Introduction: The "Red Star" is the symbol of the October Revolution in Russia, and it also shone on the socialist camp led by the Soviet Union. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the narrative of the "Red Star" withered away until people were about to forget the passionate years. Amateur international political observer Kolasna Tevica published a series of articles: "The History of the Development of the Soviet and Eastern Soviet Army Hat Emblems and the Evolution of the Initial Intention of European Socialist Countries", focusing on the construction, review and traversal of the origin and evolution of the Soviet and Eastern Soviet army hat emblems in European socialist countries. This article is part ii.
[Text/Observer Network columnist Kolasna Tevica]
(Click to view the previous part)
Next we will talk about the greatest difficulty faced by the Red Star Hat emblem in Russia in 1918.
The picture above shows a typical cap badge produced during part of 1918. Note that as mentioned earlier, the hammer head of the hammer in the early hammer plough pattern is on the top, the horn is on the top, the hammer face is pointed to the bottom right, and the hammer handle points to the bottom left, so the decoration direction of this hat badge is correct - the separate pointed corner of the five-pointed star is facing down.
Yes, there was a time in the chaos of 1918 when some of the Red Star emblems were made and even worn in the direction of one-pointed downwards and double-horned upwards. This inverted red five-star also appeared briefly in propaganda posters (bottom left) and in the red flag medal (lower center) style formulated by the Republic of the Russian Federation on September 16, 1918; in the Order of the Red Banner of Azerbaijan (bottom right), which was briefly awarded for more than three years, the five horns of the inverted red five stars were made to be more clearly distinguished.
But all of these designs were quickly abolished. Except for the incomplete inverted red five-star in the red flag medal pattern, the orientation of all the red star symbols has been strictly unified into the one-pointed upward appearance that we are now familiar with.
This shift in direction is the result of the strong Orthodox undertones of Russian (mainstream) society.
The Revolutionaries of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Brazzaville), who have long held the belief in atheism, want to popularize science and sweep away all spiritual opium, have overlooked one thing that they themselves do not care about, but which has a great problem in the folk - the appearance of the inverted pentagram accurately hits the symbol of the Antichrist, the "inverted pentagram". The symbol may have originated from the 16th-century Italian book Grimorium Verum, commonly known as the "pentagram of Mandez", which looks a bit like a horned sheep's head and is a symbol of the devil Lucifer and Leviathan.
The White Army, deeply associated with the Orthodox Church, seized this mistake of the Red Army with great sensitivity. The White Army began to preach in the countryside that "the Red Army is the embodiment of Satan, and they wear the inverted pentagram of the Antichrist on their hats." Since the Bolsheviks did believe in atheism, and because they were in power in many regions at the beginning of the civil war, they immediately dogmatically promoted the destruction of religious festivals and the demolition of churches (in the early Days, "The Red Army is The Mighty" had "the cathedral ... All destroyed" and even the policy of physical extermination of the clergy; and all this was superimposed with the effects of the surplus grain collection system (продразвёрстка) promulgated from May 1918, further worsening the image of the Bolsheviks in the countryside.
As a result, the white army's propaganda worked very well; the peasants in the remote areas, who were per capita prenatal and had a sincere faith in anyone who claimed to defend orthodoxy or Catholicism (the Soviet-Polish border area), caused great trouble to the Soviet regime.
И Mintz, director of the Political Department of the 1st Division of the Ukrainian Soviet, pointed out helplessly at the meeting: "Young peasants are full of prejudices. Not only to the Commune, but also to our army the new Red Star Hat emblem ..."
In order to dispel the propaganda of the "Antichrist symbol", the Military Department of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee quickly produced a famous leaflet - "Look, comrade! This is the Red Star (see image below). "Look, comrade! This is the Red Star is a very special document. It conveyed only one practical message — that the Red Star Hat emblem should be defined and promoted with a single-pointed upward orientation " — but its place in the history of the Russian Communist Movement is probably grossly underestimated. In a culturally constructive sense, its importance is almost comparable to the restoration of the Imperial Russian epaulettes of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army in 1943, another event that was downplayed within the CPSU but had a profound impact on the historical development of the SOVIET Union.
