The sixteenth visual reminder for Adidas: The “Slovo” building

Adidas continues to align its marketing strategy with the Soviet legacy of persecution and totalitarianism, profiting from the sale of USSR-branded products.
Since the company refuses to recall its ‘USSR’ product line and publicly apologize for launching it in the first place, UCMC publishes its seventeenth protest visual.

We encourage everyone to join this campaign and to use their network of contacts to deliver this message to the world.

The “Slovo” apartment block was built in Kharkiv in the late 1920s by a Ukrainian writers cooperative.

By 1938, residents from 40 of the building’s 66 apartments had been repressed. In some apartments, arrests took place on a rolling basis: the NKVD (Soviet secret police) arrested the apartment’s new residents, or they arrested the relatives of the inhabitants who had been there earlier. Many of them were executed or died serving their sentences.

After the repressions began, the building came to be known by its ominous nickname: The Crematorium.

This is just one example of what the USSR really was. During 70 years of Soviet rule, the populations of many nations were decimated, displaced, killed by artificial famine, tortured, persecuted, their lives, cultures, and livelihoods destroyed. The victims of the Soviet communist regime are estimated at 20 to 35M – Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Georgians, Armenians, Moldovans, Kazakhs, and many other nations suffered at the hands of the USSR.

Profiting from the sale of Soviet symbols is also tantamount to politically supporting Russia’s attempt to resurrect the USSR through the illegal annexation of Crimea and occupation of eastern Ukraine, resulting in the deaths of over 10,000 people and the displacement of over 1,7M.