Last Soviet-era (before 1991) flag was adopted by the Russian SFSR in 1954. The constitution stipulated:
- The state flag of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic presents itself as a red rectangular sheet with a light-blue stripe at the pole extending all the width which constitutes one eighth length of the flag.
Between 1937 and the adoption of the flag to the right, the flag was red with the gold Cyrillic characters РСФСР (RSFSR) in the top-left corner, in a traditional viaz' style of ornamental Cyrillic calligraphy.
The flag of RSFSR is a defacement of the flag of the Soviet Union.
Like the flag of the Soviet Union, the hammer and sickle represents the working class and more specifically, the hammer represents the urban industrial workers and the sickle represents the rural and agricultural peasants. The red in the flag represents the Russian revolution and revolution in general.
Famous quotes containing the words flag, russian, soviet, socialist and/or republic:
“By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Watching a woman make Russian pancakes, you might think that she was calling on the spirits or extracting from the batter the philosopher’s stone.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“So they lived. They didn’t sleep together, but they had children.”
—Russian saying popular in the Soviet period, trans. by Vladimir Ivanovich Shlyakov (1993)
“I pass the test that says a man who isn’t a socialist at 20 has no heart, and a man who is a socialist at 40 has no head.”
—William Casey (1913–1987)
“No republic is more real than that of letters, and I am the last in principles, as I am the least in pretensions to any dictatorship in it.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)