On Wednesday, February 12, the Paris City Council voted unanimously to create an avenue Alexei Navalny in the 16th arrondissement. No date has yet been set for the inauguration. But, symbolically, the vote took place on the eve of the first anniversary of the death of Vladimir Putin's most famous opponent of the Kremlin, mysteriously deceased on February 16, 2024, in his prison in Russia's Far North.
The name "Avenue Alexei Navalny" will be given to the odd side of Avenue de Pologne. This is an exception to the usual rule: the name of a public figure can normally only be attributed to a public thoroughfare five years at the earliest after his or her death. "The choice of the 16th arrondissement was made for two reasons: This arrondissement was historically home to the Russian diaspora in Paris, and it is also the site of the Russian embassy," said the City of Paris in a press release. It claims to have departed from the rule because of the importance of the "commitments" and "achievements" of "the figure of resistance that Alexei Navalny embodied in the face of Vladimir Putin's dictatorship."
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