Latvian Culture Minister Nauris Puntulis has called on the Saeima to revive legislation aimed at renaming streets and populated areas bearing names dating back to the Soviet occupation, according to ministerial adviser Agnese Vārpiņa.
Efforts to remove Soviet-era place names come amid a wider push by the Baltic states to counter lingering Russian influence. Latvia’s 2023 National Security Concept will require all public media content to be exclusively in Latvian or another language of “the European cultural space” since 2026, United24media reported.
Estonia, meanwhile, has begun phasing in Estonian-only school instruction, part of a regional response to what Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation has described as Kremlin propaganda targeting Russian-speaking communities in the Baltics.
Vārpiņa recalled that on June 19, 2023, then-President Egils Levits called on parliament to adopt a law renaming places introduced as a result of the communist totalitarian regime’s policies and Russification.
Puntulis has now submitted the same appeal to the Saeima’s Education, Culture, and Science Committee. The draft law calls for renaming streets and populated areas introduced under the totalitarian occupation regime to better reflect Latvian cultural identity and statehood, press.lv wrote.
Puntulis argued it is unacceptable that Latvia still has names such as Pioneer Street, Moscow Street, October Street, Andreja UpīšaStreet, and Paula LejiņaStreet, as well as populated areas called Holodnije Ručji and Tihaja Pristaņa. In his view, abandoning street names that glorify the communist totalitarian regime or its supporters would foster a more Latvian environment, strengthen national self-awareness, and affirm Latvia as a free and democratic state.
In his 2023 letter to the Saeima outlining the need for the law, Levits attached a draft bill developed by the Public Memory Center, an NGO. It came along with a list of specific Latvian place and street names that would need to be changed, according to press.lv.