It’s a topic I’ve been thinking about, the history of socialist symbols and icons, not so much in terms of their actual politics, but in terms of how people who lived under these political systems related to them. Many didn’t necessarily understand the political processes or ideology behind the systems, but they genuinely liked these systems and embraced them enough to apply their own traditional forms of praise and reverence to them. This could mean displaying portraits of prominent communist figures in their homes, creating effigies of them, or adopting the hammer and sickle or variations of it as a kind of national or cultural symbol.
Very interesting subject. Remember the hammer and sickle design was developed by an aristocrat (?) obsessed with Egyptian design and the star itself is a iconological representation of the relation between the lesser and the greater, and the greater and the whole.