In any settlement of modern Russia, the history of bygone years or literally yesterday’s events is always clearly reflected, be it a remote village, a regional center or the capital. The official name or accidentally nicknamed, the decision of state bodies or the will of the people - and here appears on the map the new name of a small street, a large avenue, artificial or natural reservoir, geographical area and is approved officially or in the people's memory.
So recently a new toponym appeared in one of the important cities of Russia - Kadyrov’s bridge in St. Petersburg. The reaction of Petersburgers was, to put it mildly, different. Controversy erupted in power circles, signatures were collected, and meetings were held. Residents of the city literally divided into two camps. Politicians too.
Biography
The turbulent history of modern Russia has given rise to several new heroes of the Fatherland. In the Caucasus, it turned out to be Akhmat Kadyrov. It was he who played a leading role in ensuring that silence reigned in the villages of Chechnya, and bloodshed and fratricide ceased for many years. Akhmat Kadyrov, the first president of the republic, was able to convince his people that peaceful life in Russia is the only fair solution and one way out of this situation.
But at first, nothing said about such a biography of Akhmat Kadyrov. The future Hero of Russia was born in 1951, worked for a long time in agriculture, various construction organizations, closer to our time he was closely engaged in religious activities. In the bloody civil strife of the nineties A. Kadyrov ultimately firmly sided with the Russian Federation both as the head of the Muslim church and as the head of state, which paid for it - in the spring of 2004 he was killed. But his death could not change the current situation. In recent years, military operations on a large scale in Chechnya have not occurred at all.
And so the St. Petersburg authorities decided to give the name of the deceased president of Chechnya, the Kadyrov Bridge, to the newly-built bridge. However, the name was not all as simple as expected by politicians during the initial discussions of the name.
Bridge location
Often now, Russians, not knowing the intricacies of the current situation, are wondering where the Kadyrov’s bridge is. This can be easily answered - the new St. Petersburg bridge named after Akhmat Kadyrov is a reinforced concrete crossing through the mirror of the Duderhof Canal in the vicinity of Heroes Avenue in the city of St. Petersburg. It was built recently - from the spring months of 2013 to the middle of summer 2015 (two and a half years). Then, on December 17 of the same year, it was solemnly declared the final construction of the corresponding structure of St. Petersburg. The beginning of automobile movement on the bridge occurred on May 1, 2016. Since then, it has become one of the active crossings in urban transport arteries.
The bridge optimally combined the newly erected architectural section of the city with the opposite bank and determined the exit of public and private transport from the Baltic Pearl area to Leninsky Prospekt.
The decision of the official governor of the city and the region on the name of the bridge was published in the summer of 2016. Approved the option previously proposed by the Toponymic Commission. The controversy surrounding the name of the Kadyrov bridge led to great public reaction. The population reacted to such an initiative very ambiguously and split into several groups.
History of creation
The builder of all the latest buildings (residential and architectural) in this rather prestigious administrative region is the construction company ZAO Baltic Pearl. As noted above, they began to build a bridge over the Duderhof Canal in St. Petersburg in the spring of 2013 and were planning to complete it in the fall of 2014, however, the hired contractor was not able to carry out the work on time, including due to the delay in delivering parts from the enterprise that found in Rybatsky. It was assumed that the construction of the bridge will reduce congestion at the two existing exits and will allow to normalize traffic.
Construction completion
The bridge was finally built in the summer of 2015, but the process of determining the bridge to the municipality was seriously slowed down. Before the introduction of the building, a permit was issued on March 31, 2016 for the operation of the adjacent area of Heroes Avenue.
Technical specifics
Technical characteristics of the bridge: the total distance of the reinforced concrete structure with approaches reached 150 m, the bridge volume was 3.2 m. The total crossing width was about 44 m, of which the carriageway reached 2 x 16 m, and the width of the separation zone was 5 m. the bridge was divided in two. Each is distributed into four zones in only one direction. River lines are blocked by solid rectangular steel-reinforced concrete devices, bridge supports were made of reinforced concrete on a pile foundation.
During the construction of the crossing, 105 m of retaining walls were made, 430 m of the length of the embankment. Handrail rigid fencing made of metal tubes and sheet metal.
When the construction process was completed, the difference between Kadyrov’s bridge became apparent. The architecture of the crossing in the alignment of Geroyev Avenue is radically different from the cable-stayed technical bridge lying nearby, for the heating main, created back in 2011. This was due to the fact that in 2007 - during the period when the general designer agreed on the bridge design with the city authorities for urban planning and architecture - it was not clear that there will also be a cable-stayed bridge with a slightly different architecture.
Name Search
The construction of the Kadyrov’s bridge was quite fast and of high quality. It was worse with the name. The bridge, even during the opening period, had only the design name “bridge in the alignment of Heroes Avenue”. The city toponymic commission of the city announced plans to give names to all the constructed bridges in this administrative region after the start of work. It was assumed that the name of the bridge would be on a marine theme, preferred for all names in the Baltic Pearl area.
Around the middle of 2016, at a meeting of the toponymic commission, for the first time, a proposal was made to give a name to the bridge in honor of Akhmat Kadyrov, but the decisive choice of the name was postponed to autumn. Prior to this, the omnipotent deputy Vitaly Milonov was called one of the supporters of the idea, whose intention was to give the name of the first president of Chechnya the name of the first president of Chechnya rejected the existing city government at the beginning of 2015. At that time, Governor Georgy Poltavchenko pointed out that Akhmat Kadyrov did not directly participate in the life of the city.
Community Initiative
Now it is officially reported that the initiative to give a name to one of the new, not yet "baptized" bridges across the Duderhof River, of the deceased Kadyrov - the Kadyrov Bridge - was made by various public organizations, by whose efforts the issue was advanced in the right direction. But at the same time, the resistance of opponents of this name intensified.
Resolution of the toponymic commission
At the end of spring 2016, the first attempt was made to study the question of the name of the bridge, but the members of the assembled toponymic commission spoke out very vaguely. However, a week later, during an extraordinary secret meeting, at which seventeen of the twenty-four permanent employees of the commission were, Governor Georgy Poltavchenko was advised to give the name of the Kadyrov’s bridge to the building in St. Petersburg. In a secret ballot, this opinion was supported by nine members of the commission, six were against and two people abstained.
The struggle in the echelons of power
Several St. Petersburg deputies appealed to the incumbent governor to disagree with the decision of the commission to name “Kadyrov’s bridge”, and one of the deputies of the legislative assembly Maxim Reznik came up with a draft decision on no confidence in the vice-governor Vladimir Kirillov, who is in charge of the issue. In response, Vitaly Milonov accused the opponents of the Akhmat Kadyrov bridge of self-PR and heating ethnic hatred in the country. Despite the activity of a number of deputies, the bulk of the members of the legislative assembly of the region nevertheless supported this decision.
Population reaction
The mass written protest formed on election day on the Change website under the slogan of eliminating the new toponymy gained in the short term about three hundred thousand demands of Petersburgers. On the last day of May, an unauthorized rally was held at the bridge with a controversial name. At that time, the Open Russia organization organized the event, “renaming” a number of famous city streets. On the night of June 9, several people painted near this bridge a colored graffiti depicting a former officer Budanov, a little later it was hidden under black paint. A little later, another stranger placed a banner on the bridge with a famous quote from Akhmat Kadyrov. And members of the Solidarity organization affixed a sign with the inscription of a war veteran, a native of the Caucasus.
Events in June 2017 in St. Petersburg
At the end of the day on June 6, a mass rally agreed upon with the municipality of the city against the name of the bridge named after Akhmat Kadyrov was realized on the opposition Field of Mars. The organizers were two deputies of the St. Petersburg meeting. The power structures determined the number of people who came in less than half a thousand, the organizers themselves gave data to up to two thousand protesters. Other opposition members took advantage of the rally, speaking about the current moment.
During the rally, 1, 400 signatures were collected. On June 8, other deputies spoke out against working with this document. V. Milonov and A. Krivenchenko made a proposal to consider the authenticity of about eighty thousand signatures collected at that time on the Change page.
National Voting Opportunities
With the completion of the vote of the toponymic commission on assigning the bridge to the name of A. Kadyrov, Boris Vishnevsky announced his intention to convene a city referendum on the name of the bridge. Kadyrov’s bridge was renamed Akhmatovsky. On June 8, a small initiative group of twenty-six most active politicians and some cultural and social figures, including St. Petersburg, presented a written request for the implementation of a nationwide referendum with an agenda on three issues. One question dealt exclusively with the name of the bridge, the rest touched more on procedural problems and the prerogatives of the toponymic commission - whether residents of St. Petersburg and plenipotentiary deputies of the St. Petersburg legislative assembly can fully work in the search for names for various architectural details of the city. In the last decade of June, the St. Petersburg City Electoral Commission opposed the implementation of the referendum, pointing out formal errors in filing the aforementioned application.