The full text of the leaflet is as follows:
"Look good, comrade!
"This
"It's Red Star:
"Look, comrade! This is the head-up section of the original Red Star flyer
"The Red Army soldiers put it on their hats, and she was the symbol that the Red Army used to identify.
"Every army wears a badge that symbolizes who it serves. What does the insignia of the old army represent? It was a shining ribbon of the Tsar's flag (note: black, yellow and white), representing the soldiers to serve the Tsar. In the past, the army ate the people's fat, but it gave its life for the Tsar, suppressed the workers and peasants and helped to oppress the bourgeoisie of the people according to the orders of the Tsar.
Russian 1907-style hat insignia, soldier (left), officer (right)
"So, what does the red star mean?"
"Listen, comrade,
"Do you know a story about the Red Fairy, Zhen'er ("Pravda", literally and allusively, as will be said below)? She was beautiful and lovely, with a star on her forehead and a star on her neck. Under the light of that star, all people live happily in abundance and truth, everyone has everything, no one kills, no one offends others.
"There's also a dark witch, Cliffda (literally: fallacy; lie). She wants to confuse people and take away their happiness.
Cliffda quietly approached Zhen'er, stole her star, and hid it under her robe.
"The world was immediately plunged into darkness. In the darkness, the blackened people began to do bad things. They began to bully the weak, taking away all their possessions and forcing them to work for themselves.
"Lies began to flourish everywhere on earth.
Poor Zhen'er screamed:
"'Good people, find my star.' Bring it back to me and give the truth back to the world! ’
"She found a nice guy. He went in search of the Star of Truth, challenged Cliffda, and fought with her for many rounds, exhausted, scarred, and bleeding profusely. He defeated Cliffda and found the hidden star.
He put the star on his forehead and walked toward Zhen'er...
"The wicked, Cliffda's vassals, stopped him from going to the Red Fairy, in a vain attempt to take the star away from him and then extinguish it. But the good man defeated all his enemies and came to the "true" and brought the stars to her.
"There is light again in the world. Cliffda's vassals, like (ominous) owls or flying squirrels, were dispersed by the light and disappeared into dark corners. The Red Fairy really swept away everyone's evil thoughts. Everything is good again, and people are free to live under the light of the Star of Truth!
"Comrade, have you heard of this fable?"
"The red star of our Red Army is the star of truth!" The Red Army is the good man who fights against Clefda and her vassals who oppress the people, and the Red Army wants the light of truth to shine on the earth, so that all the working people, all the oppressed and damaged, can live freely and happily.
Thus, the plough and hammer were engraved on the stars of the Red Army. The plough represents the peasant and the hammer represents the worker. This means that the Red Army is fighting for the Star of Truth, bringing the plough to the peasants and the hammer to the workers, giving them the right to freedom, bread, dividends and rest, rather than abject poverty, poverty and endless labor.
"All those who hope that the truth will triumph over Clefda, let the star of truth shine forever on the toiling masses and let them live an easy life." Everyone should join the Red Army, wear a red star on their foreheads, and fight against the followers of Clefda, the Tsar, the Prince, the Landlords and the bourgeoisie!
"Comrades, assemble under the red star!" Because she is the Star of Truth! It is the star that liberates the whole working people from famine, labor, war, poverty and slavery, and the star of happiness for the workers and peasants and the masses of the people.
"That's what the Red Army Star means!"
Briefly explain this flyer. If one were to realize the following facts in the Russian tradition, this parable would not be as central as it may seem at first glance.
1. As mentioned above, red in traditional Russian culture carries "beautiful", "important", "valuable", etc. positive meanings that are not available in the West or even other West Slavic and Yugoslav countries. Although "beautiful girl" has a straightforward statement (красивая девушка etc.), the same meaning is often expressed as "красна девица" (literally "red girl").
