Uncovering disciplined pasts: Tour guiding through Kyiv's changing place names

ABSTRACT

This article examines practices of tour guiding in Kyiv in the context of an ideologically disciplined commemorative culture. Responding to calls for more critical engagement with changing place names, we show how tour guides use them to walk the fine line between entertaining their guests and positioning themselves in memory debates.

KEYWORDS:

• Heritage tourism
• place names
• tour guiding
• memory politics
• Kyiv

Introduction

Across the post-socialist region, almost all aspects of commemorative culture have changed since the Soviet Union’s disintegration. One way in which the alteration of time-tested narratives has manifested itself is the changed names of streets, squares, bridges and institutions. These new labels mark post-socialist cityscapes with a newly embraced version of the past. Place names help people find orientation in a city but are also meant to orient them towards the prevalent ideology of the time (Azaryahu 1996; Gill 2005). In Ukraine’s capital Kyiv, the frequent renaming of streets and squares, as well as the removal and sporadic replacement of statues led to a complex urban labyrinth of historic symbolisms.

On a busy Saturday night in the summer of 2019, one guide navigated a large group of tourists through this labyrinth in Kyiv’s Podil neighbourhood. Her tour was dedicated to the history of this part of town, the lower city that was once dotted with churches. Pokrovska Street, near the foot of the hill, retains two historic churches. The guide used their Ukrainian baroque features to reflect on the mentality of the Ukrainian people and how Russian and Ukrainian aesthetics influenced each other. Pokrovska Podilska church, named after an Orthodox holiday, now again lends its name to the street after the Kyiv Commission for the Restoration of Historic Street Names had renamed it in 1990 (Kyyivs’ka Mis’ka Rada 2015, 198). In the preceding decades, the street had been named after the chemist Nikolay Zelinskiy, who was instrumental in establishing the USSR’s petrochemical sector. Standing beneath one of the replaced street signs, the tour guide said she did not quite understand such name changes. Zelisnkiy, after all ‘was just a scientist’.¹ Soviet scientists and artists were not specifically targeted under Ukraine’s latest renaming campaign, whereas party officials and military commanders were explicitly forbidden to retain their street names (Verkhovna Rada 2015).

The guide in this episode uses place names to position her narrative in the ‘city text’ (Azaryahu 1990, 1996, 2011) by discussing cultural influence the Russian Empire had on Ukrainian church architecture while in the same place defending a Soviet scientist who did not deserve to be erased from the street map. Tour guides are interpreters of a city text to visitors; they can add to the text, leave out bits of it or contribute correction and commentary, and they can speculate about the motives of the city-text’s authors. Guides thereby act as choreographers of the ‘performance’ of a touristic visit (Urry and Larsen 2011, 192), part of which is to reproduce memories and to represent them in a stylized way, mapped on symbolic spaces (Edensor 2001, 64). Focusing on the communication of symbolic places in guided tours, this article asks to what extent the state’s efforts of shaping historical narratives through place names translate into changed representations vis-à-vis tourists. Does the state’s disciplining of the past hold in tour guide narratives? Do place names nudge tour guides’ historical narratives in a certain direction? Drawing on literature on symbolic politics, in particular critical studies of toponymy and Ukrainian commemorative politics, we analyse guides’ narrative strategies and ideological positioning when guiding diverse audiences through Kyiv. We show how guided tours as part of the hospitality industry bring their own motives to this conversation about place names; within a capitalist service industry, guides are expected to come across as informative and entertaining rather than as lecturers for a certain faction in any of the on-going historic disputes.

In the following sections we first position the paper in relation to the existing scholarly literature and discuss recent developments in Ukrainian commemorative politics, followed by a discussion of tour guides’ role in this environment. We then provide a close analysis of how tour guides talk about changing place names in the context of attempts at disciplining the past. In a concluding section we discuss how policies of place naming translate into narratives.

Studying place names and naming practices

Streets and squares are not obvious candidates for symbolic spaces. They are so mundane in their function that they can hardly count for what Pierre Nora (1989) calls lieux de mémoire, the primary function of which is to commemorate. If streets become labelled with symbolic names, they mediate an appearance of naturalness by ‘weaving history into the geographic fabric of everyday life’ (Alderman 2002, 99), an effect that is most desired in the light of the past’s function of legitimizing the current order (Azaryahu 1990, 34). The innocence of a quotidian place makes naming and renaming of streets and squares a more subtle technique of memory making than erecting and tearing down monuments. Whereas most statues and memorials can be circumnavigated during day-to-day activities, the narratives told in street names are more obtrusive. People can choose to visit statues or memorials as desired, but street names they will have to use in some form whether they like them or not. The naming of streets and squares is therefore a preferred tool by states to mandate a particular version of the past to all users of the city. If the replacing of monuments allows making a revised historical narrative abundantly clear, the replacing of place names gives it a wider reach. The two realms of historical representation should therefore not be studied separately but as parts of the same contestation (E. Palonen 2008). Yet, new place names and efforts of ‘toponymic cleansing’ (Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and Azaryahu 2010, 460) reveal only a small part of how perceptions of the past change. They are a good indicator of the historical preferences of elites, but tell us little about the historical consciousness of the people, who use these streets (Palmberger 2012, 8–10). Authorities can control where and how streets are named, they cannot control the context in which people use the new names and the historical interpretations evoked by them (Azaryahu 1996, 320). There is therefore increasing consensus in the emerging field of critical toponymy that more analysis of the reception and response to government-sponsored renaming efforts is needed (Drozdzewski 2018; Creţan and Mathews 2016; Light and Young 2014, 683; Faraco and Murphy 1997, 146). In addition to the focus on usages, it has repeatedly been suggested to adopt a more process-oriented approach in studying place names, that is a focus on the cultural practices of (re)naming places rather than on the prevailing names (Giraut and Houssay-Holzschuch 2016, 4; Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and Azaryahu 2010). When studying the cultural practice of naming, it is important to reserve attention for the debate that led to it and for the names that did not make it into the nomenclature (Giraut and Houssay-Holzschuch 2016, 4).

