One hundred and one years ago, the main symbol of the Workers 'and Peasants' Red Army, the red star, was born. There are many rumors about her, she is extolled and hated, she is credited with some completely mythical properties, fables are told about her. But one simple fact cannot be denied: for almost the entire twentieth century, it was the red star that was the symbol of the victories of Soviet, including Russian, weapons. How it all began? Why a star? Why red? Let's remember.
Red Star in Red Petrograd
Sometimes you can read that on December 15, 1917, the first distinctive sign of the Red Army was introduced. Naturally, this is a red star. But such a statement is fundamentally wrong. Simply because no Red Army existed then. The Workers 'and Peasants' Red Army was created only at the beginning of the next 1918. However, it was indeed on the fifteenth of December 1917 that the red star became a symbol, a distinctive sign of the revolutionary armed formations of the Bolsheviks. It is believed that this is the idea of the commander of the Petrograd military district Konstantin Eremeev. True, sometimes the commissioner of the Moscow military district N. A. Polyansky is called the author of the idea. However, there is confusion here too. Polyansky offered a star for the Red Army. And that was, judging by the literature, in 1918. And Eremeev introduced the star by his order,but his reasons were rather unexpected.
To be somehow different
The situation was as follows: a civil confrontation developing into a full-fledged civil war, everyone had the same weapon and the same uniform, it was necessary to somehow stand out. The Red Guards (then not yet the Red Army), naturally, decided to use red as a distinctive sign. This is how scarlet armbands, stripes on hats and other headdresses appeared. But the appearance of some common sign-symbol was imminent. Such a symbol was the red star introduced by the order of December 15, 1917 by the order of Eremeev. And five days later, the star was recommended as a general distinctive sign by the General Staff of the Petrograd Red Guard.
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Red Star of the Red Army
Nikolai Polyansky, the commissar of the Moscow Military District, is nevertheless involved in the appearance of the red star as a distinctive sign. But only the distinctive sign is no longer the Red Guard, but the Workers 'and Peasants' Red Army, created in 1918. Polyansky proposed to approve the use of a red star with a hammer and … no, not a sickle, but a plow, symbolizing the peasantry. The sickle instead of the plow will appear later - supposedly the plow was recognized as a symbol of fists, and the sickle is the tool of the poor, but in fact, the sickle was simply graphically better combined with the hammer. They also offered an image of a book symbolizing the intelligentsia. But the book was abandoned due to the excessive overload of the image.
Star story
It would be foolish to think that the Petrograd Red Guards began to use the star as a distinctive sign simply because it suddenly occurred to them. Not. There had to be a historical context. And he was. It is tempting to deduce the tradition of using the red star in the Red Army from the practice of the Garibaldians, whose units wore a five-pointed red star on their pikes along with the banner. But, most likely, this symbol was "presented" to us by the French. Five-pointed stars were on the uniforms of the Republican army during the French Revolution. They were also in the army of Napoleon. True, only on the epaulettes of generals. In Russia, at the behest of Nicholas the First, stars appeared on epaulettes in 1827. And Nicholas the First was a great admirer of Napoleon's army. That is, the tradition of using the five-pointed star in Russia has existed for a long time,therefore, the new revolutionaries did not need to invent anything.
Satanic symbol?
Opponents of the Soviet system began, naturally, to immediately try to blacken the new symbol in every possible way in the eyes of the broad masses, poorly educated and superstitious at that time. They said, for example, that this is a sign of Satan, for more "advanced" citizens they even used the terrible word "pentagram". They said a lot of nonsense. This obscurantism, by the way, has survived to this day. And now you can hear "profound conspiracy" about the red star of the same bottling. Either it is a red devilry, or a Masonic sign.
Illustrative correspondence
A good example of such reasoning in our "enlightened" time was given in one of the articles of December 15, 2014, the newspaper "AiF". It said that Vladimir Zhirinovsky had written a letter to Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. The letter said that some Orthodox conscripts cannot serve in the army, because for them the five-pointed star in the army symbolism evokes associations with the satanic symbol. And so the State Secretary of the RF Ministry of Defense Nikolai Pankov was forced to write a detailed reply letter, where he explained the groundlessness of equating the five-pointed star with satanic symbols. It even recalled that at one time the star symbolized the replacement of paganism by Christianity in the Roman Empire. But why go so far if you can just remember what was said above:five-pointed stars were quite used in the army of the Russian Empire - the Orthodox, by the way, empire. And they did not interfere with anyone, and were not associated with any devilry. So, perhaps, you should not tie your unwillingness to serve to this kind of superstition.
Authentic explanation of the symbol
As for the meaning of the red star as a symbol in the Red Army, this is, one might say, a graphic variation of the well-known slogan "Workers of all countries, unite." Not this particular slogan, of course, but the semantic load was identical. Five rays symbolized the proletariat of five continents (then we did not have continental models with four, six and seven continents), red is the color of revolution, the struggle to free the working people of the whole world from wars, poverty, slavery, exploitation, hunger. And this was not the idea of throwing Russia into the furnace of the world revolutionary conflagration (perhaps in some wild heads, and even then for the sake of a slogan). The Bolsheviks were rational and practical enough to understand: the proletariat of one country cannot achieve freedom for the proletariat of other countries,if they themselves do not make efforts for their liberation. And besides, Soviet Russia then faced a less ambitious, but no less difficult task: to simply survive in a ring of enemies.
Down with superstition
Well, let's not forget that it was with a red star on their caps that our grandfathers and great-grandfathers won the most terrible war in the history of mankind - against Hitler's Nazism, in fact, against the reign of hell on Earth. So all talk about satanic, Masonic or some other mystical appearance of a red star on the headdresses of the Red Army is the fruit of either superstition and obscurantism, or deliberate distortion of facts. And nothing more.
Author: Mark Voron
