St Petersburg residents reject bridge honouring former Chechen leader

The decision to name the bridge after Akhmad Kadyrov, whose son now rules the region, has sparked a passionate dispute, with angry residents pointing out that Kadyrov never had any ties to the city.

An online petition against the name has already gathered more than 77,000 signatures. A number of St Petersburg’s cultural luminaries, including renowned film director Aleksandr Sokurov and actor Oleg Basilashvili, have joined the chorus of indignation.

"St Petersburg residents will be outraged to have a reference to this infamous family,” Sokurov wrote in an open letter to city governor Georgy Poltavchenko.

Sokurov also cautioned authorities against naming the bridge in honour of a man associated with a bloody conflict.

"We should not forget that during the first Chechen war it was precisely him who called for a jihad and who called on Chechens to kill as many Russians as possible,” he wrote. "Hundreds of people who died in this war are buried in our city, many people living here have not forgotten this.”

Akhmad Kadyrov’s son, Ramzan, is not popular outside the southern republic of Chechnya, where he has been leader since 2007. He has long been accused of corruption and widespread abuses that include abductions, torture, and executions.

He routinely posts pictures of himself on Instagram lifting weights, frolicking with exotic animals, and in shirts featuring likenesses of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the man who brought him to power.

A group of St Petersburg residents has launched a campaign to name the bridge instead after Anna Akhmatova, one of Russia’s best-loved poets. Unlike Kadyrov, Akhmatova spent most of her life and died in St Petersburg, then known as Leningrad.

Activists have since filmed themselves reading poems written by Akhmatova in front of the unnamed bridge and called on others to do the same.

St Petersburg’s commission for the naming of sites and structures, which voted on the 30 May to name the bridge after Akhmad Kadyrov, has already warned it will not budge.

 

 

Meanwhile in Moscow, activists and authorities have been clashing over a downtown bridge where opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was gunned down in February 2015.

Allies of Nemtsov have dubbed the Moskvoretsky Bridge, which stands a stone’s throw from the Kremlin, the "Nemtsov Bridge”, but their attempts to officially rename the bridge after the activist have been thwarted.

An ongoing memorial at the bridge, comprising portraits, flowers and a makeshift street sign, is regularly vandalised.

Authorities have also turned down numerous requests to put up a monument or a plaque to commemorate the slain politician, a former deputy prime minister and fierce critic of Putin.