One hitherto little explored way of adopting this focus on practices and processes is city tourism. In the city tours observed for this study, cultural outsiders encounter local experts, who can give detailed and entertaining insights into the city’s past without much oversight from the agents of official commemorative politics who mandate changes in the ‘city-text’. Observing guided tours is therefore studying an initiation into competing historical narratives, in our case the initiation of cultural outsiders, such as tourists, by ‘cultural intermediaries’, such as tour guides (Wynn 2012). This encounter allows us to observe a spectrum of different ways how narratives inscribed in place names can be interpreted, retold and questioned. We do this in a city located on a geopolitical fault line, where naming and renaming places has been one of the most visible manifestations of a state effort to discipline the past.

The breakdown of one-party states and the emergence of newly independent nation-states across Eurasia has attracted the attention of scholars studying how changing historical preferences transform a society’s toponyms and how a changed street map can influence people’s perceptions of the past. The process of coming to terms with the Soviet past provided scholars of the region with a quarter of a century worth of material to examine the normative and legal dimensions of renaming (e.g. Kasianov 2018; Liubarets 2016; Marples 2007) and its implications for the progress of changing relations to the past (Shevel 2014; Jilge 2014; Rjabtschuk 2005). Cross-regional comparison of the various forms how history can be reinterpreted have been repeatedly undertaken and have inspired attempts to classify different types of memory policies (Fedor, Lewis, and Zhurzhenko 2017; Kubik and Bernhard 2014; Troebst 2006). Other scholars have studied the reinterpretation of Ukraine’s history after independence from a post-colonial angle, pointing out the importance of re-appropriating the past in order to be able to control the present (Motyl 2015; Kuzio 2002). The complexity and slowness of the transition process in commemorative culture should warn us against dichotomies between approval of and resistance to newly revised narratives of the past. Following sweeping place name changes throughout the post-socialist states, a small number of studies provide insights into name using practices and whether they are an indicator of public acceptance of the narratives conveyed by new place names. For example, in their examination of why the users of a neighbourhood market in Bucharest mostly stuck to its replaced communist-era name, Duncan Light and Craig Young (2014) found that inertia and habit played a much bigger role than disapproval of the new name. Most people used the officially discarded place name without caring or without knowing what it once stood for. In her study of tourists in Budapest, Michelle Metro-Roland (2011, 78) found that her respondents did notice places named after historical figures, but they were too preoccupied with finding their way around to care much about the historic roles of the people that lent their names to the visited places.

Guided tours are an important setting to study possible interpretations of changed place names, usually to an audience that is not familiar with the place nor with the figures they are named for. Vis-á-vis the historical policies of the state, tour guides can assume a variety of roles; they can be their guest’s mentors who reproduce well-rehearsed and state-approved narratives (Dahles 2002) or they can, on the other hand, exercise a technique dubbed ‘façade peeling’ by Sharon Macdonald (2006) and described in similar terms in Wynn (2012). Part of tour guide’s role as mediators is challenging their guests' first impressions by pointing out what lies beneath the visible surface. If used for place names, mediation can take place not only between tourists and the site but also between the currently dominating version of the past and preceding versions. Studying the use of place names in guided tours is therefore an insightful way to learn about the relation of the currently prevailing version of historical narratives to its predecessors as well as studying the relation between the narrative the state mandates and what gets conveyed to cultural outsiders. Our focus on the use of narratives in transnational encounters between tourists and guides adds an important perspective to the abundant literature about academic debates on how to sensibly represent the past, as well as the normative and legal aspects of memory politics.

We studied mainly Russophone guided tours in Kyiv that welcome guests from a wide variety of geographical and social backgrounds. Our focus on Russian language tours was owed to the fact that it allowed us to clearly examine how tour guides position themselves in a context of on-going geopolitical tensions and memory conflicts. Russian language guided tours also offered a wide choice of tours and attracted a very diverse audience, providing a significant and interesting tourism offer to study. Although the stream of Russian visitors to Kyiv – until 2013 the largest group – has reduced to a trickle, the Russian language remains best placed to communicate to wide audiences visiting from Belarus, Moldova, Central Asia or the Baltic states but also Russian speaking or bilingual Ukrainians as well as many Russian speakers from a diverse diaspora in Western Europe, the US and Israel. The language of the tour is usually advertised, but in three cases we observed that the language was negotiated at the outset of the tour. As many other situations in Kyiv, tour guiding is not a strictly monolingual affair. Even if the observed tours were predominantly in Russian, certain bits, such as direct quotes or question and answer between guide and tourists could also happen in Ukrainian.

