The display of flags and emblems on official buildings in the province remains a sensitive issue.
In the past few weeks three more rich and powerful men, all emblems of the chaotic and greedy years of Russia's recent history, have felt the cold breath of official displeasure.The first was Rem Vyakhirev, the former boss of Gazprom, the grossly mismanaged national gas company, and probably the single most powerful businessman in the country.
The South is now home to large numbers of newcomers who are neither black nor white, and who have no stake whatsoever in the continuing fuss over emblems of yore.
They have achieved the improbable feat of disarming tribesmen in a society where guns are considered indispensable emblems of manhood.
In 1899 Thorstein Veblen, an economist, described the economic necessity of efficient leisure to a society where conspicuous consumption, leisure, and other "emulative or invidious comparisons" had replaced hereditary emblems of status.
These include changing the name of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, removing the crown from the force's cap badge, and wiping away other emblems of Britishness.
Families gawk at a game enclosure featuring stuffed buffalo, grizzlies, bighorn sheep and other rarely seen emblems of the American frontier.
In 1918 Lenin issued a decree that statues "erected in honour of the tsars and their minions" be torn down, and the "old inscriptions, emblems, names of streets" be changed to reflect the "ideas and sentiments" of the revolution.By using laws and punishments to change people's ideas about history, "we are repeating the mistakes of the past," says Mikhail Minakov, a political philosopher in Kiev.
Her yellow dress and the yellow ribbons it inspired are even seen as the forerunners of the roses, tulips and other coloured emblems of these uprisings.
After enduring a government lecture on white supremacism, it was comforting to dine with Mr Oppenheimer in his splendid home in Johannesburg with its Goyas and Degas and other emblems of good taste; and hear his liberal-minded views delivered in quiet Oxford English.
Students might also take a leek or daffodil, the two Welsh national emblems, to school with them.Leeks have been associated with Wales since Welsh soldiers wore them in their caps during the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.