Like "Prince Ivan" (Иван-царевич, "Son of the Tsar Ivan", sometimes transliterated as "Ivan Zarevich" in Chinese), the Red Girl is one of the most commonly used generic terms and descriptives in Russian fairy tales, and the heroine who is described in this way is naturally a frequent guest of the hero's rescue routine story. In a folklore that combines the story of Andromeda with a Russian-style culture of corruption, three 12-headed snake demons appear at sea in turn, sending letters to the Tsar asking him to sacrifice his beautiful eldest, second, and youngest daughters. Each time, the soldier's son Ivan came to the cliff that bound a red girl (actually a princess), killed the corresponding snake demon, and saved the corresponding princess; the surviving princess was found and taken away by the minister sent by the tsar to feed her water, but was threatened with a knife halfway through, forced to lie to the tsar that the minister was the hero who saved her, and then was given to the minister. Until the last time, the little princess was also given marriage to a liar, but Ivan himself unexpectedly came to the wedding, so the crime of deception was broken, and the soldier's son Ivan and the third red girl lived a happy life.
The image of the red girl is sometimes associated with the "stars", with a cool temperament that is sacred and cannot be desecrated. 19th-century Russian composer М П Mussorgsky's Little Star, Where Are You? "Will I never see another clear star / Will I not see another red girl?" The Ukrainian fairy tale "Prince Ivan and the Red Girl - Clear Star" tells the story of Prince Ivan, who is good at opening a harem, who sacrificed himself to save his mother and broke into the secret place and met a "beautiful girl (fairy) as clear as a star".
2. The name of the Red Fairy "Pravda", which literally means "truth" (this is the word used in pravda), "truth", but in antiquity it was also used to mean "justice" – the Code of Laws of Kievan Rus is called Правда Руськая, literally "Rus Truth", or "Rus' Justice".
3. "Pravda" and "Cliffda" (Truth and Error) are a pair of common imagery in Russian literature that can be traced back to the Psalms of ancient Slavic polytheistic legends:
"What's in the sky that makes a thunderstorm-like roar?"
"It was the birds flying in the sky that came together, it was Pravda and Cleveda's battle...
“...... So the unstoppable power converged on Yus, and Pravda and Cliffda engaged in a fierce battle...
“...... Pravda flew to heaven and reached the ancestor of the High Heavenly Pole. ”
Pravda's reign exists only in heaven; the earth is the arena of the struggle between "Pravda" and "Cliffda". Whoever chooses Cliffda will pay the price for it.
In modern Russian folklore, Pravda and Cliffda are often personified as a pair of sisters or cousins as an endorsement of the two extremes of good and evil, and sometimes (for example, in two fables in Alfanassiyev's Russian Folktales) as two merchants; Pravda is always framed by Cleveda first, but always wins or gains greater benefits.
4. The word translated as "comrade" – "Davalich"; in 1918 the meaning of the word was not yet stable. It originally referred to "colleague", "partner", "(commercial) ally"; considering that the mainstream title of modern Imperial Russia is still "master", "lord", "grand master", "adult", etc. linked to its hierarchy, it is more in line with the egalitarian trend since the French Revolution, but it is still limited by gender (male, which originally had the female form "Davarga") and industry (commercial legal terms). It was the early Bolsheviks and the Red Army who continued to consciously de-gender, de-industrialize, and use it with literary overtones in mass propaganda that it was established as a universal title without gender, trade, or hierarchy, and thus succeeded in attaching to it the meaning of "identifying the person to be called (also) a communist" to it.
"Look, comrade! This is the Red Star is a classic proclamation of the use of magic to defeat magic in the early days of the Russian Revolution (in 1918 most peasants were not their own people to the Bolsheviks, at least not the basics, and the countryside was mostly controlled by the White Army. This is a typical case of external propaganda:
By rotating the five-star orientation (showing directly in the picture without saying a word), the simplest scheme quietly dismisses the enemy's narrative of "inverted pentagram - ram's horn Satan - antichrist symbol", while avoiding the direct justification of right and wrong or the hard-hitting argument;
An easy-to-understand story of mobilization addressed to the objectively poorly educated peasants (and indeed many Red Army soldiers of rural origin) avoided the extensive debates needed to reconstruct an atheist worldview;
The fables used are rooted in the ancient historical and cultural traditions of the Russian nation familiar to the audience (the Russian peasants), and resonate with each other, avoiding the conflict with the simple national sentiments of the audience that may be triggered by the introduction of "foreign ideas" (communism);
Taking full advantage of the audience's spiritual need for religious alternatives but not the characteristics of theological experts, folklore and Orthodox beliefs with a similar affinity for them, adopting expressions similar to religious styles but not copying the language of the Church, providing alternatives to their own religious narratives;
In the case of the extreme importance of the timeliness of mass work, the extremely high time cost and difficulty required to propagate atheism and natural science education in a step-by-step manner, to eradicate conspiracy theories of religious background, and to make oneself receptive are avoided.