The data was collected during a two-month fieldwork in Kyiv in July and August 2019 with participant observation of 20 guided tours, 17 of which were in Russian, two in Ukrainian and one in English. The guided tours in other languages helped us better understand the specificities of Russian language tour guiding. Ten of the guides whose tours were attended gave permission to audio record their tours. The tours for which we were given permission to attend but not to audio record were documented with a combination of note taking on a mobile phone and a GPS tracking device that allowed for a detailed reconstruction of the tour’s content in a participant observation sheet directly following the tour. Of the 20 tours attended, four were conducted on the territory of a museum complex by employees of the institution, the rest were conducted by freelancers, who also rely on other sources of income. Among them were three overview tours, one on foot and two by boat, four walking tours that focused on urban myths, three tours that focused on architecture, two tours focusing on social history and four tours dedicated to a specific historic neighbourhood. Walking tours typically lasted about two hours and they coalesced around the three historic centres of Kyiv, the upper city, the lower city (Podil) and the Cave Monastery, usually covering only one of these discontinuous areas. All the walking tours observed were held in an interactive style, where the guide often probed the knowledge of the audience and the audience could ask questions at any time. We also conducted in-depth interviews with 18 professional tour guides who provide walking tours on historical topics, predominantly in Russian. The respondents were two thirds female and one third male, their work experience ranged from three years to several decades. All of them could provide Russian language tours and some additionally offered Ukrainian language tours or tours in German and English. This body of data was complemented by nine interviews with tourism officials and museum curators, who deal with difficult memories.

Disciplining the past: state efforts and its challenges

Like its Soviet predecessor, the independent Ukrainian state, through most of its political metamorphoses, has remained clear which version of the past was currently considered a historical truth. The focus on conveying new truths through state institutions has been described as an effort of disciplining the past, which however, often overlooked that acquiring historical knowledge is a much more socially dispersed process than usually considered by those who manage the institutions of nation building (Richardson 2008, 41–42).

Ukraine has had two significant waves of disciplining efforts manifested in name changes and monument removals. The first one affected mainly its western regions, where the Soviet state had less time to put down roots following this region’s annexation in 1939. During Perestroika and especially after 1991, regional and municipal governments in western Ukraine, but also to some degree in Kyiv, were quick to get rid of most Soviet symbols. Following a series of spontaneous ‘Lenin-Falls’ during the Maidan street protests, a second wave affected the rest of Ukraine and was mandated by the 2015 de-communization laws, a package of new legislation concerning history politics and the use of historical symbols adopted by the Poroshenko government (2014–19) in light of an on-going Russian proxy war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. Between Ukraine’s independence and the de-communization laws, Ukraine’s place names were not systematically de-communized. The pantheon of Soviet heroes was never roundly discarded but Ukrainian heroes were gradually added to it (Zhurzhenko 2014, 252). As part of these intermediate solutions some streets were renamed while others retained their Soviet names and some Lenin statues were pulled down while others stayed (Portnov 2013).

The state institution charged with selecting a more unified set of historical representations is the Institute of National Remembrance (INR). It was founded in 2006 under pro-Western president Yushchenko (2005–10) and modelled on its Polish counterpart (Kasianov 2018, 135–138). Around the same time, Russia, which dominated the counternarrative to the one preferred by the Ukrainian government, started its own project, the Commission to Counter Attempts to Falsify History (Kappeler 2014, 114), leaving the INR flanked by pendant institutions in Poland and Russia, each with its own version of Ukrainian history.

The powers given to the INR resembled a wish list of those who saw the government as the driving force in furthering one exclusive historic narrative based on anticommunism and Ukrainian ethno-symbolism. Among the institute’s more politicized responsibilities were the ‘propagating of the old age of the Ukrainian nation and language’ or the ‘activating of patriotism in Ukraine’ (Kasianov 2018, 135–138). The institute’s highly politicized agenda was accentuated when its status changed after each national election. The Russia-leaning president Viktor Yanukovych (2010–14) side-lined the institute, cut its budget and replaced its director with a member of the communist party. After the Maidan protests in 2014, which led to the ousting of Yanukovych, the institute was revived as a central organ of the government (Kasianov 2018, 141–143). After the 2019 election of Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who ran on a campaign that carefully avoided even a whiff of identity politics, the institute’s controversial director, Volodymyr Vyatrovych, was sacked.

The institute’s main achievement in the years following Maidan was a package of four laws regulating commemorative politics that came into force in 2015 (Verkhovna Rada 2015). Although the law goes far beyond changing place names, it is the place name regulations that affected communities throughout the country and therefore became the most debated part of the de-communization laws.

