Baltic countries want Walmart to remove Soviet-themed shirts

Because they claim to have all the answers to society's ills, Communists often seem "cool" to young people -- hence these shirts

Three Baltic countries have lashed out at retail giant Walmart for selling online T-shirts and other products with Soviet Union emblems on them, and demanded that the goods be removed.

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were forcibly annexed by Moscow in 1940 and remained part of the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991, except for a brief occupation by Nazi Germany 1941-1944. Lithuania has been taking a particularly hard line against its communist-era legacy, banning all Soviet symbols as well as Nazi ones.

"Horrific crimes were done under the Soviet symbols of a sickle and hammer," the Lithuanian ambassador to the United States, Rolandas Krisciunas, wrote Wednesday to Walmart. "The promotion of such symbols resonates with a big pain for many centuries."

"When the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania, hundreds of thousands of our citizens were killed, exiled, tortured, raped, separated from their families. Similar fates struck dozens of millions of other innocent people, including children, across Europe and across the globe," the ambassador wrote.

There was no immediate reaction from the retailer

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