“During the Soviet era, the red Soviet flag was a symbol of oppression....
The previous association has simply been lost.”

As if in a deliberate cosmic insult to Karl Marx, communism’s iconic color has been transmuted here into a symbol of electronic commerce. We’re not talking just any kind of red. Not maroon or pinkish. The color Kaur Kender was looking for recently was the “dirty, yellowish” shade that flew over Baltic capitals on Soviet flags, adorned uniforms and the sashes of the Communist Youth League.
       Kender, a novelist and advertising consultant, had to go to the history books to find bright red banners in an old photograph. He matched the shade on his computer, then slapped it behind a 15 meter by 15 meter image of Che Guevara on a billboard over Tallinn’s central Viru Square. “FREEDOM! To buy and sell,” the advertisement for online auction site Osta.ee declared.
       Kender explains that he was looking for something that was “a little bit of a taboo.” His idea seems to have worked and the country’s first splashy New Economy ad campaign drew attention: Osta pulled in 2000 bids in its first month.
       Kender and other pranksters such as Austrian venture capitalist Thomas Streimelweger, chairman of red-stars.com data AG, helped shatter such taboos as there were against communist symbols. They’ve prepared the ground for others to follow.
       When the leading Baltic IT company Microlink recently rebranded itself as “the Red Dot Company,” it didn’t even consider the symbolism of the recent past, company representatives say.
       During the Soviet era, distinguished by deportations during Stalinist rule and later by suppression of free speech and religion, the red Soviet flag was a symbol of oppression.
       Today, advertising executives in the Baltics say it’s a joke at best.
       The previous association has simply been lost. The color, a fixture in Socialist realist art—from the popularity of red marble for sculptures to the red bandanna around a worker’s head in countless paintings—has become thoroughly capitalist.
       The first push from Communism to consumerism came with the entry of big American brands. 
       “These days, red is all about Coca-Cola and the Marlboro Man,” says Varis Lazo, managing director of Saatchi & Saatchi’s Latvian affiliate. Local companies in Eastern Europe have learned from those brands, and from the omnipresent McDonald’s. “Now everybody is going red, because red sells,” he says.
       Part of the swift semiotic change comes from a generation gap. Few Eastern Europeans old enough to remember the horrors of Stalinism do their shopping online. Not many retailers here spend much time targeting these older people, whose pocketbooks have taken the hardest hit from the transition to capitalism.
       “The target audience here is very young,” says Guntis Stirna, managing director of Balta Communications in Riga, Latvia. One client, a candy company, recently told him, “We’re only interested in 15 to 30, because the others don’t have any money—and why should we advertise to them?”
       Definitive evidence of the red shift in the Baltics came when Microlink went red.
       After a string of acquisitions in 2000, the Baltic conglomerate of hardware, software, and solutions companies needed to extend its brand to its new companies. Playing on the red dot in the “microlink.com” logo, Chief Executive Allan Martinson suggested it call itself “the Red Dot Company,” and incorporate the symbol into the logos of all members of the group. 
       When only one of 30 participants in a focus group even mentioned the communist connection, Microlink went ahead with the slogan, printing it on banners displayed at key locations in Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius, running cryptic advertisements and sending its big customers mousepads emblazoned with the crimson dot.
       Microlink’s Marketing Director Antti Aasma says the company was thinking more of dot-com style than of communism.
       “It’s abstract—it doesn’t mean anything, so it means everything,” he says.
       Kaur Hanson of Tallinn’s Zoom agency, who worked on the campaign, agrees. 
       “Red is such a basic color that the association with politics has very quickly worn off,” he says. “Of course, at some point there would be associations. A red hammer might not be such a good idea.”
       Kender, the man behind the Che Guevara campaign, knows something about that: He drew fire earlier in the decade when he named his agency “Sacco and Vanzetti” after the American Communists who became Soviet icons after an unfair trial in Boston.
       But now Kender says even that joke has lost its punch, and he doubts that the dominant color of the red dot campaign will carry the same power it might have a few years ago.
       “‘Dot is a heavily loaded word,” he says. “There’s no room left for communism.”    

Benjamin Smith is a New York-based journalist who spent several years in the Baltic states in the late 1990s. He is a frequent contributor to CITY PAPER.

                                     —CITY PAPER-The Baltic States