APPROVAL OF THE NEW STATE SYMBOLS IN THE BALTIC REPUBLICS: FLAG AND COAT OF ARMS

Abstract

The article discusses the process of emergence and semantic load of the state symbols of the Baltic states. The Baltic republican symbols began to emerge at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries, during the period of “national awakening”. State paraphernalia in the form of a flag and coat of arms in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania was legally fixed in the early 1920s. As a result of incorporation into the USSR in 1940, the state symbols were replaced by the Soviet version. However, during the period of perestroika and the growth of disintegration processes in the Soviet Union, Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius in 1989–1990 officially returned to the original paraphernalia of the bourgeois republics of the interwar period, thus sanctioning the consolidation of the principle of continuity – historical succession to the states of the 1920s – 1930s. State symbols undoubtedly have an impact on public memory, as that builds historical parallels between the current republics and key stages of the past, the memory of which is the attributes of national statehood.