11 September 2013. RIA-Novosti Infographics. The History of the Russian National Flag

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The familiar Russian white-blue-red tricolour wasn’t always the symbol of our country… in the long history of the Russia, the flag changed several times; there was a black-white-yellow flag in the 19th century, and there was the familiar Soviet red banner. We offer you this infographic, which illustrates Russian flags from different historical periods. The Russian tricolour has a more than 300-year history. The Russian national flag appeared in the period between the 17th and 18th centuries, the era that marked the rise of Russia as a great power. The first white-blue-red banner flew over the first modern Russian warship, the frigate Oryol, in 1668, during the reign of Pyotr Veliki’s father Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich. Pyotr Veliki issued a decree on 20 January 1705 ordering all Russian merchant ships to hoist the white-blue-red flag. Thus, he was the “father” of the modern tricolour, as he sketched out the design, and decided upon the order of the horizontal stripes.

In 1858, Tsar Aleksandr Nikolayevich approved a flag “with black-yellow-white horizontal stripes, to be the Imperial banner, for use for public display on special occasions”. He issued a decree on 1 January 1865 naming the colours black, yellow, and white “the national colours of Russia”. In the USSR, for more than 70 years, the red flag was the national flag. An extraordinary session of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet on 22 August 1991 decided to reinstate the tricolour as the official Russian flag. A Presidential decree of 11 December 1993 formally approved regulations making the white-blue-red banner the State Flag of the Russian Federation. On 25 December 2000, President Vladimir Putin signed a federal law, “On the State Flag of the Russian Federation”. In accordance with the law, the State Flag of the Russian Federation is a rectangular banner of three equal horizontal stripes, white on top, blue in the middle, and red on the bottom. The flag’s ratio is laid down as 2:3, which means that the height is 2/3 of the width.

22 August 2013

RIA-Novosti

http://ria.ru/infografika/20130822/957708240.html

http://www.en.rian.ru/infographics/20130822/182902292/History-of-the-Russian-State-Flag.html

 

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23 August 2012. RIA-Novosti Infographics. History of the Russian State Flag

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Russian Flag Day was established by presidential decree in 1994. In a move that seems natural to the eyes of modern Russians, the “tricolour” displaced the Soviet red flag during the August coup three years earlier. On 22 August 1991, President Boris Yeltsin approved the pre-revolutionary white-blue-red flag as the national flag of the new Russia.

The colours that became symbolic of the Russian Federation appeared for the first time in the state flag back in 1668. The so-called “flag of the king of Moscovy” was raised aboard the first Russian warship of Western design, the Oryol, built under Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich. Later, his son, Tsar Pyotr Veliki, adopted the “tricolour” as a state flag, standardising it according to the colours flown on the 12-gun warship Svatoy Pyotr, which sailed on the White Sea. The main symbol of the country, in one form or another, maintained this white-blue-red configuration until 1858. Tsar Aleksandr Nikolayevich made significant changes to the appearance of the flag; he used the heraldic colours of the Romanov Dynasty… black, yellow, and white… for the state banner. During the socialist era, the state flag became a red banner, up to 1923 it bore the golden letters “RSFSR” (in the Cyrillic alphabet), and, after that, it had a golden hammer and sickle with a five-pointed star.

22 August 2012

RIA-Novosti

http://en.ria.ru/infographics/20120822/175367319.html