The Industrial Cities

Flag of Shuya

You could believe that this flag represents a chunk of butter. It doesn’t, of course. That would be ridiculous.

No, it’s actually a bar of soap.

This is the flag of Shuya, a small city (about 60 000 people) located 300 km east of Moscow. It used to be a major soap-making center, hence the design of the flag.

Yes, used to be, because that is the second surprise about this emblem: despite its post-modern look that would make it not so out of place in a contemporary art gallery, the “bar of soap” design actually dates back from 1781. Sure, the first version had another symbol on top of it but overall, it hasn’t changed that much:

Shuya may be one of the oldest examples of a city using the symbol of a local industry on a flag (Another good –but less amusing– illustration of this is the flag of Tula, which was one of the main arms factory center in the Russian Empire).

The arrival of the Soviet Union and its planned economy meant that hundreds of Russian cities became “monotown”, places revolving entirely around a single industry. Nearly two decades after the fall of the USSR, monotowns still exist in Russia, a good part of them having experienced constant worsening of their situation. When the local involves the extraction of a specific natural resource, this resource is sometimes used as a symbol on the official flag. The greatest illustration of this is the fantastic and yet depressing flag of Magnitogorsk, an industrial city in the Ural:

Flag of Magnitogorsk

The black triangle doesn’t represent the futility of love and the inevitability of death, nor is it the logo of a cyberpunk evil corporation. It is actually a minimalistic representation of the Magnitnaya mountain, a geological formation which used to be an incredible source of ore. Most of it has now been mined, but Magnitorosk remains a city entirely devoted to the metallurgy industry.

Leninsk-Kuznetsky, located in the oblast of Keremevo (a region about 300 km north of Mongolia) is less subtle about its links to the extractive business. According to its flag, Leninsk-Kuznetsky is about two things: coal mining, and communism

Flag of Leninsk-Kuznetsky

But it’s not always about resources. The settlement of Linyov, in the region of Novosibirsk, was built for the express purpose of housing the workers of an electrode factory, which began operating in 1974 and is still functioning today. Its flag, representing two electrodes making a spark, is then a fairly clear reminder of the city’s reason to exist:

Flag of Linyov

In the same fashion, Severny, a small village in the Moscow region, developed thanks to the installation in 1949 of a radio center. It therefore made perfect the sense for its flag to depict a radio tower: