Russian & Slavic Heraldry: Imperial Eagles & Family Crests

Medieval Rus' identified its princes by personal marks rather than coats of arms. The Rurikid dynasty used an angular device — a bident or trident, varied from prince to prince — stamped on coins and seals from the tenth century. It functioned like a signature and it was not heraldic: it was not borne on a shield, and it changed with each ruler rather than descending intact.

Its most famous descendant is the Ukrainian tryzub, the trident that is the state emblem of Ukraine, taken directly from the mark of Vladimir the Great.

The double-headed eagle appears under Ivan III around 1497, traditionally connected with his marriage to Sophia Palaiologina, niece of the last Byzantine emperor, and with Moscow's claim to the Byzantine inheritance. Combined with St George slaying the dragon — the emblem of Moscow, placed on the eagle's breast — it became the arms of the Russian state, and is again today.

Family heraldry in Russia is essentially an eighteenth-century import, and the dates are precise.

In 1722 Peter the Great created the Office of the Heraldmaster and appointed an Italian, Count Francesco Santi, to run it. Santi's job was to design arms for a nobility that largely had none, on western principles, and to bring order to those that existed.

The same year brought the Table of Ranks, which made nobility attainable through state service rather than birth alone — and this is the fact that matters most for anyone researching a Russian family. Russian nobility came in two kinds: potomstvennoye, hereditary, and lichnoye, personal and not transmitted to children. Reaching a specified rank in the army or civil service conferred one or the other. So a Russian noble family may have become noble in 1790 or in 1880, through a great-grandfather's promotion, and the record will say which.

The central source, and one of the most orderly heraldic records in Europe.

The Obshchiy Gerbovnik — the General Armorial of the Noble Families of the All-Russian Empire — was begun in 1797 by decree of Paul I. It ran to twenty volumes compiled into the early twentieth century, containing roughly three thousand coats of arms, each confirmed by the sovereign and each attached to a named family with its patent and date.

Because every entry was confirmed rather than merely collected, the Gerbovnik is a register rather than an anthology. If a Russian family's arms are in it, there is a document behind them. If they are not, there is a real question to answer.

• Mantles and crowns of rank. Princely arms are displayed on a crimson mantle lined with ermine, beneath a princely cap — a convention borrowed from German practice and used far more consistently in Russia.
• Helmets facing forward or in profile according to rank, again on the German model.
• Tatar and Caucasian charges. A substantial part of the Russian nobility descended from Tatar, Georgian, Armenian and Circassian princely houses absorbed into the empire, and their arms carry crescents, bows, sabres and tamga-marks rather than western charges.
• Granted augmentations commemorating campaigns, unusually common because so much Russian nobility was conferred for service.

Poland and Lithuania run on a system unlike anything else in Europe: the herb, a heraldic clan in which hundreds of unrelated families share one identical shield, with no differencing. It is covered in full in our guide to Polish heraldry and the clan system, and it also governs much of Belarus and Ukraine, whose nobility was largely within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

The South Slavs had a western-style tradition mediated through Hungary, Venice and the Habsburgs. Croatia's šahovnica, the red and white chequerboard, is documented from the late fifteenth century and is the national arms today. Serbia bears the cross between four ocila — firesteels, often misread as Cyrillic letters. The great source is the Fojnica Armorial, an Illyrian armorial of around 1600 that collected South Slavic arms, some genuine and some enthusiastically invented.

Bohemia and Moravia belong squarely to the Central European sphere and are covered in Siebmacher's great German armorial.

Russian surnames became general later than western European ones — universal among the nobility by the seventeenth century, but not fixed for the peasantry until the abolition of serfdom in 1861 and, in many places, not until the 1880s or later.

• -ov / -ev — possessive, from a father's name or nickname: Ivanov, Petrov, Medvedev (from medved, bear), Kuznetsov (from kuznets, smith — the Russian Smith, and the most common Russian surname).
• -in — the same function on a different stem: Pushkin, Nikitin, Ilyin.
• -sky / -skoy — locative, from a place or estate: Trubetskoy, Volkonsky. Also, distinctively, the ending given to seminary students, so a great many Russian clergy families bear invented Latin- or Greek-derived -sky names.
• -ich / -ovich — patronymic, more characteristic of the western Slavic and Balkan lands.

Two practical points. Russian surnames inflect for sex: Ivanov's wife and daughter are Ivanova, and immigration records routinely flatten this. And every Russian carries a formal patronymic as a middle name — Ivan Petrovich means Ivan son of Pyotr — which is genuinely useful in genealogy because it names the father in every document.

• The Obshchiy Gerbovnik, digitised, for confirmed noble arms.
• Provincial armorials and the Gerbovnik Anisimova for arms outside the general register.
• Revision lists (revizskie skazki) — the tax censuses taken ten times between 1719 and 1858, naming households. The backbone of Russian genealogy before civil registration.
• Metrical books (metricheskie knigi) — Orthodox parish registers of births, marriages and deaths, kept from the early eighteenth century, held in regional state archives.
• Noble assembly records (dvoryanskiye deputatskiye sobraniya), province by province, holding the proofs of nobility families had to submit.

A caution worth stating: the archives of the former Russian Empire suffered heavily in the twentieth century, and coverage is very uneven by region. Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states and Poland all hold records for families that would once have been filed in St Petersburg.

The Heritage Volume sets out what the historical record holds for a surname — where it comes from, what it meant, where its bearers were concentrated, and the arms associated with it. How Your Report Is Made explains which parts come from public records and which our system builds.

Display the arms in a framed coat of arms, or carry the crest on a signet ring.