Why did the Soviet Union adopt the hammer and sickle, and how did it become a symbol of communist revolution?
The hammer and sickle is one of the modern world’s most recognisable symbols. It instantly evokes the former Soviet Union and communism. For some people around the globe, it remains a beacon of hope for a better tomorrow. But for others it is a painful reminder of totalitarian oppression and terror. What’s the history behind this revolutionary symbol?
What is the hammer and sickle?
The symbol of the hammer and sickle is typically presented in a two-dimensional format, with the hammer crossed over the curved blade of the sickle (a tool traditionally used for harvesting crops, which has a curved metal blade often set on top of a wooden handle). A red star often – though not always – appears just above the tip of the sickle.
The hammer represents the working class engaged in industrial production, who, according to Marxist theory, are destined to overthrow the bourgeoisie, the dominant social class under capitalism. The sickle denotes the peasantry, the toilers of the land.
Though the symbol denotes solidarity between agricultural and industrial workers, the 19th-century philosopher Karl Marx, whose works were foundational to the beliefs of Vladimir Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks, had dismissed the peasantry as a vestige, leftover by the epoch that had preceded capitalism: feudalism.
Marx regarded peasants as an instinctively conservative class that would likely prove hostile to a workers’ revolution.
The adoption of a visual expression of unity between worker and peasant shows the Bolsheviks’ adaption of Marxism to their homeland’s specific circumstances, referencing the socio-economic reality of Russia, which was still a predominantly agrarian society with little industrial development, at the time of the October Revolution in 1917.
When did the hammer and sickle first appear?
In early 1918, Lenin and Anatoly Lunacharsky – head of the regime’s Commissariat for Education (known as ‘Narkompros’) – launched a competition for artists and designers to create an official seal for the nascent Soviet state.
The entries were a diverse assortment that spanned everything from striking avant-garde forms, classical imagery such as overflowing cornucopias, and even a double-headed eagle shorn of its feathers and regalia (the double-headed eagle had been adopted centuries before by the Russian tsars to symbolise their link to ancient Rome via the Byzantine empire; the regal title ‘tsar’ meaning ‘Caesar’).
The winning entry (by an unknown artist, though it has sometimes been attributed to one Alexander Nikolaevich Leo) featured a crossed hammer and sickle, sheaves of wheat, a rising sun and a vertical sword.
However, this was just weeks after Soviet Russia had negotiated its withdrawal from the First World War via the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Lenin, determined to maintain the regime’s peace-making credentials, vetoed the inclusion of a sword in April 1918.
While the government debated the state seal, artist Yevgeny Kamzolkin created the template of a crossed hammer and sickle that would later become famous throughout the world.
Kamzolkin’s stark design was originally produced for a poster celebrating 1918’s May Day festivities in Moscow’s Zamoskvorechye district.
On 10 July 1918, the Soviet republic formally adopted its constitution, which officially proclaimed that: “the coat of arms of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic consists of a red background on which a golden sickle and a hammer are placed (crosswise, handles downward) in sun-rays and surrounded by a wreath.”
Beneath this design was a slogan in Russian Cyrillic that paraphrased the last sentence of The Communist Manifesto and affirmed the Bolsheviks’ commitment to a global socialist revolution: “Workers of the world, unite!”
What other symbols did the Bolsheviks use?
Among the rejected entries for the state seal was an illustration by graphic artist Sergey Chekhonin, of a peasant woman holding a sickle and spade, facing a male worker holding a sledgehammer and a caduceus. These gender roles – the countryside as feminine and nurturing and the city as masculine and assertive, endured in Soviet inconography.
Some of these symbols also showed links to the classical pantheon. The caduceus is a staff wielded by the Greek god Hermes (also the Roman god Mercury). As well as a divine messenger, Hermes was the patron of commerce.
His caduceus and other paraphernalia, such as his winged helmet, often appeared on the banners of trade unions across Europe during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Also, the sickle is associated with Saturn, the Roman god of agriculture.
Lenin and his comrades understood the power of symbols and revolutionary heraldry. Further classical imagery appeared on the frontispiece to the first Soviet constitution, which featured fasces (a bundle of wooden rods with an axe) behind the hammer and sickle.
Fasces exemplified authority in ancient Rome and were revived during the American and French revolutions of the late 18th century.
How is the hammer and sickle used today?
Just over a year after the October Revolution, leading Bolsheviks formed the Communist International, better known as the ‘Comintern’. This global body aimed to promote the cause of worldwide proletarian revolution through kindred communist parties in every nation on the planet. The hammer and sickle quickly became the symbol for world communism.