The INR was responsible for drafting the list of places that needed to be renamed under these laws. While the INR framed the law as a possibility for bottom-up initiatives for citizens to force the state to get rid of unloved Soviet street names (Uryadovyyi Portal 2014), in reality municipalities were often forced to change place names from the top. The law came with tight deadlines when local administrations had to change place names reminiscent of the Soviet past (Verkhovna Rada 2015, Article 6). After this deadline, the task to rename places fell to the next higher administrative level, which then had to change the name whether or not a consensus had been formed in public debate. Resistance against place name changes was therefore not necessarily caused by Soviet nostalgia, but by the top-down procedure and the lack of regard for local identities. The most persistent criticism of the new laws from academia was that they took over the Soviet paradigm of mandating one correct interpretation of the past thereby stifling debate (Marples 2015; Shevel 2015), a far cry from what a ‘coming to terms with the past’ would require (Yurchuk 2017, 129). Being tasked to come up with new names for a place could be an opportunity for such debates that due to the time pressure imposed was missed in most cases. Whereas in Russia changes in Soviet place names were mostly reinstatements of old, imperial names (Marin 2012, 205), in Ukraine the debate about what to replace Soviet place names with was more challenging with no blueprint to fall back on. Each time an imperial name was reinstated, as in the example of Pokrovska Street above, the question came up whether it was truly representative of a more justifiable version of the past. In most cases the dilemma could be escaped by choosing a new, Ukrainian name for a place. That representations of both the Soviet and imperial pasts are dominated by narratives coined in Russia, made renaming places that commemorate these pasts an act of independence and a claim to an alternative historical narrative. In some instances, this effect seems to be more important than the new name. For example, Kyiv’s Stepan Bandera Avenue, renamed in 2016 in honour of the controversial nationalist leader, is a section of the city’s constantly congested beltway. Lined by shopping centres and car washes, it is hardly a worthy stage for national grandeur. However, it replaced Moscow Avenue and leads up to Northern Bridge across the Dnipro River, which in 2018 was stripped of the name Moscow Bridge. In this case the place name that was erased was more symbolic than the one that was established.

There is no apolitical way of naming places. Even a shift to seemingly neutral place names is a political act (Palonen 2018, 31). In Ukraine such a shift started with a new political force that has avoided taking sides in history disputes, the Servant of the People party of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, brought to power in 2019 with landslide wins in both parliamentary and presidential elections. Zelenskiy learned how deeply political his neutrality was perceived after his first New Year’s address to the Ukrainian public on December 31, 2019. In this speech he highlighted a civic Ukrainian identity in which people are loyal to the Ukrainian state rather than to a Ukrainian ethnic or linguistic identity. Alluding to the wave of recently changed street names, Zelenskiy said that a street’s name was less important than whether the street was paved and well-lit (Nahaylo 2020). This statement sparked a mid-holiday social media outrage. Widely circulated memes showed street signs ‘according to Zelenskiy’s taste’ such as ‘Paved Street’, ‘Well-lit Street’ or ‘Who Cares Street’. Zelenskiy drew harsh criticism for his neutrality and his insistence that matters like naming of streets needed to be resolved locally (Portnov 2019). In the current political climate, on the backdrop of an on-going war, neutrality or ambiguity over the labels given to places and events, especially by officials, can be interpreted as an offence.

A series of bottom-up initiatives to change the public representation of the past has taken place parallel to discussions whether the state should be the judge over competing versions of the past. Several hundred petitions to change place names are pending on the Kyiv city administration online platform. Most of them were able to gather only a tiny fraction of the required signatures,² but each needs to put forward an argument that could withstand scrutiny and public debate. Perhaps the most successful example for such a bottom-up renaming is that of Institutska Street, leading uphill from Maidan towards the government district. The street was heavily barricaded during Maidan and many of the more than hundred fatally shot protesters died there. They were quickly christened the ‘heavenly hundred’, evoking the image of Cossack freedom fighters, who organized in military units of a hundred men (Blacker 2015, 277). The renaming of Institutska Street into Alley of the Heroes of the Heavenly Hundred, started with an improvised memorial and hand-drawn street signs before it was made official (Blacker 2015, 283).

In a time of cacophonic efforts to weave a revised version of the past into the Kyiv cityscape, tour guiding provides an opportunity to relate place names and the political agendas they encode to visitors in a variety of ways. These visitors may bring their own versions of the past into the encounter so that guides must navigate a field of tension between their personal views, the preferences of their audience and the state’s preferences as manifested in place names. When asked how they prepare and adapt their narratives, none of the interviewed tour guides said they had made adaptations directly following changes in commemorative politics. Guides did report to adapt their tours to the knowledge, interests and preferences they can detect among the group’s individual members. For instance, they draw parallels to the histories of their guests' home countries or they point out instances of mutual influence.³ The lack of reports that tour guides adapt their narratives according to changing commemorative politics suggests that changing preferences of the state, such as revised place names, are not a direct influence on how tour guides narrate history. However, they still do appear in their narratives abundantly.

Tour guiding through a disciplined past

Guided walking tours in Kyiv are a largely unregulated sector. The state has little oversight over the content of narratives and even less possibility to impose its preferred narratives, so much so that some tour guides in their interviews expressed their wish for more unified quality control in tour guiding throughout the city. Tour guides can speak with authority about a place and its past in a popular and accessible form. This would make them ideal messengers of a disciplined past. However, tour guides are increasingly free to compose their own scripts. Perhaps least so on the territory of state museums. But there too efforts have been made to allow more freedom for tour guides to develop their own interests into trademark tours relying on in-house researchers and extensive archives.⁴ The internet platforms organizing and advertising drop-in walking tours also scrutinize their guides before advertising them. This usually involves the presentation of a tour to colleagues. However, since usually tour guides are the best expert for their topic, these review sessions are, as the founder of one such website explained, not fact-checking efforts but meant to clarify whether the narrative is plausible, well-presented and free of obvious political bias.⁵ But unlike in a state museum, where certain concepts of the past can be enforced in practice, the content of guided walking tours is mainly determined by tour guides’ preferences and their perception of the audience’s preferences. The narratives and names used in a guided tour are therefore first and foremost the guide’s choice and the guide’s primary loyalty is to their customers, whose recommendations and online ratings most of them rely on. The narrative delivered eventually to the group depends on the dynamic interaction between guides and tourists (Larsen and Meged 2013).

