According to Ostap Bender’s will, or how money is being made on decommunisation in Dnipro

According to Ostap Bender’s will, or how money is being made on decommunisation in Dnipro

The law on decommunization was adopted back in 2015, but its active implementation began only a year or two ago, which most of the population linked to the awakened national consciousness caused by the full-scale war.

However, the real reason is banal money. Because renaming streets inevitably leads to expenses, and clever officials have realized this. In this context, the immortal Ostap Bender comes to mind, who took up the production of address plaques as one of his ways to make money. Only Bender had the lone Kisa Vorobyaninov working on the plaques by hand in small quantities, while local authorities — it is from local budgets that all this procedure is financed — are talking about thousands of signs and tens of millions of hryvnias. Here are the results of the Transparency International Ukraine "Transparent Cities" study on purchases caused by the change of toponyms in cities, conducted in 2022-23.

The leader of this list is the city of Dnipro, where plaques cost the most — 2044.33 UAH, 1485.61 UAH, and 1237.03 UAH per piece. In Kyiv, the same action costs 609 hryvnias, and in Ternopil — 490 hryvnias.

And here are the results of two tenders for the production of address plaques in the city of Dnipro for 2024. The first took place on February 29, 2024, the client was KP "Zhylservice-5" of the Dnipro City Council, and the procurement price is 7,750,000 hryvnias. The winner was FLP Bobrikova Inna, who offered to complete all the work for a slightly lower price — 7,736,844.00 hryvnias. But the average price of plaques, if it changed, only increased:

The second tender was won on May 8, 2024 by FLP Shamrai Vadym. He agreed to manufacture 875 address plaques for 2,591,245.00 hryvnias. Thus, the price per unit is 2,961 hryvnias 42 kopecks. Which is six times more expensive than in Ternopil.

Moreover, it is worth noting that in both cases, only those people who eventually became the winners participated in the tender. For some reason, there were no other participants, although the price offered for the service was very alluring.

Of course, this is only an assumption, but most likely, the tenders for the purchase of address plaques for an exorbitant price were "targeted" strictly for those who eventually won them. How the implementation will go — we’ll see, but we hope at least that neither FLP Bobrikova nor FLP Shamrai are listed in the "Myrotvorets" database, as happened with last year’s plaque manufacturer, FLP Hefter Vadym, to whom the city budget was prepared to allocate 13,674,762 hryvnias for this procedure.

But a scandal arose, and the tender won by Hefter had to be urgently canceled. However, the procedure and the price did not change — the city of Dnipro pays the highest price for address plaques in Ukraine, and for some reason, only one participant applies for tenders, who wins this tender. The total cost of this process to the city as of now is 24,002,851 hryvnias.

This is not the end of the problems. After all, Ukraine is a record holder for cutting budget money, and another theft might have been overlooked. But, as historians say, the renaming of toponyms, which caused the need to replace address plaques, is not final. And it raises a huge number of questions regarding the adequacy of the new names and the adequacy of those who come up with these names.

The fact that new names are often quite controversial and dubious is not a problem only for Dnipro but for all of Ukraine. Although neither historians nor the overwhelming majority of Ukrainian citizens deny the need to rename colonial and communist toponyms, the problem is that the haste with which this is happening will inevitably lead to new renaming.

Which, as everyone understands, will entail new significant expenses — after all, new plaques will need to be made? And looking at the prices paid in Dnipro for these procedures, one gets the strong impression that the officials responsible for the renaming process are fully aware of what they are doing. And they understand that they have found a new gold mine in a poor country.