With hammers and chisels, they brought down walls in hails of concrete. They unfurled barbed wire fences that had held them back for decades, and crossed borders that only hours earlier had been minded by machine guns and guard dogs. They chipped away at statues of Lenin, toppling monuments from East Berlin to Budapest. They fled prisons and gulags where they had been locked away for crimes of conscience.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union meant freedom for millions locked for decades behind the Iron Curtain. But it also meant coming to terms with the legacy of Communism – humanity’s most lethal ideology, responsible for the deaths of 100 million people. Remembering the victims and those still languishing under Communist systems across the world is the mission of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Through its new websites, designed and developed with the Javelin digital team, and an earned media campaign that garnered coverage from the Daily Beast to the pages of the Wall Street Journal, the VOC is making sure that the stories of Communism’s victims are never forgotten.
• Viral Buzzfeed Listicle with more than 100,000 views
• Op-ed on 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in the Wall Street Journal
• Op-eds also placed in Politico Magazine, CNN, The Hill, USA Today
• Quoted in LA Times, Washington Times, TIME Magazine, Washington Examiner, Change.org.
• Feature coverage in Daily Beast • 50+ nationally syndicated radio interviews
The fall of the Berlin Wall and dissolution of the Soviet Union finally meant freedom for millions locked behind the Iron Curtain.