This parable soon spawned a more vivid version: Cliffda stole the Red Fairy's star and smashed it! But the world was not destroyed, and the red star of truth turned into thousands of small red stars, and everyone who fought for the truth got one.
Comrades, for the sake of truth, for the sake of happiness for millions of people, be that good man!
The figure below shows the various Red Star Hat emblems produced from 1919 to 1922. As you can see, some time after the leaflet was released, in the "official seal and hat badge must be correct, careful and made according to the pattern!" Under the strict order, the actual products were still varied, and the craftsmen in the local jewelry factories, mints, and any other factory that could produce stamped parts made the template at will according to their own understanding (it was not until the new ordinance of July 11, 1922 that it was clear that the ten sides of the red star should be straight lines, not curved petals), but at least the five corners of the point were finally unified.
One thing worth mentioning:
In the red star hat emblem actually produced in the picture above, many of the aesthetics of traditional Russian crafts (possibly a misreading of the five-pointed inner circle auxiliary line in the command pattern) have added a circle to the hammer and the climbing plough pattern. The hat badge with the ring comes in two variants, some painted the circle red and some white (as shown in the last one). This variant of the red star with an embedded white circle was eventually retained in the officer's cap insignia of the later Red Navy and the Soviet Armed Forces Navy (below).
The Russian Revolutionary Party has not had a long history of training cadres, and it has nominally seized national power in a very short period of time. During the long and dangerous Russian Civil War, the soldiers who fought for the Red Army were mostly ordinary people, like ordinary people who believed in God, feared death, had elderly parents in the countryside, a large number of relatives, fiancées and land.
"When my dear mother said goodbye to me, all my relatives ran over: 'Boy Vanyuk, where are you going?' Are you going to be a soldier! The Red Army was full of black tea and bayonets, and the Bolsheviks lacked you a lot! ...... My mother was heartbroken for you, and her head was white; someone needed to work at home and in the field..." I had to bow deeply to my mother, bow to my relatives, and then step out of the house.
"'For God's sake, don't complain about me.' If all of you are just watching the hilarity, who will defend Moscow, and Russia? Who will defend Moscow and Russia? ......’”
They are all the same Ivan (Vanyuk is Ivan's nickname) from the song Bolshevik Leaving Home (composed in 1919). They were the ordinary, rustic, dragging Russian peasants of the Soviet region who feared never to be seen again after dying on the battlefield. They heard the broadcast of "The Socialist Fatherland in Crisis" and saw the "Look, Comrade! This is the Red Star", volunteered to join the army, squeezed into the stuffy tanker, sat in the speeding gun card, and put on this little red star.
They are defending their own tools of labor embedded in this red star— the ploughshares and hammers— the truths they recognize (justice), equality, happiness, and the dream of forever lifting themselves out of poverty and establishing a heavenly kingdom on earth.
From Plough to Sickle: The Rise of the Poor Peasant and the Evolution of Imagery
The above-mentioned red five-star flashed in the cultural history of the Soviet Union. The only trace of it that has been left to future generations is the order of the Red Banner of the USSR (pictured below), which inherits the style of the Order of the Red Banner of the Russian Federation established in September 1918.
It is worth mentioning that the Red Banner Medal also seems to be the only place where the hammer pattern with a plough in later Soviet culture (the plough head is in the lower right corner of the outside of the inverted red five-star СССР ribbon in the upper left left, and the curved sharp tool represents the plough hammer) is the only place where traces remain.
The last section briefly tells the story of the plough and the sickle. It can be concluded that the plough is a more Russian (Eastern European) imagery, and the sickle (tooth sickle) with the hammer is actually a cultural combination that was scattered in the world at that time, but has not yet been given a communist meaning; the early Soviet revolutionaries eventually abandoned the complex and proportionical "plough hammer" design and popularized the "sickle hammer", which may have some unexpected subjective factors, but objectively brought about a leap in the construction of the international communist movement culture.
