How Dwarves laughed Communism out of Poland.
After years of Nazi occupation in World War II, followed by life under Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders, the Polish people had suffered enough. By the 1980s, the resistance movement had swelled to a climax. History celebrates the Solidarity Movement, strikes, and international negotiations—and rightly so. But the Orange Alternative also deserves attention—unless it appears to historians like a clownish child whose desire for attention is best ignored. But this movement was hardly an isolated street corner demonstration. In June 1988, 10,000 Poles marched through the streets dressed as dwarves (krasnoludek in Polish) in orange hats. They mocked the Communist police, cracked jokes, and sketched orange dwarves over political slogans around the city.
The Orange Alternative began as a group of university students led by Waldemar Fydrych. Chafing under communist rule and tired of shortages of basics like toilet paper and tampons, a group of students in Wroclaw staged “happenings” with ironic messages designed to subvert the fear of Communist police. On December 13, 1988, they spread the word to “Help the Militia, beat yourself up” (Fydrych 295). “There is no freedom without dwarves!” was a favorite slogan in their anti-communist protests.
Mid-century writers like Viktor Frankl and Alexander Solzhenitsyn encouraged victims of totalitarianism to resist by confronting suffering and finding meaning in the power of the transcendent human spirit. But Fydrych argued in his “Manifesto of Socialist Surrealism” that the Soviet Union should be viewed as surrealist art—not to be made sense of. It’s a bit of absurdity that deserves only laughter. He quipped, “The whole world is a work of art. Even a single policeman standing in the street is a piece of art. Let’s have fun, our destiny is not a cross to bear.”
Fydrych kept up his quips even when arrested for subversion. Other prisoners laughed, while guards struggled to deal with a man who simply refused to act afraid. This gave him the psychological upper hand even under arrest and chipped away at the authorities’ confidence.
Rationalism and realism, according to Fydrych, create depression and fear. Why be rational when you could simply enjoy yourself? Life, he said, isn’t a valley of tears—it’s a farce. Instead of directly fighting the central planners, he decided to confuse them, saying, “We have prepared very perfidious tricks for the well organized knowledge you possess” (305).
In 1986, on the anniversary of the October Revolution, the Orange Alternative held illegal demonstrations and asked everyone to wear red to mock the Communists—even if the only red was nail polish or tomato paste. These were ongoing, continuing until 1988. When the police arrived, demonstrators cackled to hear officers order one another to “arrest the Reds!”
In his memoir The Lives of the Orange Men, Frydrych reveals that his nonchalant attitude was maintained by marijuana. Americans and Western Europeans may see some similarities with the ’68ers student movements that mocked cultural conventions and authority—except these students were protesting Communism instead of sympathizing with it. Fydrych also wrote with deliberate irony and irreverence—like Vonnegut without the undertones of aching cynicism.
At the same time, the Orange Alternative carried traces of the Eastern Christian tradition of the Holy Fool, rooted in St. Paul’s teaching that God turns social convention on its head and works in ways the worldly-wise call foolish (1 Corinthians 1). Society needs people who speak truth to power, and sometimes that comes in the form of the jester mocking the king. The ability to joke about your oppressor requires interior freedom and is a first step to exterior liberty.
In the foreword to the first Polish edition of Orange Men, Anne Appelbaum from the Washington Post wrote:
The young people who came to happenings probably hurt the regime more by mocking it than a whole decade of riots would have done. They proved the emperor had no clothes, that the regime was intellectually bankrupt… Communism fell apart totally only two years later.
The Orange Alternative recognized that philosophical arguments and economic theories are only so convincing—sometimes the best way to demoralize the enemy is to laugh at him. Art—whether in the form of street art or theater—captures the imagination, frees the spirit, and builds camaraderie. Their revolution pointed out that the Communist regime had no clothes and invigorated a new generation of freedom fighters. So, with a hi-ho, they sent the dwarves off to mock the Communists.
You can watch a video of the “happenings” here:
