Product Description
The red five-pointed star is one of the oldest symbols in human history. It appears in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, in Sumerian cuneiform texts, and later in ancient Greece. Over centuries, it carried various meanings—cosmic, religious, and philosophical.
Yet no one succeeded in stripping it of meaning and turning it into a symbol of fear and hatred as thoroughly as the criminal regimes of the twentieth century. From Stalin’s Soviet Union, through the communist authorities of Eastern Europe, to Slobodan Milošević’s regime in Serbia, the red star became a sign of repression, violence, and ideological coercion.
During the protests against Milošević in Belgrade in 1990, the burning red star—bearing the leader’s portrait—was no longer a historical symbol, but a direct expression of public revolt. It marked the moment when fear began to give way to open resistance, and when symbols imposed from above were reclaimed and destroyed by those who had lived under them.