How Hitler and Lunacharsky Ended Widespread Soviet Use of the Swastika

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 3 – For almost five years after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, Soviet officials used the swastika on documents, money, and military awards, a practice that might have continued had it not been a campaign Anatoly Lunacharsky launched against it and Adolf Hitler’s use of the swastika to symbolize his struggle against Jews and communists.

            Swastikas have been a feature of human art and religion extending back at least 25,000 years, historian Galina Pogodina says; and by the earlier years of the 20^th century, it has become fashionable to use it in Europe and America as a decoration and symbol of fertility and good luck (russian7.ru/post/sovetskaya-svastika-na-kakikh-dokument/).

            Russia was no exception to this trend.  Nicholas II had swastikas painted on his limousine. His wife Aleksandra drew a swastika on the walls of the Ipatyev House where the Imperial Family was murdered. And the Provisional Government issued currency with swastikas behind a two-headed Russian eagle.

            After the Bolsheviks seized power, the Red Army introduced the use of swastikas on insignia and awards for the Kalmyks, who were Buddhist and thus honored the swastika as part of their faith, and for the Bashkirs, who weren’t and didn’t.  But the most frequent use was on the first issues of Soviet currency and on official documents.

            At the end of 1916, the tsarist mint had prepared new bills which featured the swastika. The Provisional Government used some of them. And then the Bolsheviks, who “didn’t have time for coming up with their own design, used these as the basis for the first Soviet issues of 250, 1000, 5,000 and 10,000 rubles.

            “Thus,” Pogodina continues, “this symbol on the first Soviet bills was left as an inheritance from the previous authorities.”  But she says, Soviet officials up to and including Lenin used the swastika on official documents to confirm that they were genuine and not faked by opponents.

            This might have continued and the swastika taken its place along the hammer and sickle as a symbol of the Soviet state had it not been for a campaign against it by Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Soviet commissar for enlightenment. In a 1922 Izvestiya article, he said the Soviets shouldn’t use the swastika because right-wing German anti-communists were.

            Lunacharsky’s concerns were vindicated when in 1923, Adolf Hitler adopted the swastika as the symbol of his party. The fuehrer said that it stood for his “struggle against Jews and communists.” After that, it was unthinkable that the Bolsheviks would use it; and it rapidly began to disappear from official documents, but as a church decoration it survived for a time.