To move the process along, historians have submitted a proposal to the Saeima twice, but a majority vote has not yet been reached.
In the last two years, only a fifth of the street names in Latvian towns and villages have been renamed, or about 30 out of a total of 140 that the Public Memory Center identified as glorifying the communist and totalitarian regimes or russification.
Kārlis Kangeris, historian and chairman of the Public Memory Center, says that the association has repeatedly sent out appeals to municipalities to rename specific streets.
"In many places, they do not respond or say that it has no meaning or sense. And they also find various pseudo-arguments. And the question is, why do we need to keep names that are established by a foreign power, that glorify people who have occupied Latvia, who have oppressed Latvia?" Kangeris asks.
The municipal slowness in renaming streets is explained by other more urgent work and by saving money.
In Preiļi municipality, the renaming of streets was already started in 2022, when the first street in Rušona parish, 5 August Street, was renamed Jašas Street, but then the municipality encountered resistance from residents.
"There were different opinions: let it stay, don't change it. After considering the application of the residents of Kosmonautu [Astronaut] Street, the explanation of the museum, and the results of the survey, the decision was taken not to change it for the time being," says Ilona Indriksone, a spokesperson for the municipality.
The only municipality that does not compromise and does not change street names in principle is Daugavpils.
Andrejs Elksniņš, the non-partisan mayor of Daugavpils, confirms that there are no streets in the city that need to be renamed.
"In my opinion, streets such as Tsiolkovsky Street or Mendeleev Street absolutely fit into the historical and cultural space of the city, so the issue of renaming streets in Daugavpils is not on the agenda at the moment," says Elksniņš.
In Rezekne, too, street name plates still read "Lermontov", "Moscow", "Astronaut". The issue has not been on the agenda of the current city administration due to lack of finances, while the temporary administrators, who started work in early July, are still familiarizing themselves with the situation in the city.
The historian Kārlis Kangeris points out that he is not questioning or attacking the literary legacy of poets and writers or the contribution of scientists, but rather their political activities. And that street names were once purposefully subjected to Russification.
"And the system wants you to believe in the system, to see our people everywhere. And with that, they tried to show that culture comes from the East. It slowly instills the idea that everything good comes from the East," the historian explains.
In order to encourage municipalities to focus on renaming streets, the Public Memory Center has appealed to the Saeima to enshrine this norm in law.
So far, the draft law has not been supported, but the association is determined both to continue to reach out to municipalities and to knock on the legislator's door to finally do away with the Soviet legacy.
