High-Resolution Selfie

Today in Ukraine, the sky is where it should be and the grain is turning yellow. But the Russians do not see it that way.

One need only look at the historical flags of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic to understand why successive ceasefire talks come to nothing. On them, the arrangement of yellow and blue is upside down in relation to the present-day Ukrainian flag. Those speaking have opposite perspectives.

Heraldry is the most formalised part of the system of symbolic signs that convey the balance of power, the course of borders and aspirations. The arrangement of colours on flags always has some obvious explanation. The red banners of Bolshevik communism were meant as a reminder of the blood of the weak and poor. It quickly became apparent that this was more often blood shed by the propagators of the revolutionary empire.  

There is something ghastly in the enduring imperial practice of covering such difficulties in reaching agreement with one’s surroundings with an excess of red. According to the Russian school of realist battle painting, a different point of view must be surrounded and saturated with blood until it is indistinguishable from the rest of the red plane, vanishes into the monotony of the nightmare and ceases to mean anything.  

In the mythic narratives of Eastern Europe, the entire landscape is periodically soaked in red. These may be Polish red poppies or the Ukrainian red viburnum.