Morning Comrade and welcome back to another instalment in the series: Art In The Service Of The Revolution where this week we will go through a brief history of this symbol and it’s meanings.
As with so much imagery that came out of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the subsequent establishment of the USSR a lot of our base reactions here in the West are based on a century of anti-communist propaganda and indoctrination and the purpose, partly in any case, of this dispatch is to clarify the background to this symbol. I am fully aware that it can and does mean many different things to many people, to me as well, but to be sure, this isn’t some sort of larpy-crush post in favour of the Soviet Union. Whilst there is much to admire there is plenty of aspects to their history that one can disagree with. No matter your ( or my own ) feelings about it all, history is what it is: mostly unclear and remaining to be written. Additionally, no matter anyone’s feelings, the fact remains that the hammer and sickle is one of the most omnipotent and powerful symbols of the proletarian uprising and rule.
The hammer and sickle is the symbol meant to represent proletarian solidarity, a union between agricultural and industrial workers. It was first adopted during the Russian Revolution at the end of World War I, the hammer representing workers and the sickle representing the peasants.1
Farm and worker instruments and tools have long been used as symbols for proletarian struggle, a good time before the October Revolution, in the same instance that the colour red, especially used on flags, has been a symbol of peasant and working class uprisings, especially since the Paris Commune. 2
The combination of hammer and sickle symbolised the combination of farmers and construction workers, specifically. One example of use prior to its political instrumentalization by the Soviet Union is found in Chilean currency circulating since 1894.
An alternative example is the combination of a hammer and a plough, with the same meaning. In Ireland, the symbol of the plough remains in use. The Starry Plough3 banner was originally used by the Irish Citizen Army, a socialist republican workers' militia. James Connolly, who co-founded the Irish Citizen Army with Jack White, said the significance of the banner was that a free Ireland would control its own destiny from the plough to the stars. A sword is forged into the plough to symbolise the end of war with the establishment of a Socialist International. That was unveiled in 1914 and flown by the Irish Citizen Army during the 1916 Easter Rising.
In the early days of the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks considered the Red Banner to be sufficient as a symbol for their ideological commitment to place all authority in the hands of workers and peasants as a plain red flag had first been used as a symbol of popular rights against autocratic governments during the French Revolution. However, after the victory of Marxist-Leninist forces in Russia, it became more closely identified with communist movements, and social-democratic parties often sought other symbols.
On April 14, 1918, the newly formed Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic adopted the Red Banner with the initials of the state in the upper hoist corner in gold lettering. Similar flags were used by Soviet regimes in Belorussia (now Belarus), Ukraine, and Transcaucasia (i.e., Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan). The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R., or Soviet Union)4 was created on December 31, 1922. The Soviet constitution mandated the national flag’s design, and that flag, with minor modifications, was effective from January 31, 1924, to the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 31, 1991. The hammer and sickle as it represented, respectively, workers and peasants, and the star symbolized the ultimate goal of global communist victory.
In 1917, Vladimir Lenin and Anatoly Lunacharsky5 held a competition to create a Soviet emblem. The winning design was a hammer and sickle on top of a globe in rays of the sun, surrounded by a wreath of grain and under a five-pointed star, with the inscription "proletarians of the world, unite!" in six languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Georgian, Armenian and Azerbaijani). It originally featured a sword, but Lenin strongly objected, disliking the violent connotations.
The winning designer was Yevgeny Ivanovich Kamzolkin.6, interestingly enough not a member of the Communist Party.
On 6 July 1923, the 2nd session of the Central Executive Committee (CIK) adopted the emblem. In his work, Daily Life in a Crumbling Empire: The Absorption of Russia into the World Economy,7 sociologist David Lempert hypothesizes that the hammer and sickle was a secular replacement for the patriarchal cross. On that note, there are heaps of articles out there dipping into the symbology behind the Hammer and Sickle and quite frankly, you can easily and happily disregard most of them. After a few hours of reading up on the pseudo-scientific nonsense I gave up so spare yourself the trouble.
As much as this symbol of worker solidarity is both revered and hated around the world, the meaning behind it is just that: solidarity of the working classes upon which the foundation of Communism is built. I would wager that it is precisely this simplicity that has caused so much energy having been spent to criminalize it, and have its history distorted. Again, I wish I could have included more pictures in this essay but google blocks emails that exceed a certain size and that’s just that.
As always, thank you for your time and attention,
Yours,
V.
"Flag of Union of Soviet Socialist Republics". Encyclopedia Britannica.
Absolute worthy of your time: Lempert, David (1996). Daily Life in a Crumbling Empire: The Absorption of Russia into the World Economy. Columbia University Press/ Eastern European Monographs.