I have not worn my hammer-and-sickle T-shirt in public for a long time. In fairness, I rarely wear T-shirts in public, let alone logo T-shirts… these days, anyway. For some reason, as I have grown older, I keep hearing my late-mother’s voice in my head: “T-shirts are underwear, not clothes – wear then for gym class and sports, if you must, but they’re not clothes.” My mother, born in 1934, was of a generation that believed that there are “done things,” and wearing one’s underwear in public was “not the done thing.”

So, I am not in the habit of wearing T-shirts as public except in occasional circumstances, like when I am sitting on my balcony, or working on my bike, or when I am just too knackered to dress myself properly. These days, I only wear my hammer-and-sickle T-shirt behind closed doors… mostly as pyjamas. I wouldn’t be caught dead on the balcony wearing it, where somebody might see me. The symbol means something, especially now, and I would not want my neighbors to misunderstand my meaning.

I bought it – decades ago – because of its meaning. I was younger then, and it signified a certain kind of edgy political radicalism with which I identified. It came easily to me, too, since I had grown up in a resolutely left-wing Jewish family. (Yes… It’s a cliché.) My mother had been an activist and organizer for Canada’s Co-operative Commonwealth Federation in her youth and knew Tommy Douglas personally – I even met him once.

My father had returned from the Second World War radicalized, joined the Communist Party of Canada, and briefly worked on the staff at Fred Rose’s Montreal riding office until the MP for Cartier was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union in 1947. When I read Merrily Weisbord’s book The Strangest Dream in college, I felt as if I knew all of the characters personally… because I kind of did. Even after my father drifted from the Party in the wake of the revelations following Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, he insisted that Rose had been framed.

I was brought up to believe that revolutionaries were heroes, that capitalism was oppressive, and that the leaders of national liberation movements in the colonized world like Nelson Mandela were people to admire and emulate. The fact that distant cousins worked with Joe Slovo in the South African freedom movement was a matter of no small pride. When I was assigned South Africa in a primary-school model United Nations, my parents used the opportunity to carefully explain apartheid, Sharpeville, and the ANC struggle as part of my preparation.

I remained committed to my family’s politics as a teenager and a young adult, and was so deeply involved in anti-Apartheid, pro-Sandinista, and general Latin American revolutionary solidarity politics that I flunked out of college in my third year. (I later went back.) It is true that I flirted with anarchism, much to my father’s displeasure, writing an undergraduate paper at Concordia University’s Liberal Arts College on Peter Kropotkin, taking shifts at the Librairie Alternative on St-Laurent Blvd., and hanging out at Café Commun/Commune. But die Rote Fahne and the politics that I grew up with remained important enough to me that I expended a lot of energy trying to reconcile anarchism with Communism.*

Although it was designed and adopted in 1917 explicitly as a symbol of Bolshevism, which would later either be subverted by or morph into Stalinism (depending on your commitments), the hammer-and-sickle represented, in my imagination, something that transcended the bloody trail of forced collectivization, the purges, Katyn Forest, the Night of the Murdered Poets, Holodomor. I remembered standing with my parents in the cold outside the Soviet consulate in Montreal in when I was 12 years old, protesting the treatment of the Refuseniks. “Just because someone calls himself a communist or a socialist and flies the red flag doesn’t mean that that’s what they are,” my father said. “Some are no better than lying fascists… But that does not mean that we should give up on socialism. On the contrary, we have to win it back.”

So, the hammer-and-sickle retained some of that idealistic meaning for me. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed ignominiously 1991 – this came, as Alexei Yurchak wrote in Everything was Forever, Until it was No More, as both a shock and no surprise to Soviet citizens themselves – I sat with my father at the dining room table in my parents’ home drinking Slivovitz, trying to make sense of things. We listened to appropriate selections from his record collection, like the Red Army Chorus singing the “Internationale” and the Soviet national anthem (which I knew well from hockey), Dmitry Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony (unironically), and Sergei Prokofiev’s music for Alexander Nevsky. And although the end of the USSR was a shocking nonsurprise for us, too, and although my father had stopped believing in that kind of socialism long ago, we felt nostalgia for something lost.

Not the USSR; by 1991 after all of the revelations, the bloody suppression of the Hungarian Revolution and Prague Spring, the bare shelves at the markets from Minsk to Magnitogorsk, and the belligerent and incompetent invasion of Afghanistan, it was clear that there was nothing to mourn there. But the mere existence of the Soviet Union seemed to suggest that communism could exist in the real world, and the dream could be made real even if the dream begun in 1917 had ended in abject failure.

The heirs of Marx and Lenin had tried, and failed, but even the persistence of that failure seemed to invite a do-over in ways that Jian Zemin’s China and the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania could never be.† It suggested that, “if at first you don’t succeed, try again.” Indeed, there were signs, however brief, that Western European Marxism which, Russell Jacoby wrote in Dialectic of Defeat, had never failed like Soviet Communism because it had never succeeded, would rise under the Eurocommunist banner of parties like Groenlinks in the Netherlands and Italy’s Communist Refoundation, now released from the failed Soviet experiment.

