I just saw a man in his late twenties or early thirties wearing a bright red T-shirt with a huge yellow hammer-and-sickle symbol on his chest. I could not guess whether this was only a joke or a feeling approaching conviction, but the symbol of socialism as it came to pass started me thinking. Workers and peasants united, that is. This is a Soviet invention, for there were but a few workers around after the October Revolution. In fact, workers were in such a minority that the hammer was a little more than pure fiction. With the exception of a couple of large cities, such as Moscow and Petrograd, Russia had little industry to show off. Across the vast country, the sickle reigned supreme. With the exception of East Germany and the Czech part of Czechoslovakia, the same was true of much of Eastern Europe after World War II. This is where everything was done to promote the hammer and thwart the sickle for many a decade. And this is how things remain to this day. The sickle is still paramount in spite of so many decades of apparent economic and political development. Returning to the T-shirt, what would be wrong with a huge sickle and a tiny hammer? It would look a bit like the Turkish flag, I guess.