This interaction and the public nature of tour guiding lead to frequent scrutiny over what tour guides say. Tourists themselves sometimes challenge the narrative of tour guides if they disagree with their interpretation of the past. De-communization and the name changes that come with it are one of the topics that especially Russian tourists often want to dig into deeper, because they have heard controversial media coverage of it.⁶ Some tourists pour out their disagreement online after a tour. This can have a devastating effect on the tour guide’s ability to attract new guests. In some instances, bystanders, who overhear a narrative, heckle the tour guide expressing their disagreement.⁷ Tour guides themselves can be stern critics of their colleagues. Correction among tour guides can happen in organized peer presentation sessions that some guides consider a prerequisite for a solid script. Such meetings can help to eliminate factual mistakes or hapless jokes and serve to discuss new trends, such as name changes, and newly emerging insights that might compel guides to change their narrative.⁸ This form of peer review is now privately organized but was once part of the training of tour guides in Soviet tourism agencies.⁹ Besides complaints about colleagues taking too many liberties with historic facts, a frequent critique is that fellow tour guides are too obsessed with getting all the details right and in the process lose sight of their story’s plot. As one tour guide put it, ‘those excursions where they poured dates over me, chronological and geological detail, who is whose son, grandson or brother and from which dynasty, I can’t remember any of that. But I remember very well my feelings about facts that caught my attention’.¹⁰

Because guided tours transport such emotion-laden narratives in public places, they are also open to public scrutiny. A particularly telling example of disciplining the past is a series of opinion pieces published by the Ukrainian edition of Radio Liberty in 2017–18 entitled ‘a test of nationhood’. For this series, a pair of journalists visited guided tours in selected museums and heritage sites and subsequently picked out statements they deemed to be unpatriotic and incompatible with Ukrainian statehood. The criticism included that tour guides did not mention often enough that the medieval princes of Kyiv spoke Ukrainian, that they did a bad job in explaining how old the name Ukraine was or that they never used the phrase ‘a national treasure of Ukraine’ to describe the Kyiv Cave Monastery. The articles end with a demand for answers from the criticized institutions (Kostenko and Ostapenko 2017a, 2017b), making the disciplining of the past more than just a metaphor in this case.

Under scrutiny from actors with different agendas and guiding trough a city in which the rolling revision of identities and allegiances reflects recent geopolitical shifts, place names are never an easy choice. This applies to all levels from the name of the country itself to the smallest streets and alleys. The area that we know as Ukraine today has had many names over the centuries (Boeck 2005). Grammatical considerations follow: the preposition na ‘on’ preceding ‘Ukraine’ sounds more natural to most Russians, whereas Ukrainians usually insist that it’s a country like any other and therefore should be preceded by v ‘in’. This grammatical nuance is so toxic that one tour guide reported he habitually used the phrase ‘on the territory of Ukraine’ in order to not take sides in this controversy.¹¹ There are no alternative names for the city of Kyiv, but its Russian spelling (Kiev) or the Ukrainian equivalent (Kyiv) can be a point of heated contestation (Zraick 2019). The spelling difference bears enough significance for Kyiv souvenir vendors to sell mugs and T-shirts with ‘ie’ in ‘Kiev’ crossed out and replaced by ‘yi’.

If tourists see that such basics as naming the country and its capital are still debated, this signals that not much about this place’s past is set in stone. Making such controversies a topic of tour guiding, and by extension the controversy over the interpretation of history, amounts to the opposite of ‘objective truths’ which to convey was the main purpose of Soviet tour guiding (Banaszkiewicz, Graburn, and Owsianowska 2017, 112). One tour guide, who received her training in the Soviet Union, underlined how important it was to make the connection between a place and the people or events that lent their names to it.¹² This served to emphasize the logic and objective connection between a place and its conceptualization in current commemorative culture. In contrast, another Kyiv tour guide tells his guests that since he took up work in in the city in the year 2000, the historical conception of the city’s World War II museum has changed at least five times.¹³ These changes affected the museum’s name as well as the name of the war it commemorates.¹⁴ This style of presenting contradictions to visitors differs markedly from the Soviet sense of historical ‘inevitability and naturalness’ (Solonari 2003, 422). That tour guiding now is no longer bound to any narrative of predetermined and inevitable historical trajectory makes guided tours an excellent platform to study what happens to place names and the state approved narratives attached to them if exposed to a diverse audience with sometimes critical questions.

Continuity, closure and transience: tour guides’ narrative strategies

One guide during a walking tour focusing on nineteenth-century living conditions gathered her group on the intersection of Yaroslav Wall and Prorizna Street to explain the etymology of street names in the historic Golden Gate district. The former is a narrow street that runs the course of a former city wall and is lined with elegant fin-de-siècle houses, the latter, Prorizna (literally cut-through street), gradually opens up into a wide boulevard flanked by an ensemble of monumental Stalinist architecture.

