Part One: The Orange Alternative: The Polish Hippie Surrealists Who Tore Down a Communist Government

Margaret talks with Courtney Kocak about how a bunch of self-styled anarchist gnomes helped collapse a government.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff?
Your podcast that's always about successful movements. I don't know
what you're talking about. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and
this week, not only am I going to talk about
successful movement, but I'm also going to talk to Courtney Cossack. Hi,
how are you hi?

Speaker 3 (00:22):
Hello? I'm a successful movement.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
I don't have any counter evidence to that.

Speaker 3 (00:28):
No, trying to start a cult over here?

Speaker 2 (00:31):
Okay, okay, well people want to start with the cult?
Could they start with private Parts unknown your podcast?

Speaker 3 (00:36):
Yes, that would be a great place to start. Okay.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
Also part of Courtney's cult, I mean. Also on this
podcast is Sophie. Hi, Sophie, how are you hi?

Speaker 1 (00:47):
I volunteer.

Speaker 4 (00:50):
I know.

Speaker 2 (00:50):
I was like, I don't really know what's involved yet,
but I'm like, eh, I try.

Speaker 3 (00:53):
I trust court.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
I don't got anything better going on, you.

Speaker 1 (00:56):
Know, Like I just feel like it'll be a good
time and I'll be fed.

Speaker 3 (00:58):
Well. Yeah, I'm a great leader. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:04):
Everyone should say hi to our audio engineer, Rory.

Speaker 4 (01:06):
Hi.

Speaker 2 (01:06):
Rory, Hi, Riight, Rory. Our theme musical was written forced
by unwoman, and believe it or not, I'm going to
cover people who won. That's not something I get to
do every week.

Speaker 3 (01:18):
Dun dun du dun du du du du du dun du.
I know.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
So we've covered art revolutionaries before on this show, and
we'll keep doing so because I like art revolutionaries.

Speaker 4 (01:29):
I like that.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
I like started off doing this research and I was like,
oh cool, I found even more cool, like weird anarchist
cerealists who oh wow, they like win and I'm really
excited about them. I'm gonna like go out on a limb.
Usually I try and hold the like reveal about what
it's about. I'm just gonna guess that neither of you
have heard of this, But I don't know. Are either
of you familiar with the Orange Alternative movement in Poland

(01:50):
in the nineteen eighties. No, nope, did either of you
know that hippie anarchists, surrealist artists where I really major
part in bringing down communist authoritarian governments. Interesting, Yeah, And
they didn't do it because they're like pro capitalists. They

(02:11):
are absolutely leftists. They just didn't like communist dictatorship and
lived in Poland the Orange Alternative Movement. So we've covered
comparable things and things that have inspired this movement. Before
we covered the cabouter movement in the Netherlands, which was
the anarchist pranksters who changed city life in the Netherlands

(02:32):
and the nineteen seventies, we covered the San Francisco Diggers
of the sixties, also anarchists who brought us whole wheat,
tied ie and about half of what's cool with hippies.
I'm not calling whole wheat or tied eye what's cool
about hippies, but I'm just including that as like two
of their big impacts. And we've covered the Surrealists and
the Dadaists who brought art into the war against fascism.

(02:52):
We covered the Dill Pickle Club that integrated nightlife in
Chicago in the nineteen tens, and today we're going to
cover a movement that was just as influential but is
basically not talked about in the English language. We're going
to talk about the Orange alternative movement of Poland, which
used what they called socialist surrealism or maybe sometimes Soviet surrealism.

(03:13):
I feel like I've seen it translated both ways, or
maybe it's Soviet surrealism and I wrote it wrong in
my script to challenge the authority of totalitarian communism. Along
the way, they're going to make a laughing stock out
of the authorities time and time again. They're also going
to dress up as gnomes. Sometimes it gets translated as dwarves,
and sometimes it gets translated as elves. But when I

(03:35):
picture like a short mythical creature from Europe with a
big pointy red hat, like, I go with gnome. What's
the word that you use for that?

Speaker 3 (03:44):
I like gnomes. It's got a nice visual. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:48):
Problem is I play so much dandy that gnome, elf
and dwarf are very distinct categories in my head. But
if you get into folklore, they are not distinct categories.
So they're gonna dress up as non they're going to
sing funny songs, and they're also going to do a
thing I really like, which is, for the first time
since the nineteen twenties, they are going to raise the
black flag of anarchism in a communist nation. And this

(04:11):
story is hard to tell, not emotionally, although I got
really invested, like way more than I expected while doing this.
But because there's only one book in English about this movement.
It is called Lives of the Orange Men by major
Waldemir Fiedrich. He's also the main character of the book

(04:34):
and a surrealist. So he's a surrealist. He's the author
of a Soviet surrealist manifesto. The whole book is written
as a series of like over the top glowing like
hay geographies of you know these the way that like
when Soviets write about Stalin or Lenin, you know, that's
the way he wrote about himself and all of his friends.

(04:57):
So it's hard to know so exactly everything that's true
in this story, and I, like, you know, compared it
to as many academic papers and other sources as I
could find.

Speaker 4 (05:07):
Right, Okay, So when you say anarchist, like is the
ultimate end total chaos? Or is the ultimate end something else?

Speaker 2 (05:17):
Oh, this is a really good question. So in this case,
it's a reference to a political movement that was around
since the eighteen sixties. It's basically socialism without an authoritarian
without a state, without so it's a horizontally organized system
of like distributing everything instead of a top down system.

(05:40):
And so it basically like anarchism gets such a bad
rap throughout the whole twentieth century that it now becomes
almost a word that's very hard to explain to people.
So he's an anti authoritarian socialist.

