Bleached Stripes & Burning Beetles: Russia’s St. George Ribbons and the Guardianship of Soviet Space and Memory

This paper considers how the Georgievskaja lentochka, the orange and black striped ‘St. George’ ribbon now strongly associated with pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine, illustrates both the reinforcement and undoing of Russian leadership in imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet space.  The small, looped ‘awareness’ ribbons, diminutive models of the orange and black ribbons on the Soviet medal of valor distributed to soldiers “for victory over Germany,” were first distributed on a large scale in 2005 by Russian nationalist youth organization, Nashi, which encouraged people to wear them at the traditional May 9th Victory Day celebrations as a way of commemorating World War II (‘Great Patriotic War’) dead.  Several years later, the ribbons had come to be associated with loyalty to Putin’s regime.  The ribbon’s meaning had become both bleached and refined: those who declined to wear the ribbons were labeled ‘fascists,’ their opposition to the current Russian regime read back in time as opposition to the Soviet heroes who fought the Nazis.  Adherents to the ribbons imagined themselves defenders of the nation(s) and its memories.  This paper explores the semiotic processes that facilitated the uptake of the ribbon, as well as its further recontextualization in the 2014 Ukrainian separatist crisis.  In particular, it attends to a case of metaphor by metonymy, in which pro-Russian wearers of the ribbon were referred to by pro-Ukrainians as kolorady, short for koloradskij zhuki, the invasive, orange and black striped Colorado potato beetles that have plagued Eastern Europe since the late 1940s.