Several typical hand-held plows in western Russia in the early 20th century were the Top-Down Tatar Plough (top), the Suhani Plough (center), and the Ryazan Plough (bottom) that emerged at the end of the 18th century. They are often towed by one or two horses.
The earliest Russian ploughs appeared around the time of Kievan Rus in the 10th-11th centuries, were imported from Eastern Europe and the Southern Turkic regions, and belonged to the Western plough (which is very different from the plough structure common in ancient China). Due to the harsh climate and the near-gratuitous labor force under serfdom, the Russian landlords never had the incentive to innovate agricultural machinery, and it was only in 1802 that the first modern factories for the production of ploughs appeared, and most places made their own plows according to the occasional tradition. As a result, the countryside had different impressions of what the "plough" should look like; in 1885, in the province of Kwangvyatka (present-day Kirov), there were as many as 30 different names of ploughs in use. This cognitive difference is directly reflected in the formulation of the Red Army hat emblem:
Looking back again at the various cap emblems from this period, you can see that almost every mold corresponds to a different plow. To identify this image, it is necessary to find a series of features such as handrails, ploughshares, coulter wheels, and hooks connecting the tiller harnesses, and to identify the interrelationships; this high demand for precision determines that it is neither conducive to reducing the size (for example, on the armbands that the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army was required to wear in January 1919), in thicker lines such as embroidery or gold pin embroidery, nor is it conducive to the spread of the whole concept - the urban-rural divide in Russia was already very serious at that time, In the big cities, there have never been many workers and intellectuals who cultivate the plough. The complete pattern on the hat emblem is fine, for the little curved shape exposed by the aforementioned Red Star Medal, who can see what it is? shovel? Big axe? Hook and sickle gun? In fact, this thing is лемех плуга, that is, the plough.
There is a more critical issue. As shown in the figures above, European ploughs are complex and heavy, not affordable by every farmer, and not even necessarily needed for poor peasants with no land or enough land, or no horses available. And as a result of the aforementioned resistance of the rural areas to the surplus grain collection system and even to the Soviet power as a whole, the Bolsheviks gradually subdivided the peasants, and in addition to the landlords, the kulaks who were unwilling to pay grain were gradually excluded from the party's dependence. Since June 19, 1918, the Soviet government has adopted a sign made of a sickle (tooth sickle) and a hammer.
As a very simple and aesthetically pleasing motif, the sickle and hammer not only preceded the army in the Russian Revolutionary regime, but also preceded the Russian Revolution in the earliest birth in the world. The first known image of a sickle hammer and hammer together comes from several versions of the Chilean 1 peso coin after 1894 (second from left and third from left in the figure below), symbolizing the union of workers and peasants. But it was a decorative symbol, with no political stance, and did not gain any fame at the time, and the image of the sickle hammer used by the Russian revolutionaries was probably designed independently.
After 1919, the newly formed Republic of Austria also designed a national emblem with a sickle hammer image (pictured below, this pattern structure continues to the present day), and the sickle hammer symbolizes the two major classes of workers and peasants that make up the Austrian population, but has no special meaning, including communism. The coat of arms appeared not only later than the Russian Revolution, but also slightly after the birth of the Austrian Communist Party (3 November 1918), but did not cause any confusion among Austrians at the time. This can be used as one of the bases for judging that the cultural meaning of the sickle hammer pattern in the European world around 1919 has not yet been determined.
As for the Austrian Communist Party, since its inception, it has also used the sickle hammer motif without pressure, and the picture below is a symbol it has used in recent years. As the second oldest surviving political party in Austria, the Austrian Communist Party survived the drastic changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, insisted on not changing the name and banner of the party, and became the ruling party of Graz, Austria's second largest city, in 2021.
Interestingly, a proposed version of the Soviet coat of arms, which produced a slightly later coat of arms of Austria and is unclear whether it was influenced by the former (above, right), attempted the same structure that separated the sickle and hammer underneath. The only surviving example of this unique configuration is the polychrome relief on the Moscow Central Telegraph Building, which, unlike later reliefs of the Soviet coat of arms, is realistic about the curvature of the earth on this sculpture.
