Street Names That No Longer Exist: Decommunization, Decolonization, and Why Address Data Goes Stale

Every address dataset carries an implicit claim: that the street it names is a street you could actually post a letter to. For much of Europe, and for several countries beyond it, that claim quietly expired somewhere between 1945 and last year. Half a continent has been through waves of street renaming — some driven by statute with a legal deadline, some by a municipal council vote on a Thursday afternoon — and any address list assembled before those waves contains names that no longer legally exist.

This is not a political observation but a data-quality one. A street name a country has struck from its register is wrong in exactly the way a discontinued postcode is wrong: the record fails to describe reality. It just fails less visibly, because nobody validates street names the way they validate checksums.

The problem, in one number

Take a concrete case. The most widely used PHP faker library ships eleven Ukrainian street names. Eight of them are Soviet: Леніна, 40 років Перемоги, 50 років Жовтня, Гагаріна, Космонавта Попова, Генерала Жадова, Пацаєва, Волкова.

That means roughly 73% of generated Ukrainian addresses referenced streets that have not legally existed since 2015. The library is not badly written; it is simply older than the law. Nobody rebuilt the list, because street names look like the kind of data that does not change. They change constantly.

What actually happened: four decades of renaming

Renaming waves cluster around regime transitions, and each has its own legal instrument, scope, and list of casualties.

Ukraine: two laws, not one

The single most common mistake is treating Ukrainian renaming as one 2015 event. It is two distinct legal acts with different scopes.

Law 317-VIII, adopted 9 April 2015 and in force from 21 May 2015, condemned the communist and National Socialist totalitarian regimes and banned propagation of their symbols — with "symbols" defined broadly enough to include geographical names. This is what removed Леніна, Дзержинського, Кірова, Комсомольська, Червоноармійська.

Law 3005-IX, passed 21 March 2023 and in force from 27 July 2023, is a separate instrument targeting symbols of Russian imperial policy. It is what removed Пушкіна, Толстого, Суворова, Московська — and, notably, Гагаріна, which the 2015 law had left standing. Over 51,000 settlements, streets, squares and buildings were renamed under the decommunization framework; a further 9,859 toponyms went in 2022 alone under the decolonization push.

A dataset built against the 2015 law and never revisited is therefore still wrong. It just fails on a different set of names.

Poland: a statutory deadline and a substitute order

Poland's approach is instructive because it is unusually mechanical. The Act of 1 April 2016 (Dz.U. 2016 poz. 744) entered into force on 2 September 2016 and gave municipalities twelve months to change non-compliant names. Where a council did not act, the provincial governor issued a zarządzenie zastępcze — a substitute order imposing a new name, backed by an opinion from the Institute of National Remembrance. In practice: municipalities until 2 September 2017, governors until 2 December 2017.

The Act also does something worth noting for data people: Article 5(2) states that a renaming does not invalidate documents containing the old name. The legal system explicitly acknowledges that address data will be stale, and simply grants amnesty to the paperwork.

Hungary: a naming ban with an academy in the loop

Hungary's § 14 of Act CLXXXIX of 2011 (the Mötv.) forbids public spaces from bearing the name of a person who took part in founding, building or maintaining a twentieth-century totalitarian regime, or any expression directly referring to one. Where a municipality is unsure, § 14(3) requires it to request a position from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences — a scientific opinion, not a binding ruling. The Constitutional Court upheld the arrangement in decision 3038/2016.

Spain: fifteen years and still counting

Spain shows what happens when a renaming law has weak enforcement. Article 15.1 of Ley 52/2007 required public administrations to remove commemorative objects exalting the 1936 uprising, the Civil War, or the dictatorship's repression. Compliance was patchy enough that Ley 20/2022 (in force 20 October 2022) repealed and replaced it with sharper language: Article 35.2 explicitly names toponyms and street directories as elements contrary to democratic memory. Even so, an estimated 5,600 Francoist symbols remain in place, because execution falls to individual municipalities. A dataset for es_ES is therefore describing a moving target, not a completed transition.

South Africa: replacing a civic vocabulary

Pretoria changed 27 CBD street names in one batch in 2012: Hans Strijdom Drive became Solomon Mahlangu Drive, Andries Street became Thabo Sehume Street, Hendrik Verwoerd Drive became Johan Heyns Drive, Church Street was split into four separately named segments. Johannesburg followed with the 45-kilometre Albertina Sisulu Road consolidation in 2013 and a further CBD batch adopted in September 2014.

The deliberate exceptions — where "decommunization" would be an error

This is where naive datasets fail in the opposite direction. Having learned that Soviet street names are stale, the tempting next move is to strip them everywhere. That is just as wrong, because the rule is not "remove communist names" — it is "match each country's actual register."

Russia did not decommunize

There was no decommunization law in Russia. ул. Ленина remains the single most common street name in the country. Советская, Кирова, Комсомольская, Гагарина are current, legal and extremely widespread. A ru_RU dataset that excludes them on the grounds that Ukraine excluded them is not being careful — it is importing another country's statute into a jurisdiction where that statute does not exist, and producing addresses that describe no real Russian city.

The correct rule is jurisdictional, not moral: the dataset reflects what the register says, country by country.

Germany kept Karl Marx and removed Adolf Hitler

Germany is the clearest demonstration that "communist" and "Nazi" are different legal categories with different fates.

Adolf-Hitler- and Hermann-Göring- streets vanished after 1945 — comprehensively, across the whole country. But Karl-Marx-Straße and Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße are current addresses today, including in western cities that were never under GDR administration. Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin still exists. So do numerous Ernst-Thälmann-Straßen.

