Оранжевая Альтернатива: Подпольное движение сопротивления в Польше

Polish anti communist underground movement, started in Wrocław

The Orange Alternative (Polish: Pomarańczowa Alternatywa) is a Polish anti communist underground movement, started in Wrocław, a city in south west Poland and led by Waldemar Fydrych (sometimes misspelled as Frydrych), commonly known as Major (Commander of Festung Breslau) in the 1980s. Its main purpose was to offer a wider group of citizens an alternative way of opposition against the authoritarian regime by means of a peaceful protest that used absurd and nonsensical elements. By doing this, members of the Orange Alternative could not be arrested by the police for opposition to the regime without the authorities becoming a laughing stock. The Orange Alternative has been viewed as part of the broader Solidarity movement. Sociology professor Lisa (Lisiunia) Romanienko has argued it was among the most effective of Solidarity's factions in dismantling anxiety and fear surrounding the dictatorial regime, in order to bring about the labor (and later social and cultural) movement's success. Initially it painted ridiculous graffiti of dwarves on paint spots covering up anti government slogans on city walls. Afterwards, beginning with 1985 through 1990, it organized a series of more than sixty happenings in several Polish cities, including Wrocław, Warsaw, Łódź, Lublin, and Tomaszów Mazowiecki. It was the most picturesque element of Polish opposition to Stalinist authoritarianism. It suspended activity in 1989, but reactivated in 2001 and has been active on a small scale ever since. A statue of a dwarf, dedicated to the memory of the movement, stands today on Świdnicka Street in Wrocław, in the place where events took place. The Orange Alternative movement has inspired several other similar movements in authoritarian countries including Czechoslovakia and Hungary and it has also inspired and influenced the PORA and the so called Orange Revolution movement in Ukraine, which was in turn supported by Poland. Some utterances ascribed to Waldemar Fydrych:
In Poland there are only three places when you can feel free: In churches, but only for prayers; in prisons, but not everyone can go to prison; and on the streets: they are the freest places. The Western World will find out much more about the situation in Poland from hearing that I was sent to jail for handing out sanitary pads to women, than from reading books and articles written by other members of the opposition. Can you treat a police officer seriously, when he is asking you: "Why did you participate in an illegal meeting of dwarfs?"

The beginnings of the Orange Alternative are in a student movement called the Movement for New Culture created in 1980 at the University of Wrocław. It is in that year that Waldemar "Major" Fydrych, one of the movement's founders, proclaims the Socialist Surrealism Manifesto, which becomes the ideological backbone behind a gazette known as "The Orange Alternative". Seven out of the total fifteen issues of this gazette appear during student strikes organized in November and December 1980 as part of the Solidarity upheaval. The first number is edited jointly by Major Waldemar Fydrych and Wiesław Cupała (a. k. a. "Rittmeister") simply with an idea to have fun. The editors treat the strike and the surrounding reality as forms of Art. For the ensuing numbers, the editorial committee is joined by Piotr Adamcio, known as "Lieutenant Pablo", Andrzej Dziewit and Zenon Zegarski, nicknamed "Lieutenant Zizi Top". Although its avantgarde character, according to the student strike organizers, was a threat to the "higher aims of the strike", and notwithstanding attempts by the strike committee to censor it, the gazette became rapidly very popular among the students.

The first known actions of the Orange Alternative consisted of painting dwarf graffiti on spots created by the police's covering up anti regime slogans on walls of the Polish cities. The first graffiti was painted by Major Waldemar Fydrych and Wiesław Cupała on the night from 30 to 31 August 1982 on one of the residences in the Wrocław district of Biskupin and Sępolno. Altogether more than one thousand of such graffiti were painted in the major Polish cities such as Wrocław, Kraków, Warsaw, Łódź, and Gdańsk. Dwarves appearing in numbers all over Poland aroused the interest of both Polish pedestrians and the militia, whose intervention led to short term arrests of the graffiti artists. During one of these incidents, Major, a detainee at a police station in Łódź, proclaimed, in reference to the Marxist and Hegelian dialectics, yet another artistic manifesto and referred to his graffiti art as "dialectic painting" stating: "The Thesis is the Anti Regime Slogan. The Anti thesis is the Spot and the Synthesis is the Dwarf. Quantity evolves into Quality. The more Dwarves there are, the better it is."

At the beginning of the 21st century Dwarf figurines made of bronze began to appear in Wrocław. Over time, they have become a major tourist attraction in Wrocław.