25 Years Later, Poland Is Still Trying to Rid Itself of Communist Street Names

Goodbye, Heroes of Vietnam Street. Farewell, Six-Year Plan Avenue. So long, Forty Years of the Polish People's Republic Estate. This year, Poland's Senate has moved to ban street names commemorating people and events celebrated by the country's former communist government. The group pushing for the changes is Poland’s Institute of National Memory, a body set up in 1998 to remove traces of the country's former communist rulers and promote the memory of their victims. In defending the removals, the Institute argues that such street names are:

To outsiders, the surprise might not be that Poland is getting rid of street names celebrating communist heroes and battles, but that any still exist at all. In fact, most of the thousands of such place names were changed shortly after 1989, many of them altered to celebrate figures admired by the new government. Thus Warsaw’s Karol Swierczewski Street became Solidarity Avenue, Nowa Huta’s Cuban Revolution Street became John Paul II Avenue and its hitherto neutrally named Central Plaza became Ronald Reagan Square.