Here the urban topography speaks to us. We now understand that Yaroslav Wall is not just simply called like that. There really were walls here. We understand that Prorizna Street (…) doesn’t bear such a beautiful name for no reason. It has this name because to lay this street they needed to cut through the old city walls. In the nineteenth century these walls were still standing upright. They needed to cut down parts of these walls and ever since the name of the street was Prorizna. Minus the Soviet period, when it was Sverdlov Street, but that’s a different story.¹⁵

By singling out the period when the street was named after Yakov Sverdlov, a Bolshevik revolutionary, the guide underlined the exceptionality of this period, when a politician, not topographical features, gave the street its name.

As representatives of the hospitality industry, most tour guides want to create a pleasant experience for their guests and try to avoid parading their political views. Usually the mentioning of place names in tour guide narratives is therefore not formulated as a direct critique of the present choice. But tour guides also avoid too overtly embracing the state sanctioned narrative, even if their own narrative runs along similar lines.

Our participant observation in Kyiv walking tours and interviews with tour guides revealed three main ways how tour guides can refer to and make use of changed place names. They can be divided into narratives of continuity, closure and transience respectively.

Focusing on a narrative of continuity by underscoring a place name’s old age or vernacular origin is one way in which place names can be used to walk the thin line between subtly challenging a disciplined past and being openly critical. The excerpt about Prorizna Street provided earlier succeeds at underlining the current name as rooted in the city’s topography and history. It also succeeds at the portrayal of the Soviet period as a footnote of history and exposes the aspirations that Soviet elites wanted to see reflected in place names as short-lived and overambitious. It achieves what Marin (2012, 193) calls the ‘bracketing’ of the Soviet past as an anomaly of an otherwise determined, long and steady development from an authentic local culture towards modern nationhood. Importantly this ‘bracketing’ effect works without explicit condemnation of the Soviet past, which might spark the anger of visitors nostalgic about the Soviet Union. ‘Bracketing’ reflects a wider trend observed in memory tourism across post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe, in which the socialist period is often portrayed as no more than a short interruption of long-standing cultural ties with Western Europe (Light, Young, and Czepczynski 2009, 239). Names taken from topography or from an ancient function are free of political symbolism and therefore more resilient to political change. Another tour guide said that Khreshatyk, Kyiv’s main shopping street, was called Koz’e Boloto (Goat’s Swamp) since the middle ages, a name that she said sounded ‘magically beautiful’ to her.¹⁶ Names that refer to an ancient function can be portrayed as more representative of the people living and working in a place. Often such folksy toponyms were replaced by elites, who wanted place names to reflected their aspirations for the place’s future rather than the mundane function these places had for their dwellers (Rose-Redwood 2008, 440). To single out place names that refer to topography and ancient functions allows tour guides to deflect attention from politicized place names. This makes it possible to transport an interesting but relatively unengaged narrative that does not contradict the one favoured by the state.

A special way of continuity, one that is more loaded with an evaluation, is the narrative of closure that comes with a return to a former place name. For instance, Evropa Square, one of the main junctions connecting Kyiv’s upper and lower cities, changed its name at least seven times. One tour guide gathered his audience on the steps leading up to Ukrainian House from where a panorama across the square onto the city’s concert hall, library, art museum and the House of the Ukrainian Government opens. Flipping through a folder of old photographs that illustrated the square’s physical transformation, the guide explained the square’s parallel symbolic transformation. It was once already Evropa Square because of an eponymous hotel built there. Then, after a theatre was built, it became Theatre Square, later, when a statue for tsar Alexander II was erected, it became Tsar’s Square, then briefly National Square, then, after the October Revolution it sported a statue of a Red Army soldier and was called Square of the III International, then Stalin Square, during German occupation Adolf Hitler Square and after World War II Square of the Leninist Komsomol (the Communist Party’s youth organization).¹⁷ That the square was now back to its original name gave this story a sense of coming full circle. Now, that a Hotel Evropa no longer exists, the square’s name reflects the current government’s desire to align Ukraine with (western) Europe (a composition of Ukrainian and EU flags in the square’s centre underlines the connection). In Ukraine, creating this sense of closure through the choice of place names is often more difficult than in neighbouring countries with long traditions of statehood. In Anaїs Marin’s (2012) study of changing place names in St. Petersburg the restoration of the mostly imperial place names succeeded in suggesting a return to historical justice and an imperial Golden Age. In Kyiv, the foundations of most streets in the city centre were laid and named in the nineteenth century, when the city was part of the Russian Empire. Just restoring the place names of that period, as has been done in the case of Evropa square, does therefore often not have the same effect of closure as in neighbouring Russia. Such easy restoration was possible in cases like Pokrovska Street, mentioned in the opening passage of this paper, in which the name comes from a church. This street name was reinstated by the tellingly named ‘Commission for the Restoration of Historical Street Names’ in the last year of the Soviet Union. Other instances where the return to a nineteenth century name was relatively uncontested were names derived from topography as in the case of Chervonoarmiys’ka (Red Army Street), a major thoroughfare that regained its pre-Soviet name, Velyka Vasyl’kivs’ska in 2014, which harmlessly refers to the town of Vasyl’kiv to where the street leads. If tour guides want to reach the effect of the restitution of a Golden Age, they must put forward a more elaborate argument than their colleagues in former imperial centres. The historical periods that serve as reservoirs for names to replace the Soviet ones—the medieval Kievan Rus, the Cossack polities of the 17th and 18th centuries, the first attempts of creating an independent Ukrainian state after World War I, the Ukrainian nationalist movements in World War II and the Perestroika era national movement—have to be presented as candidates for a Golden Age to be restored. A case in point here is Petro Sahaidachniy Street, the main axis of the fashionable Podil neighbourhood has recently been turned into a pedestrian zone and is a tourist magnet for its many cafes. The street was renamed already during Perestroika for the seventeenth century Cossack leader, who, in the service of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth commanded an attack on Muscovy. Its renaming was pointed out in three separate tours. One tour guide additionally pointed out that renaming streets was not a phenomenon only of our times.¹⁸ She said the street had been named after Tsar Alexander I in imperial times and after Stalin’s confidant Andrei Zhdanov during the post-war Soviet years. Replacing these two representatives of the imperial and Soviet centre with someone who led a military campaign against it, closed a symbolic circle. Asked about how to react to criticism of reinstated place names, one young tour guide expressed understanding for people nostalgic about the erased street names of their youth, but said:

Concerning this nostalgia and a tendency to romanticize what is over and what you can’t have back, one must point out that, yes, this street name wasn’t all that good and that it perhaps is a good thing that your street name no longer exists in this city. But then it never should have been named like that, because the same street could have had a completely ordinary historical name, which was changed to the street name that you remember.¹⁹

Highlighting the aspect of rectifying a past injustice contains clear positioning towards the past (usually the Soviet period) that was erased from the nomenclature in that it is not only ‘bracketed’ out but marked as a hindrance to historical justice. This form of using place names for narratives of closure is also clearly in line with the state’s efforts to erase the injustices of the Soviet state as manifested in de-communization laws.

A more common and much more critical stance to the currently state-sanctioned narratives can be taken by highlighting the transience of politically preferable readings of the past. One illustrative example, in which the underscoring of the present place name was traded for a more critical and also a more entertaining narrative comes from Kyiv’s most famous square, Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square). The tour guide who regularly tells this story said,

About Russian tourists, (…) they always laugh, like actually most other tourists, that’s the moment when we stand on Maidan and I tell them the story how in 2001 they erected the independence column for the 10th anniversary of Ukrainian independence.²⁰

This column, a neo-baroque, 61-metre structure topped by a gilded statue of a female saviour figure in traditional Ukrainian attire, marks a stark contrast to the Stalinist ensemble of the square. The 16-storey Stalinist high rise directly behind the column is now fittingly called Hotel Ukraina. Together with the square’s flagpole sporting a giant Ukrainian flag, the view across Maidan provides a panorama of national Ukrainian symbolism. However, when the column was built, the hotel behind it was called Hotel Moskva, which provided an inapt backdrop for the postcard image of the independence column. The hotel was hurriedly renamed to Ukraina in the days before the column’s inauguration, although there was already a Hotel Ukraina in Kyiv, which consequently also had to change its name. Juxtaposing the hotel’s old name with the present one clearly challenges the sanctity of Maidan’s present symbolisms. Enumerating the changing place names and the contradictions that occur in the process can serve as an illustration of the transience of ideologies and power. There can be some comic relief in the realization that every power eventually must go, and that its symbols and narratives get replaced by something new. The more often this overhaul repeats, the stronger the comic effect. Take for example one tour guide’s story of how Taras Shevchenko Park, outside the iconic red university building, received its current name and how a seven-meter-tall-statue of the Ukrainian national poet came to overlook it:

So they built a monument for [Tsar] Nicholas I, and immediately they also renamed the park. They called it Nicholas Park. Nicholas I stood here until 1920. The Bolsheviks conquered the city. ‘What’s with this Nicholas? Nicholas who?’ They take Nicholas down and transport him away, it is bronze after all. They take him to the Arsenalna factory and there they melt him down. He no longer exists. But the pedestal stands. He’s no longer here, so clearly the park has to be renamed too. They renamed it simply Red Park. Red University, Red Park and red all around, the army was red too. The park was called Red Park until 1939, because in 1939 for the 125th anniversary of Taras Shevchenko, they built this statue here. (…) When the Park was renamed Taras Shevchenko Park they also renamed the University Taras Shevchenko University.²¹

The name of the park, the university and the figure on the pedestal in the centre of the park seem almost capricious in this excerpt, as if the slightest change of destiny could change them again anytime. Confronting tourists with the underlying historical contradictions in the name of a place is a good way to challenge their first impression. Most places now named to reflect current political preferences replaced preceding names that contradicted them. Bringing to the surface such underlying tensions and thereby confronting tourists with the contradictions in their own perception about the past is a technique described by Sharon Macdonald (2006) as ‘façade peeling’. By challenging tourists in their confidence of the first impression they are also guided towards a reflection that goes beyond the currently preferred interpretation of the past. Tour guides become cultural intermediaries that can help their guests to a deeper reading of the cityscape, revealing what lies underneath the visible façade (Wynn 2012, 346). Pointing out the underlying layers of a cityscape can help underscoring a place’s uniqueness and situate it in time. It has a similar effect to enumerating place names, thereby illustrating the various layers of meaning a place used to be loaded with.

