INHUMAN CITY OF CH: PROBLEMS OF HISTORICAL MEMORY

Any settlement, regardless of the number of inhabitants living in it, has its own cultural and historical memory. In cities that respect their history it is reminded and told by street names, large and small sculptural monuments and memorial signs standing on these streets. This material raises issues related to the historical memory of the city of Ch, shows the circumstances and causes of the abnormal situation of the proper names of the street and road network that has existed for more than a hundred years. In September 2020, the author sent a letter to the Department of Culture of the Chelyabinsk City Administration. By the time of sending the article to the editorial board of the journal, the author has not received either a written or oral response, and the proposals made in the appeal were not subject to consideration at the meetings of the commission for the assignment, change, and cancellation of the names of the city street network, elements of the planning structure, and municipal facilities of the city of Chelyabinsk. As the naïve expectations were not met, the author decided to make public the content of the letter, which is attached. The article concludes that the city, which as of January 1, 2023 ranked eighth in terms of population among sixteen cities with a population of over one million, has a depressing picture with urban memory covering the period of the city’s history until 1917. And the author names the main reasons for such a bleak situation of indiff erence and disregard for the pre-revolutionary history: the revolutionary frenzy of the people who came to power in Chelyabinsk after the end of the Civil War; the course set by the party for the eradication of everything pre-revolutionary and counter- revolutionary; a not-too-high, almost low, level of the urban political elite; low qualifi cation of historians who do not love and do not know their history, who do not fulfi ll their direct duties to preserve and popularize historical memory; deafness and the reluctance of the authorities to come out of the protracted hibernation that has been going on since the end of the last century, since the 1990s, etc.