The Moscow Times added a detail from the independent outlet Mediazona: government workers in the city were allegedly told by their employers to vote for the Donetsk option.
Russian officials made no effort to hide their pleasure. At a June press conference, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said she hoped the United States would not take too long to recognize “the new republics.” She added that Russians were welcome to send letters to the new address, as often as they liked.
The backdrop is blunt. In February, President Vladimir Putin formally recognized Donetsk and the neighboring self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic, then sent in troops he described as a “special military operation” to “liberate” the wider Donbas.
Britain next
The embassy did not stay alone for long. On July 4, 2022, the mayor’s office said the ground beside the British embassy, along Smolenskaya Naberezhnaya, would become “Luhansk People’s Republic Square.” The Moscow Times said about 109,000 residents took part in that poll, and 56.85% backed the British embassy location. Voters could also have picked sites near the German, Lithuanian or Belgian embassies. The announcement followed Russia’s capture of Lysychansk. London had not yet responded.
A former deputy mayor of Moscow, Sergei Stankevich, had no doubt what he was looking at. “It’s just what today we call ‘trolling,’” he told NPR. In his reading, the authorities want the Americans to feel psychologically uncomfortable, and he suspected the name would change again one day.
Street names in the city have a record of shifting with politics. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, czarist-era addresses gave way to communist leaders. After the Soviet Union ended in 1991, many historical names came back. Washington has played the game too: during the Cold War, the ground beside the old Soviet embassy was named Andrei Sakharov Plaza, and more recently the D.C. City Council named a square across from the Russian embassy for the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was murdered in 2015.
Moscow taxi driver Denis Usmanov, seven years behind the wheel, thought both governments were missing the point. “It doesn’t matter what they call it,” he said. “The important thing is to get you where you need to go.”
Sources
- Russia and the U.S. engage in name-calling over the U.S. Embassy's Moscow address (NPR)
- Moscow Renames Area Near U.K. Embassy 'Luhansk Square' After Ukraine Separatists (The Moscow Times)
