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By
the start of the twentieth century the Russian authorities
themselves show readiness to appeal to positive Soviet values and to
reestablish the disrupted historical continuity. The most telling
example of the new attitude is the approval by the parliament, under
Putin, of the seemingly incongruous concoction of
state symbols. These
include the coat-of-arms, the national flag, and the state anthem.
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The Russian
coat-of-arms is a golden two-headed eagle on a red shield, with the
three crowns of Peter the Great above it. The double-headed eagle
was the coat-of-arms of the Byzantine Empire. In the fifteenth
century the Russian tsar Ivan III adopted it after he married
Sophia, or Zoe, Palaeologa, the niece of Constantine XI, the last
Byzantine emperor.
Following the
Bolshevik takeover in 1917, this emblem was discarded and replaced
by a hammer-and-sickle against the background of a globe bathed in
sunrays and framed in ears of corn and red ribbons bearing the
inscription (in the languages of all constituent republics)
“Proletarians of All Countries, Unite!” and crowned with a
five-pointed star. The two-headed eagle was reinstated as the
Russian coat-of-arms on President Boris Yeltsin’s decree in 1993.
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