Victory Banner

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This article is about the Russian/Soviet Victory Banners. For the Buddhist Victory Banner, see Dhvaja.

"Victory Banner #5" was raised just below a statue on the roof of the Reichstag building

The Soviet/Russian Victory Banner (Russian: Знамя Победы, Znamya Pobedy) is the banner that was raised by Red Army soldiers on the Reichstag in Berlin, in 1945. The Cyrillic inscription reads: "150th Rifle, Order of Kutuzov 2nd class, 'Idritskaya' Division, 79th Rifle Corps, 3rd Shock Army, 1st Byelorussian Front." This flag is not the first to be hoisted on the Reichstag, but is the first (and the only surviving) of the 'official' flags, explicitly prepared for that purpose, to be raised there.

[edit] Yeltsin's Victory Banner

The banner that Boris Yeltsin approved, in a presidential decree, in 1996, and that was the flag of the Russian Army

There was a variation of the Soviet flag, without the hammer and sickle, to which president Boris Yeltsin gave a status similar to that of the national flag, on April 5, 1996. President Vladimir Putin also adopted the Victory Banner as the official flag of the Russian Army. This flag was named after the flag raised on the Reichstag, but it is also called Victory Flag.

Today this variation isn't an official symbol. The Russian Ground Forces flags where once again changed to a flag without the soviet-era star. changed^[1]^[2] The flags that are to used for celebrations of the soviet Victory Day were defined by a federal law,^[3] on May 7, 2007, as copy of the flag raised on Reichtag (with the hammer and sickle, and the inscription).

[edit] Trivia

Yeltsin's Victory Banner is very similar to the August 1st Military Banner, which is the banner of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, although the similarity is largely coincidental. It is also similar to the flag of the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League, which later became the basis for the flag of Burma.