Coat of arms of Russia

• 1. Introduction

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  The coat of arms of Russia carries a symbol that is older than the Russian state itself. A gold double-headed eagle on a red shield, a silver horseman driving a spear through a black dragon: these two images predate Peter the Great, and both trace back to the medieval world of the 15th century. When President Boris Yeltsin signed a decree in 1993, he was not inventing a new emblem. He was reaching back past the Soviet hammer and sickle, past the revolutionary upheaval of 1918, and recovering something that had sat on royal charters, palace walls, and imperial seals for more than five hundred years. How did a Byzantine eagle end up on a Russian shield? What does the horseman on the eagle's breast actually represent? And why does one of the scepter's ornaments show a tiny image of the coat of arms itself? The answers run through the fall of Constantinople, a dynastic marriage, and a long argument about who is the rightful heir to Rome.

• 2. The Byzantine Eagle

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  Constantinople fell in 1453, and with it went the Byzantine Empire. The Grand Dukes of Muscovy drew a direct conclusion: they were the successors to Byzantium's heritage. That claim was reinforced by a marriage. Ivan III wed Sophia Paleologue, a niece of the last Byzantine emperor, and the connection gave him a compelling symbolic argument. Ivan adopted the golden Byzantine double-headed eagle in his seal, first documented in 1472. By stamping that image on a charter of share and allotment of independent princes' possessions in 1497, he made it a mark of sovereign authority over Russian lands. Around the same time, a gilt double-headed eagle on a red background appeared on the walls of the Palace of Facets in the Moscow Kremlin, fixing the image in stone and plaster for anyone who entered the heart of Russian power. The choice of the double-headed eagle was also a pointed statement toward the Holy Roman Empire. Ivan positioned himself as a sovereign equal and rival, not a lesser prince on the European fringe.

• 3. Saint George and the Dragon

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  The silver horseman on the eagle's breast has a longer story than most people expect. In its earliest form, as a rider armed with a spear, the image appears in the seal of Vasili I of Moscow in 1390. At that point the rider was simply a horseman; the dragon was added during the reign of Ivan III, but the figure was not formally identified as Saint George until 1730, when an Imperial decree named him as such. That gap of more than three centuries between the image and its official name is a useful reminder that heraldic symbols accrue meaning over time. Saint George eventually became the patron saint of Moscow and, by extension, of Russia as a whole. After Ivan IV took the title of Tsar, the two great symbols were combined: the eagle now bore the escutcheon depicting Saint George on its breast. When the Moscow Patriarchate was established in 1589, a patriarchal cross was added for a time between the eagle's two heads, marking the brief moment when church authority was written directly into the state emblem.

• 4. Soviet Interruption

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  On the 10th of July 1918, the government of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic adopted a completely new coat of arms, sweeping away the double-headed eagle entirely. Wheat for agriculture, a rising sun for the nation's future, the hammer and sickle for the victory of Communism: each element carried an explicit ideological message. The RSFSR was notably the last Soviet republic to add the red star to its state emblem, doing so only in 1978. The Soviet Union as a whole adopted its emblem in 1923. That emblem was technically not a coat of arms at all, since it did not follow traditional heraldic rules, but Russian still called it a gerb, the same word used for a traditional coat of arms. It was the first state insignia created in the style known as socialist heraldry. The motto inscribed on its ribbons, "Workers of the world, unite!", was printed in the official languages of all Soviet republics; the number of ribbons grew as the union expanded, reaching sixteen before settling at fifteen after the final version was adopted in 1956, when the Finnish inscription was removed to reflect the transformation of the Karelo-Finnish SSR into the Karelian ASSR.

• 5. The 1993 Revival

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  In 1992, the inscription on the Russian emblem was changed from RSFSR to Russian Federation, tracking the country's new name. Then in 1993, President Boris Yeltsin signed a decree replacing the Communist design with the restored double-headed eagle. The specific decree was No. 2050, dated the 30th of November 1993, and the drawing it approved was the work of artist Yevgeny Ukhnalyov. The revival was not without friction. Communists objected to the reappearance of the orb and scepter in the eagle's claws, symbols of monarchical power, on the grounds that the Russian Federation is a republic, not a kingdom. The designers had already made concessions to the modern state: the blue ribbon and the collar of the Order of St. Andrew, which in the imperial arms had supported the three crowns and surrounded the central shield, were both removed. The crowns themselves remained, reinterpreted as symbols of the unity and sovereignty of Russia as a whole and of its constituent republics and regions. On the 25th of December 2000, President Vladimir Putin signed Federal Constitutional Law No. 2, which retained the 1993 design as the permanent state symbol and set out rules for its use.

• 6. Details Worth Noticing

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  One element of the current coat of arms has an unusual optical property. The scepter held in the eagle's right claw is topped by a miniature image of the coat of arms itself, creating what heraldists call the Droste effect: a picture that contains a smaller version of itself. The official description, in both Russian and its English translation, is precise about every element: a four-cornered red heraldic shield with rounded lower corners, a golden double-headed eagle with raised extended wings, two small crowns above the heads with one large crown above them all, the three crowns linked by a ribbon, and a silver horseman in a blue cape mounted on a silver horse, slaying a black dragon with a silver spear. The 1993 decree and the 2000 law differ slightly in how they phrase these details; the 1993 version refers to the three crowns as "the three historical crowns of Peter the Great," while the 2000 law describes them without that attribution. Both regulatory documents contain the same drawing by Ukhnalyov in their appendices, so the visual image was settled even as the verbal description was refined. Russian ruble coins have depicted the coat of arms on the obverse side since 2016, placing that medieval eagle in the hands of anyone buying groceries or paying a bus fare.