Hammer and sickle

The hammer and sickle is an emblem combining a worker’s hammer and a peasant’s sickle. It symbolizes the alliance of industrial workers and peasants and became strongly associated with communism and the Soviet Union.

Communism: A political and economic ideology advocating a classless society and common ownership of productive resources. The emblem became one of communism’s most recognizable visual signs.
Russian Revolution: The upheavals of 1917 that ended imperial rule in Russia and brought the Bolsheviks to power. The emblem emerged from the revolutionary politics that followed these upheavals.
Hammer: A hand tool with a weighted head used chiefly for striking, shaping, or driving objects. It supplies the emblem’s visual sign for industrial labor.
Emblem of the Soviet Union: The official state emblem of the Soviet Union, featuring a globe, wheat sheaves, a red star, and the hammer and sickle. It incorporated the tools into a fuller image of Soviet statehood.
Fasces: A bundle of rods surrounding an axe, used as an emblem of authority and collective strength. It represents political authority through a different historical symbol and visual logic.
Proletariat: The social class of people who earn wages by selling their labor. The hammer represents industrial workers, central to the emblem’s claimed alliance.
Bolsheviks: The revolutionary faction led by Vladimir Lenin that seized power in Russia in 1917. Bolshevik authorities adopted the emblem as a sign of the new workers’ state.
Sickle: A hand tool with a curved blade used for cutting crops and grass. It supplies the emblem’s visual sign for agricultural labor.
Communist parties: Political parties organized around communist ideology and the pursuit of a communist society. Many parties adopted the emblem to signal their political tradition.
Anarchism: A political tradition opposing imposed hierarchy and advocating voluntary forms of social organization. Anarchist movements often reject the state-centered politics associated with Soviet uses of the emblem.

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Worker and Kolkhoz WomanRelated: The figures raise these emblems together, making their union the sculpture’s central visual statement.