As Russia teeters between democracy and autocracy, modernity and a return to its Stalinist past, the tentative liberalism represented by President Dmitry Medvedev and the repression represented by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, one symbol describes the country's split personality particularly well: the double-headed eagle, Russia's emblem for much of the time since the 15th century.
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Throughout ancient history, eagles -- with one head -- were a universal symbol of empire, from Persia, Turkey, and South India to Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Rome. Napoleon adopted the noble bird as his coat of arms in the early 1800s. In modern times, the eagle has lived on, though it has shed some of its domineering symbolism. Countries such as the United States, Egypt, Iraq, Mexico, Poland, and Romania have adopted the eagle more as a sign of national greatness than of conquest.
Add a head, however, and the equation shifts. In Byzantium, the "Second Rome" of the first millennium, the two-headed eagle came to signify the empire's doubly powerful domination over the world: One head looked over the West, the other ruled the East. Not to be outdone, the Holy Roman Empire starting in the 900s also insisted on two heads. After that empire dissolved in 1806, its successors in the German Confederation and Austria-Hungary held on to the double heads, at least until modernity hit and that second one began to look too 10th-century. Germany discarded its second eagle's head in 1866, while Austria's lasted until 1918.
The Russian czars, soon after Byzantium's collapse in 1453, also adopted the double eagle as a symbol of their power. After dumping the czars centuries later, the Soviets sought to eliminate all trace of the imperial emblem, going to such lengths as painting red stars over the double-headed eagle on the side of official teacups. But President Boris Yeltsin brought it back after the Soviet collapse in 1991 to replace the hammer and sickle as the state symbol, explaining that the eagle's three crowns no longer had imperialist overtones but referred to the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of the government. The double-headed eagle he chose evoked the seal of Peter the Great, the legendary reformer to whom Yeltsin liked to compare himself.
But no one stopped to argue that maybe what Russia really needed was only one eagle with a clear mission -- not two heads, or three crowns. And now it's just Russia and the Balkan states of Serbia, Albania, and Montenegro that still cling to the double eagle.
At first, Yeltsin's move seemed to be about resurrecting a pre-Soviet relic. But over the last decade the eagle's implicit message -- Russia's superiority over both Europe and Asia -- has become more and more central to Russian identity. Today you'll find the emblem everywhere: on Russia's official coat of arms, on its police insignia, as the symbol for Kremlin announcements on television, in the Ministry of Internal Affairs logo, and so forth. Byzantium and its twin-headed icon are discussed on talk shows, their imperial grandeur cited as an example for Russia's future glory. Russian Orthodox priests deliver sermons on the lessons Russia must learn from its Byzantine past.
Putin himself often invokes a mythic version of this history to explain why the country is so great. "'All peoples are equal before God' is at the foundation of Russian statehood," he said upon assuming the presidency in 2000. "Unlike in the West, Russian Orthodox culture had always insisted upon the equality of all peoples.
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