In the period from mid-1918 to 1922, the red army emblem and the government emblem were used to express the same symbolic imagery; although there was originally a meaning of "distinguishing the active personnel of the Red Army from other communists of faith", with the implementation of the above-mentioned wartime communist policy and a series of policies excluding the kulaks, the necessity of this distinction became more and more suspicious as the plow on the Red Army's side, which happened to have a strong "kulak sense".
On April 13, 1922, in accordance with Order No. 953 of the Revolutionary Military Commission, the plow motif in the Red Star emblem was removed and replaced by a tooth sickle common in Eastern Europe and affordable to anyone. The order goes like this: "The red army now wears a hat emblem with the motif of 'hammer and plough', but the state emblem of the Russian Republic established by the Constitution uses the image of 'hammer and sickle'.
"(For the sake of uniform norms,) the Ministry of Supply shall be responsible for the production of the Red Army hat emblem with the constitutionally established national emblem (note: 'hammer and sickle'). The red army hat emblem should be worn on the helmet-shaped hat in the center of the large star of the color cloth of the army set up according to Order No. 322 of the Revolutionary Military Commission of 1922 (Note: See the picture on the right above for the attached picture of the order). ”
In Europe, the tooth sickle (Серп, pictured below on the left) and the straight plate sickle (Коса, also known as the "samarium knife", pictured below on the right) are two different things. Unlike the straight plate sickle, which had all kinds of complex deformations like ploughing, the basic form of the tooth sickle— a curved blade with serrated teeth, a wooden handle connected to it at a specific angle, was almost the same everywhere, the shape was very unique, and it did not cause ambiguity; it turned out that even in the Far East, which was backward in development and the traditional sickle shape was very different in China, Vietnam, India, Indonesia and Nepal, the folk acceptance of this symbol was very smooth, and no one could understand what this tool really was.
Moreover, the tooth sickle is only a simple harvesting tool, and can be held by women and children with weaker physical strength. The slab sickle, which was used both for field harvesting and before the invention of the lawn mower, was also a tool used by the European nobility and petty bourgeoisie to trim delicate lawns; in addition, the straight scythe, especially the long-bladed giant sickle used for efficient wheat cutting, was very laborious, usually only used by specially trained adult men, and the unskilled were extremely vulnerable. Therefore, in European mythology, especially Slavic mythology, there is a horrible image of the god of death holding and harvesting life, which is not suitable as a symbol of the new regime for the same reason as the aforementioned red five-star.
On July 11, 1922, Order No. 1691 of the Revolutionary Military Commission re-issued Order No. 953, and in the appendix provided for a new standard system of scythe hammer red star.
The drawings are shown in the appendix to Order No. 1691. Due to size limitations, a row of fine teeth on the sickle blade shown on the Soviet coat of arms was omitted from the Red Army hat emblem, which later became a stylized expression (of course, some of the sharper small sickles did not have teeth on them). In addition, as the rumors of the "Antichrist's inverted pentagram" gradually subsided, compared with the above-mentioned Order No. 594 of the People's Commissar of The Military Commissar on July 29, 1918, Order No. 1691 also reduced the size of the inner circle of the red star to 12mm, thus turning the "fat five star" into an ordinary positive five-pointed star (pictured below). But like the previous series of orders, this order has not been strictly enforced 100%, and various "fat five-stars" (below, right) that continue to be produced due to inertia still exist in large quantities. The "Fat Five Star" later became the official standard for the Soviet hat emblem many times.
It should be said that the complete replacement of the hammer and sickle with the hammer and the plough was a great leap forward in the development of Russian revolutionary culture. It not only enhances the representation of the entire sign for poor peasants, but also simplifies the perception of the sign and creates a highly recognizable and appealing cultural image. At this point, the international communist movement completed its original symbolic construction - inheriting the Red Flag of the French Revolution, the Red Star (with golden outlines, containing rays of light, often with five horns with a certain expansion, usually used as a hat emblem), usually outlined in golden yellow, the sickle hammer cross pattern; the construction of the image of the red star was completely completed in the army.
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