Regally Blonde What's on your billboard?

Author: Astri von Arbin Ahlander

Let's talk fashion. And politics. Your body may be your temple, but it is also your own personal billboard. Use it wisely. Expressing your political views on this valuable advertising space is a great idea, as long as you are willing to stand up for you beliefs. Original homemade varieties are my favorite. I can't see a kid with a hand-painted t-shirt urging the down-fall of this or the other without smiling. It's not only daring, it's creative. As for commercially produced political imagery on clothing, we're in different, deeper waters. Che Guevara's face has, by this point, basically ceased to stand for anything more than a marketable icon to mass print on t-shirts and sell to middle-class kids. But, whether or not you're wearing a paisley print of the guy, you are projecting a certain message and you should be aware of what that message is.

Over the past couple of years, I have begun to see an increasing amount of Soviet symbols floating around on the clothing of young people everywhere. Whether it is the hammer and sickle on big fur hats or the letters CCCP across sweatshirts, every time I see an example of it, it makes me flinch. It's been less than two decades after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and have we already forgotten? Or worse, we never really knew.

It is a common fact that the victors write history. After Hitler turned on Stalin in 1941, the Soviet Union allied against Germany. When Germany lost the war, the Soviet Union stood as a winner alongside Western democracies despite its leader, Josef Stalin, being another democracy-loathing dictator with his own reign of terror. During his time in power, Stalin staged a mass famine that killed nearly ten million people through his forced agricultural collectivization. He ordered mass-arrests and subsequent executions of millions more. He created a society of informants, where everyone was afraid of everyone else, and where anyone ran the risk of being classified a class enemy - a crime punishable by death.

Even before Hitler was gassing his victims to death, the NKVD in the Soviet Union were experimenting with shutting people into closed trucks with the exhaust-pipe leading inside.

And what of censorship? The destruction of irreplaceable pieces of art and the banning of forbidden literature left deep gashes in the country's rich cultural heritage. As late as 1990, when I was living in the Soviet Union, our Russian friends would beg us to smuggle them forbidden books from Sweden. How can intelligent, educated members of the Middlebury community - a community lauding the cultivation of the mind - proudly be wearing the symbols of such oppression?

Somehow, during Stalin's reign of terror, the rest of the world accepted much of what was going on in the Soviet Union without daring to ask too many questions. I am from Sweden, a country whose actions during this time and relationship to the Soviet Union throughout its history do not make me proud. But I'm not about to perpetuate that shameful passivity now.

The hammer and sickle, the symbol of the Soviet Union, also stands as a symbol for the terror that went on within that Union. When we see our friends wearing the Soviet symbol, most of us don't bat an eye. Many of us think it's cool. Retro. Alternative. I don't see that. I see the nauseating numbers 15-50: the estimated millions of people who lost their lives under that symbol.