The hammer-and-sickle was the Eurocommunist left’s symbol as much as it belonged to the Bolsheviki and their Stalinist heirs, it had flown in the canton of the POUM’s flag just as it did on the banner of the Stalinist PCE. It was, in many ways, the most communist way of regarding a political symbol as powerful as the hammer-and-sickle. It was as property of the revolution itself; hadn’t Marx said “Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen?”‡ It was never the USSR’s sole property and, now that the Stalinist debacle had run its course, it was free for all of us to use.

So, when I saw the hammer-and-sickle in the window of one of those cheap-ass T-shirt-souvenir-cigarette shops that are so common in Montreal, I decided that I was going to have it and wear it, just like my Sandinista scarf and Ushanka with the big red star on it that I’d bought at the Army Surplus store on the Lower Main (down the street, incidentally, from Librairie Alternative). Two decades ago, I could imagine that the sign of hammer-and-sickle had been liberated – like the Winter Palace – from its associations with a genocidal totalitarian police state, and I could rock it as a kind of edgy hipster-revolutionary statement.

… And I did. In endless discussion with grad school colleagues, “comrades,” and friends about late-stage capitalism, neo-liberalism, vulgar-or-messianic Marxism, frontism, Antonio Gramsci, entryism, grassroots organizing, Georg Lukacs, the Occupy movement, Antonio Negri, the “new proletariat,” and all the rest, I rocked that sucker like a Superman symbol. For a glorious 25 years, it meant what I wanted it to mean – edgy, engaged, theoretically-informed left politics – because the USSR was dead. Only a few crackpots held on to misguided nostalgia and the defunct ideology of Soviet Communism was just another dead end in the Marxist family tree, a political paranthropus boisei.

Yet, Soviet nostalgia, and the oppressive ideology it reveres, has risen from the dead like that annoying venom-spitting dinosaur from Jurassic Park (I’m keeping with the evolution metaphor here). Two decades ago, no one except the most marginal sectarian with a bundle of cheaply-printed newspapers on a table at a political rally would have praised the USSR and Soviet Communism, yet now such revenants are everywhere in left politics, particularly in social media. Maybe they always were there, like the white nationalists and Christofascists they so resemble, but we never noticed them until Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey provided place to crawl to from under their rocks.

There has been an efflorescence of hammers-and-sickles in social media and the real world since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine began on 24 February of last year. The current generation of “tankies” – named after their rigidly ideological forbears who celebrated the arrival of Soviet tanks in Czechoslovakia in 1968 to bring bloody repression to Prague Spring – have flocked to Putin’s flag as Russian troops have shelled Ukrainian cities and butchered civilians in Bucha and elsewhere.

There is no atrocity they can’t explain away because, in their simpleminded Manichean worldview, all of the world’s evil is embodied in the United States: Russia “had no choice but to invade Ukraine” because Kyiv’s government is in thrall to “the West…” by which they mean “international finance capital” (or “international banking conspiracy” – fill in the blanks) and the “Davos clique,” which are Washington’s puppets (and presumably also somehow Washington’s “Zionist puppet-masters, but that’s a value-add). It’s a kind of mind-numbingly binary east-west way of thinking that, ironically enough, evokes George Kennan’s call to arms in his cold war missive “The Long Telegram.”

Kennan, you might recall, opined in 1946 that the Soviet Union’s leaders were all paranoids who believed that “the USSR still lives in antagonistic ‘capitalist encirclement’ with which in the long run there can be no permanent peaceful coexistence.” Putin’s Tankie apologists have adopted this presumed Stalinist delusion (Uncle Joe was, we know, prone to paranoid delusions) and embraced it as reality or, as the kids say today, “their Truth.”

With this fever dream as their basic ideological premise, it doesn’t really matter that klepto-capitalist Russia is hardly encircled by capitalism, or that the Soviet Union collapsed a generation ago. All that matters is that America is “bad” (and capitalist and imperialist), and any power that stands against this Great Evil is, by definition, “good” (and anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist). It is by this strange ideological alchemy that they have resurrected the mythic USSR of their imaginations in the form of contemporary Russia, and have cast Putin, a multi-billionaire who might be the wealthiest person in the world, as a great hero of the proletarian revolution.

In this political wonderland, where “four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is—oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate!” the sign of the hammer-and-sickle has somehow settled once again on Mother Russia. It has become utterly evacuated of any meaning that might encompass the POUM, Eurocommunism, the Communist Refoundation or even, really, any kind of communism or socialism at all. It has become the badge of Russian brutality and the wannabe Stalinists’ totalitarian libidinal desires.

The hammer-and-sickle is a symbol of oppression, imperialism, and hate – and nothing else – and I cannot wear it, even in irony.

The question remains of what to do with my old T-shirt, threadbare and ratty like the Tankies’ nostalgia for the glories of Stalinism, the purges, the Gulag, forced collectivization and genocide. Should I toss it in the garbage? Should I tear it into rags to use when I work on my bike or clean up cat vomit? Should I maybe keep it as a reminder that symbols have a way of losing their meaning and can be perverted to signify the exact opposite of what they once might have stood for? Whatever the case, I will never wear it again.

***

* Inevitably, I settled on a position akin to Spain’s POUM after my interest in the Spanish Civil War led me to George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.

† The initially-Maoist Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), distinct from the pro-Soviet Communist Party of Canada, had pivoted to Enver Hoxha’s Albania in the 1970s. I voted for one or both of these parties in a couple of Canadian elections in the 1980s.

‡ From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.