What did go after 1990 was the layer tied to Soviet-imposed rule: Berlin's Leninallee became Landsberger Allee, Klement-Gottwald-Allee became Berliner Allee, Lenin Square became United Nations Square. Leipzig put 67 contested names up for discussion and renamed 38 by 1992.

Austria shows the same case-by-case pattern rather than a blanket sweep: Vienna's Dr.-Karl-Lueger-Ring became Universitätsring by council committee decision on 5 June 2012, with new signs up that July — while Dr.-Karl-Lueger-Platz kept its name.

Any dataset applying a single "totalitarian names out" filter to de_DE gets both halves wrong at once.

Ukraine's Перемоги: a judgment call, not a statute

Перемоги ("Victory") is excluded from the curated Ukrainian list, and the reasoning is worth stating precisely, because it is not the same kind of exclusion as Леніна.

On 9 February 2023 the Kyiv City Council renamed 31 objects, among them проспект Перемоги → проспект Берестейський and площа Перемоги → Галицька площа — both restorations of historical names. That is a municipal decision by one council, not a nationwide statutory ban: Перемоги streets still exist elsewhere in Ukraine. The name is excluded as a directional call — it is trending out of the register alongside Дружби Народів and Возз'єднання — rather than because a law forbids it. Honest datasets should mark the difference between "illegal" and "receding."

Kazakhstan: the data is going stale as you read this

Kazakhstan is the live case. The capital's return from Nur-Sultan to Astana in September 2022 triggered a broader wave; villages, districts and streets have been renamed steadily since.

Назарбаєв is excluded from the curated list for a reason that has nothing to do with legality. Almaty's Furmanov Street was renamed Nursultan Nazarbayev Avenue on 30 November 2017 and, as far as the public record shows, still carries that name. But maslikhat deputies in Taldykorgan, Petropavlovsk and Oral have moved to restore the former names of their Nazarbayev streets. The name is not dead — it is unstable. Including a volatile name in a dataset with a multi-year shelf life is a bet you will lose on an unknown schedule.

It is also a useful reminder that renaming is not a historical topic. Somewhere a council is voting this month, and some line in some address file is becoming false.

Why this is a data problem, not a political one

The unifying idea is simple: a dead street name describes a country that does not exist.

An address reading вул. Леніна in Ukraine in 2026 is not offensive-but-usable. It is incorrect, in the plainest engineering sense — no such street is on the register, no postal system will resolve it, no resident lives there. It carries the same defect as an invalid postcode or a phone number with the wrong country code. That the defect has a political history does not make the assessment political. The register is a factual document, and the dataset either matches it or does not.

This reframing also produces the right behaviour automatically. If the test is "does this name appear in the country's current register," then Леніна fails in Ukraine and passes in Russia, Karl-Marx-Straße passes in Germany, Adolf-Hitler-Straße fails everywhere, and Назарбаєв is flagged volatile. No moral reasoning is required — and none should be applied, because moral reasoning is exactly what produces the error of exporting one country's law to another's street plan.

Practical implications

If you maintain address data, four rules follow:

1. Date your source. A street list without a compilation date is unusable, because you cannot tell which renaming waves it predates.
2. Per-country rules, never a global filter. Every locale gets its own register-derived list. de_DE ≠ de_AT, ru_RU ≠ uk_UA, and no rule generalises.
3. Distinguish banned from receding. Statutory removals are permanent. Municipal trends are directional. Volatile names (Назарбаєв) belong in neither the include nor the exclude bucket without an explicit decision recorded.
4. Re-verify on a schedule. Spain's transition is fifteen years old and unfinished; Kazakhstan's is ongoing. "Correct in 2015" is not a durable property.

The alternative is what the faker library ships: a list that was accurate once, describing a country that has since ceased to exist, and failing silently in 73% of cases.

Methodology / data as of 2026-07-17

• Scope. Renaming waves covered here are those affecting curated street-name datasets across the 63 of our 64 locales that carry street files. Countries are included where a renaming wave materially changed the set of currently valid street names.
• Legal citations were verified against primary or authoritative secondary sources: Ukraine Law 317-VIII (adopted 9 April 2015, in force 21 May 2015) and Law 3005-IX (adopted 21 March 2023, in force 27 July 2023); Poland, Act of 1 April 2016, Dz.U. 2016 poz. 744, in force 2 September 2016; Hungary, Act CLXXXIX of 2011 § 14, with Constitutional Court decision 3038/2016; Spain, Ley 52/2007 (Art. 15.1) and Ley 20/2022 (Art. 35.2, in force 20 October 2022).
• Municipal decisions cited individually: Kyiv City Council, 9 February 2023 (31 objects, including проспект/площа Перемоги); Vienna culture and science committee, 5 June 2012 (Dr.-Karl-Lueger-Ring → Universitätsring); City of Tshwane, 2012 (27 CBD streets); City of Johannesburg, 2013–2014.
• Known limitation. Enforcement of naming laws is municipal in every jurisdiction surveyed, so "the law says X" and "the street signs say X" diverge — measurably so in Spain (~5,600 symbols outstanding) and Kazakhstan (renamings in progress). Statements about current validity describe the legal register, not a guaranteed street-level survey.
• Non-goal. This article assesses the legal status of names, not regimes, historical figures, or peoples. Inclusion or exclusion of a name reflects a register, not an evaluation.
• Data freshness. Curated street data as of 2026-07-17. Kazakhstan and Spain are the locales most likely to have drifted since.