Discussion
This paper examines the transformation of political authority in Russia through its heraldic insignia, highlighting the Mongol influence on the Grand Duchy of Moscow and the Russian Empire. From Ivan the Terrible’s use of the Unicorn on seals, the throne, and coinage to the Romanovs, one can trace how symbols of legitimization from the Golden Horde and its successor khanates were appropriated and transformed, reinforcing authoritarian control. Even centuries after the fall of the Horde, these principles of centralization, combined with colonial expansion, remained visually encoded, serving as instruments of imperial identity.
Immediately following the Crimean War (1853–1856), the Romanovs introduced a dynastic personal coat of arms and replaced the imperial standard with a yellow-black-white tricolor, officially justified as aligning with “the principles used by leading European empires, notably Prussia and Austria.” Bernhard Koehne drew on a standard of the Romanov ancestor, boyar Nikita Zakharyin-Yuriev, used during the Livonian War. This Romanov gryphon, advancing with a sword toward Europe, sharply contrasts with the disarmed gryphon of Sevastopol, visually recording the defeat of Crimea’s defenders.
Shortly after the war, the yellow-black flag of Tartary and its Kaiser, which had marked an independent political space outside Moscow’s control for almost 150 years, disappeared from global maritime charts. The flag displayed a gryphon or Zilant — a figure closely linked to Turkic-Hordaic traditions — as did the Kazan Khanate’s emblem, incorporated into the Grand Duchy of Moscow’s Great Coat of Arms since Ivan the Terrible. This appropriation functioned not as cultural inheritance but as a visual mechanism of subjugation over territories with prior statehood and political agency.
The last fragment of the former Horde-Tartary integrated into the Russian Great Coat of Arms in 1882 was the Turkestan Unicorn, signaling the symbolic completion of colonial subordination in eastern territories while visually recording the continuity of Horde-derived models of centralized authority. Other Horde-derived figures — the Kazan Zilant, the gryphons of Sevastopol and Crimea, and symbols of Vidzeme and Latgale as heirs of Livonia — persisted and adapted in post-imperial and post-Soviet contexts, demonstrating selective heraldic continuity as a tool for legitimizing control over space and memory.
Muscovite and early-imperial Russian heraldic symbols function as visual instruments of legitimation and markers of medieval territorial claims, retaining potential strategic significance even today. Analyzing these heraldic transformations reveals not only the history of symbols but also the resilience of imperial political reasoning, which survives dynasties, regimes, and ideologies, preserving long-standing models of authority and legitimation over the Moscow-Orda imperial space and its colonial territories.