It adorned the Soviet flag until the dissolution of the USSR in December 1991, undergoing slight modifications to its design over the decades. To this day it remains the symbol of many communist parties, including governing ones in the People’s Republic of China and Vietnam.
Across present-day Russia and other ex-Soviet republics, the symbol remains ubiquitous on buildings and monuments. Aeroflot, Russia’s de facto national airline, has retained the winged hammer and sickle logo designed by artist Alexander Rodchenko.
Is the hammer and sickle used in former Soviet states?
In 2010, several states in eastern Europe that had once been within Moscow’s orbit called upon the European Union to ban the hammer and sickle as a symbol of totalitarianism and crimes against humanity.
This was ultimately unsuccessful and was left up to the respective member states to determine their own approach.
Following the escalation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Kyiv has moved to obliterate traces of the country’s Soviet past. In August 2023, the Soviet coat of arms on the shield of the Mother Ukraine statue was replaced with the country’s tryzub (‘trident’) emblem.
How else has the hammer and sickle been used?
Given its striking imagery, the hammer and sickle has also found an audience beyond its explicitly political context. During a holiday to Italy, pop artist Andy Warhol was inspired to create a series featuring the tools in 1976 after being confronted with ubiquitous graffiti of the symbol while touring Italian towns.
George Orwell’s 1945 fable of the Russian Revolution, Animal Farm, in which animals revolt against their human farmer, features the so-called ‘Hoof and Horn’ flag in an apparent parody of the Soviet banner.
By coincidence, and in a non-communist rendering, the Republic of Austria’s coat of arms consists of an eagle grasping a hammer and sickle in its claws.
What symbols did the Bolsheviks use prior to the hammer and sickle?
Before the hammer and sickle there was another Bolshevik emblem – the plough and hammer, set within a red star.
As the American journalist John Reed conveyed in the title of his eyewitness account of the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in autumn 1917, Ten Days That Shook the World, the October Revolution was a seismic event.
As the ancient double-headed eagle of Russia’s tsarist past came crashing down amid the aftershocks, the country’s radical new leaders turned to face the future.
Unlike its European neighbours, Russia had retained an autocratic monarchy into the 20th century. Having only abolished serfdom in 1861, the vast empire was still largely defined by a feudal social order where illiterate peasants made up most of the population.
Generations of them had been raised to revere religious icons and the tsar as a ‘little father’ to his people, a living intercessor between their everyday lives and the divine.
The Bolsheviks were therefore acutely aware of the authority that visual motifs and symbols commanded in the land. They set about cultivating a new revolutionary culture soon after the October Revolution. Tsarist flags and iconography were outlawed, while statues of emperors were toppled on a wave of iconoclasm that swept through the major cities.
Yet before the hammer and sickle emerged, the new regime’s earliest symbol arose amid the Russian Civil War that immediately followed the Bolshevik Revolution.
On 19 April 1918, soldiers of Soviet Russia’s Red Army were bestowed with a breast badge that depicted a plough crossed over a hammer, contained within a red star.
Although its designer remains a mystery, the plough’s association with agriculture functioned as a precursor to the sickle, symbolising the peasantry in union with the industrial working class, embodied in the hammer.
As for the red star, its origins as a socialist symbol are also unclear. Five-pointed red stars had first appeared on the uniforms of tsarist officers during the early 19th century. Its martial use was a nod to the Roman god of war, Mars.
Similarly, its adoption by the Red Army evoked this meaning. However, it may also have been a salute to the 1908 novel, Red Star by Russian writer, Alexander Bogdanov, a work of science fiction that imagined a communist utopia on the red planet, Mars.
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Why is red associated with communism?
The Bolsheviks considered themselves the heirs to the European revolutionary tradition. To that end, in 1918, they adopted the red flag and renamed themselves the Communist Party as a homage to the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871.
Prior to that brief insurrection – which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had highlighted as a glimpse of the workers’ revolution they envisioned – the red flag had been adopted by radical republicans on the left during the 1848 revolution in France.
The use of red by the Soviet state also tapped into centuries of Russian tradition. In the Russian language, krasnyi (‘red’) is related to the word krasivyi, meaning ‘beautiful’.
Red corners were (and remain to this day) features of Orthodox Christian homes where residents displayed their holy icons. Similarly, Moscow’s Red Square became the focal point for all national celebrations in the decades that followed the October Revolution.
Authors
Danny Bird is the Staff Writer at BBC History Magazine. Danny Bird is the Staff Writer at BBC History Magazine and previously held the same role on BBC History Revealed. He joined the brand in 2022. Fascinated with the past since childhood, Danny completed his History BA at the University of Sheffield, developing a special interest in the Spanish Civil War and the Paris Commune. He subsequently gained his History MA from University College London, studying at its School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES)
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