Vladimir Putin, the elected president of Russia, last week proposed reinstating the five-pointed red star as a symbol of that nation’s military.

The red star has never really gone away. A symbol of the old Soviet Union, introduced after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, it still tops the steeples of buildings in the Kremlin and is still emblazoned on older Russian military equipment. Putin’s proposal, if seconded by the Russian parliament, will just ensure that it will not be phased out along with the red flag and hammer and sickle, the other primary symbols of the old communist state.

Just using the phrases “the elected president of Russia,” and “if approved by the Russian Parliament” is a thrill for me and for most anyone who grew up during the Cold War. Russia’s transformation into a capitalist democracy remains the most dramatic and important upheaval in the world during the more than half-century of my lifetime.

But there are those in Russia who fear that re-instituting the red star heralds a return to the bad old days of Soviet dictatorship. It doesn’t – any more than reintroducing the old double-headed eagle emblem of the old Russian monarchy – which Putin also proposed – heralds a return of the czarist state. Both gestures are meant to soothe the feelings of disgruntled, conservative, mostly elderly minorities whose memory of their country is most affronted by the sweeping changes there over the last decade.

Since 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia has flown the white, red and blue flag of pre-communist Russia. Under Putin’s proposal, the red star will once again be painted on Russian military equipment and adorn the caps and belt buckles of its soldiers.

Russia is not going backward by doing these things. Putin’s gesture is magnanimous. It recognizes both that these symbols no longer threaten Russian freedom and democracy and that they remain a source of deep emotional memory and pride to millions of his countrymen.

Literally millions of Russians fought and died rallying to the symbol of the red star during World War II. Beneath that banner, and at a cost far greater than any suffered by American families, they fought Hitler off Russian soil, across Eastern Europe, and ultimately into the bunker where he opted to end his own life.

People grow attached to symbols. American emotions are stirred by the Star-Spangled Banner and by other images that remind us of home, shared ancestry and values. While the flying of the stars and bars of the Confederate States of America is regarded as an insult by many Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in the South, for many others it remains a symbol of southern pride. This sense of regional identity is much broader and less well-defined than the principles of the Confederacy. Most Americans in the 21st century who remain emotionally attached to the old rebel flag no more endorse the concept of slavery than they contemplate seceding from the union.

Symbols are powerful, but history is stronger. Today, both the red star and the old stars and bars stand for loyalties that run deeper than the defeated causes they once represented.

President Abraham Lincoln understood magnanimity. He declined to prosecute rebels after the Civil War, and he never tried to suppress the Confederate flag or other southern symbols during the war. He asked a band at the White House to play “Dixie” after Robert E. Lee’s surrender. Lincoln knew that symbols of the defeated South were far more dangerous suppressed than embraced. Accepting them was a subtle way of demonstrating the completeness of the Union victory, that there was no need to fear that the South would rise again.

Great leaders should never miss a chance to be magnanimous. On a much smaller scale, President Bush missed one last week. Canadian Prime Minister Jean Cretien accepted the resignation of one Francoise Ducros, who was forced out of her job as communications director after reports surfaced that she had called Bush a “moron.”

Ducros evidently offered this opinion to a reporter in an informal conversation. It was overheard by another reporter, who revealed it to the world. Now, apart from the fact that it does little harm to anyone that an employee of the Canadian government thinks the president of the United States is a moron, an opinion no doubt shared by some employees of the United States government, Ducros never intended for hers to be made public. Losing her job seems like such an overreaction that it suggests, whether accurately or not, that the White House had a vindictive hand in the matter.

I think President Bush should have intervened to save her job. Better yet, he should have invited Ducros to the White House for tea, turned on the Texas charm, maybe invited her to play a game of chess in the Oval Office.