Conclusion

In order to better understand the relation between narratives told through official place names and their mediation to tourists, we asked whether changed place names nudge tour guide narratives in a certain direction. Our observations and interviews suggest changing place names are more an enriching fund for tour guide narratives than a limiting guardrail. It seems, rather than place names dictating a particular version of the past, tour guides make free use of efforts to discipline the past—old and new ones as well as the tensions their juxtaposition creates—to tell the story that makes sense in a particular place and for a specific audience and to give their narratives an extra spin, such as in the observed narrative patterns of closure, continuity and transience. Ultimately, tour guides and their audiences seem to be interested in the narratives that were replaced by current street signs just as much as in the narratives current place names are intended to tell. Focusing on the layers of names beneath the surface and the contradictions and ironies of their sequence, allows tour guides to be more entertaining and to say more about a place’s past than just sticking to the version that is currently represented on the surface. The three main forms, continuity, closure and transience, rely on different combinations of current place names with their predecessors and allow for slightly different positioning towards current and past place names. The emphasizing of continuity is the narrative that succeeds best in justifying the current name as old and authentic, the underlining of closure poses the strongest condemnation of a past (usually Soviet) place name and the highlighting of transience implies that the current place name is but the latest in a long line of ultimately replaced toponyms. That this way of narrating the past draws the ire of memory warriors may be because the continued reminder of old place names could be seen as a form of resistance against efforts to discipline the past. We should however be careful seeing tour guide’s often ironic engagement with the current version of city-text as resistance. Rather than engaging in controversy, tour guides employ a pragmatic approach to memory (Schlegel and Pfoser 2020). They are interested in avoiding conflicts and conveying a good story that their audience will remember, and tourists are looking to be entertained not instructed about the currently dominant view on history. Memory practices in tourism have a reputation of being superficial and trivializing. But in an environment of heated memory conflicts and state efforts to discipline the past, they can succeed in peeling off the façade and uncovering the politicized nature of a ‘city-text’. Place names are never apolitical, but neither do they entail an inevitable political interpretation. If it is a tour guide’s task to interpret the ‘city-text’ to visitors, it is only natural that they would remind their audience of preceding versions of that text.

Commemorative politics in which place names reflect a single, state-controlled narrative are likely most successful if undisturbed by freedom of speech, that is if the state can then also control the reception and interpretation of the desired narrative. If, like in Ukraine, place names are changed, often without debate, but are left to be interpreted freely, they most likely will serve as indicators of the state’s mind-set towards the past rather than as a reflection of public sentiment. As cultural intermediaries, tour guides are able to convey nuanced commentary on the state’s preferences and what they perceive as the public opinion. In this commentary they must avoid antagonism from their audience and remain entertaining. Façade peeling can achieve this by surprising tourists with underlying layers of a less visible past and by guiding them to their own insights rather than instructing them. The current commemorative politics fits the narrative style of a Soviet guided tour better, where the name and not the naming is the narrative’s focus, where place names represent an objective truth about an unambiguous past. That tour guides and their guests seem to be more interested in the process of naming rather than its outcome may be a hint that the one-objectively-verifiable form of narrating the past fails to tell a compelling story.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no potential conflict of interest concerning the research presented here.

Data availability statement

A dataset associated with this paper is available at the Loughborough University data repository under Tourism as memory-making - Case study Kyiv. doi:10.17028/rd.lboro.12180579

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Economic and Social Research Council: [Grant Number ES/R011680/1].

Notes

1 Tour guide narrative 8, 20.07.2019.

2 Elektronni petitsiyi, Kyyivs'ka Mis'ka Rada https://petition.kyivcity.gov.ua/petitionslist/

3 Tour guide interviews 4, 5, 9 and 15 all referred to such techniques of adaptation.

4 Expert interview 2, 29.07.2019.

5 Expert interview 9, 20.08.2019.

6 Tour guide interview 4, 08.07.2019, and tour guide interview 13, 22.07.2019.

7 This happened twice during the 20 tours attended for this study and was reported in several interviews.

8 Expert interview 3, 06.08.2019, the respondent said that such meetings now happen less often than would be ideal.

9 As attested by a respondent who started his career in the Soviet 1980s, tour guide interview 3, 07.07.2019, but see also Koenker (2013, 80).

10 Tour guide interview 10, 12.07.2019.

11 Tour guide interview 11, 16.07.2019.

12 Tour guide interview 16, 01.08.2019.

13 Tour guide interview 4, 08.07.2019.

14 Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture mandated the renaming of the museum in July 2015 from ‘The Ukrainian State Museum of the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945’ to ‘National Museum of History of Ukraine in the Second World War’ https://www.warmuseum.kiev.ua/_eng/museum/about_us/

15 Tour guide narrative 9, 21.07.2019.

16 Tour guide narrative 6, 14.07.2019.

17 Tour guide narrative 19, 17.08.2019, the sequence of names provided in this tour seems to have been not entirely complete, since the square had an even earlier name (Kudrits’kiy 1995). The frequent name changes for Evropa Square were mentioned in a very similar fashion in tour guide narrative 7, 19.07.2019, along with the claim no other square in Kyiv had been renamed more often.

18 Tour guide narrative 14, 04.08.2019. The frequent renaming of Petro Sahaidachniy Street was also mentioned in tour guide narrative 8, 20.07.2019 and in tour guide narrative 17, 11.08.2019.

19 Tour guide interview 13, 22.07.2019.

20 Tour guide interview 15, 25.07.2019.

21 Tour guide narrative 3, 10.07.2019.