The fifteenth visual reminder for Adidas: The Great Purge

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 fifteenth protest visual.

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

The Great Purge (aka the “Great Terror”) was a campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union which took place in 1936-1938 and involved a large-scale purge of the Communist Party and government officials, repressions of peasants and the Red Army leadership, widespread police surveillance, imprisonment, and arbitrary executions. According to declassified Soviet archives, between 1937 and 1938, the NKVD detained 1,548,366 persons, of whom 681,692 were shot – an average of 1,000 executions a day.

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.