Flag of Russia
Russia's parliament recognizes the white-blue-red tricolor
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗At noon, a white-blue-red flag replaced the Soviet-era banner over the building where opponents of the coup had just held out behind barricades.
22 August 1991: an emergency session
At an emergency session in Moscow on 22 August 1991, the Supreme Soviet of the Russian SFSR adopted a resolution recognising the historical white-azure-scarlet tricolor as the official National Flag of the Russian Federation. The hard-line coup against Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev had collapsed the day before.
The tricolor was raised over the Russian parliament building — the Moscow White House — in place of the Russian SFSR's Soviet-era red flag. Reports give the time as noon.
Recognised only until a symbols law
The resolution was expressly interim: it recognised the tricolor pending a special law establishing new state symbols. Ruslan Khasbulatov, first deputy chairman of the Supreme Soviet, autographed the archived text.
Contemporary reporting described Boris Yeltsin announcing the tricolor as Russia's official flag during the post-coup victory gathering outside parliament. One correspondent put the crowd at 100,000.
What the flag change did not do
The resolution concerned the Russian SFSR and Russian Federation, not the still-existing Soviet Union. The Soviet flag stayed over the Kremlin until 25 December 1991.
The tricolor's status was written into the RSFSR Constitution on 1 November 1991. Because the exact specification was standardised later still, the August 1991 cloth should not be assumed to match today's flag in every legal detail.
Sources
Researched 23 Aug 2026 5 sources 2 audit passes Date corrected
How this was checked
Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →
Date corrected. The research places this at 1991-08-22.
What the sources leave uncertain
- The listed date, 23 August, is one day late. The archived parliamentary resolution, official Russian commemorations and contemporary reporting all place the action and flag raising on 22 August 1991.
- The August resolution was expressly interim—effective until a special law established new state symbols. The constitutional and later statutory specifications therefore should not be projected backward onto every detail of the flag used that day.