Speaker 3 (05:53):
Okay, So, and has it ever worked?

Speaker 2 (05:56):
I would say yes. Other people would argue otherwise. It
has worked like explicitly as an anarchist society in three
major times and places for several years with millions of people.
It worked in revolutionary Spain in Catalonia during the Spanish
Civil War from nineteen thirty six to nineteen thirty nine.
It worked in Ukraine, and actually we were talking beforehand

(06:19):
about the Cossacks, because that's just the thing I apparently
talk about with my guests before we start recording. And
a Cossack named Makno led a revolutionary movement in Ukraine
that was anarchistic, very intentionally specifically meant to be an
anarchist society for a couple of years, but unfortunately the
Bolsheviks came and killed them all. And in Spain they

(06:42):
a very similar thing happened were Stalin and the Fascists
essentially like combined forces, not actually but practically, they both
attacked the anarchist society and destroyed it. And then there's
another one that I know less about, in the Korean
People's Association of Manchuria that last also several years and
included a couple million people, and it was destroyed by

(07:04):
a combination of Mao's forces and Japanese imperial forces. So
the main reason that we don't know one way or
another about whether this like sort of anarchist communism has
worked historically or could work historically is that authoritarian left
and the authoritarian right have every single time both attacked it.

Speaker 4 (07:23):
Right away, Okay, that was really helpful. I have to
say thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (07:29):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, this is unfortunately one of
my favorite things to talk about. And there's stuff now
that's like happening right now that is not anarchist in name,
but is very heavily inspired by anarchists that is working
in for example, northeastern Syria. They practice democratic con federalism,
which is inspired by anarchism, and it's a horizontal stateless
anti capitalist society. So anarchists really like it, right because
we don't care as much about names. We want people

(07:52):
to take care of each other and to be organized
with each other, but not in a way where like
people are running around making everyone do it or they
get shot. Yes, so yes, yeah, now that's a very
important question. Thanks for asking that upfront and overall, Right,
this story is not about anarchism. This is a story

(08:15):
about anarchist tactics being used in the struggle against a
communist dictatorship in coalition with this huge broad movement called Solidarity.
And I just didn't know about the anarchist surrealist element
of it. So I got really excited when I found
out about it.

Speaker 4 (08:34):
It seems almost like the thing that you're describing taking down,
except the dictator parts.

Speaker 3 (08:41):
That's the problematic part.

Speaker 4 (08:42):
Right, they like the anarchists, like the communism, but they
don't like the dictator part.

Speaker 2 (08:48):
Yeah. Overall, yeah, they like the They like what communism
could have been, right, but not what communism ever was
under Bolshevism basically.

Speaker 3 (08:56):
Yeah, okay, beautiful.

Speaker 2 (08:58):
Yeah, and so yeah, this book was written by someone
who's a surrealist and not always telling exactly the truth.
He has a lot of conversations with secret police throughout
this book that I'm like, I don't think this conversation happened,
but I don't know. It was just him and a
secret policeman talking.

Speaker 3 (09:16):
So who knows a secret policeman named Mushrooms.

Speaker 2 (09:21):
Yeah, totally. He smokes a lot of weed in this story.
And so this story I'm going to tell more than
I was expecting, is going to be surrealist in how
I tell it, because there's myth woven into here. But
it is a fascinating story. It is one hundred percent
cool people did cool stuff, and I have no reservations

(09:41):
about it at all. The Orange Alternative was cool as hell,
and I think we can learn a lot from them.
And it takes place in Poland, which famously nothing bad
has ever happened in Poland except for all the bad
stuff that happened, like when Hitler and Stalin made a
secret pact called the Malodav Ribbon trop packed and invaded
jointly at the start of World War Two. That was

(10:04):
really bad. But after the war, Stalin basically grabbed Poland,
ignoring the existing Polish government in exile in London, and
the USSR was like, Oh, don't worry, we'll let everyone
have free and independent elections, but they didn't do that.
Poland became part of the Communist Block as one of
the Soviet satellite states, kind of roughly the same as

(10:27):
like Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria, all those places. That aren't
technically the USSR right, but they're in the USSR's power.
And folks in Poland never really liked the fact that
they lived under a communist dictatorship, and they kept fighting
from both the right and the left against their government,
and the government would ping pong back and forth between

(10:49):
like more like every now and then they'd be like, Okay,
we can kind of liberal up a little bit and
be a little bit more free as a society, and
then they would be like, no, wait, never mind, hardline
communist And they would just go back and forth about
that constantly, and they didn't have free and fair elections
until nineteen eighty nine. But that's Poland. And now we're
going to meet our hero, who is named Major Waldimir

(11:11):
Theodrich or Waldeck to his friends. In case you ever
needed to know what Waldeck is short for, it's short
for Waldemre. He was born on April eighth, nineteen fifty three,
about a month after Joseph Stalin did the best thing
that he ever did, which was die my people to

(11:31):
figure if you've listened to my show enough, you know
that I'm not a big fan, not a big Stalin girl.
Oh really, yeah, no, it secrets out. Waldeck was born
in Poland. If you ever have been to Poland, I
haven't been to Poland. I have a bunch of friends
from Poland, but I've never been there.

Speaker 3 (11:47):
No, I would like to go.

Speaker 4 (11:49):
I've never been anywhere in Eastern Europe.

Speaker 2 (11:53):
I've only been to Bulgaria. In Eastern Europe, I liked it,
but I haven't been to Poland. There was more in
a city called torn And. As a little kid, he
was weird, but in a good way. I feel like
we're gonna have to like start defending the word weird again.
I'm totally fine with using it against the right wing
when they're acting really weird. But obviously there's both good
weird and bad weird.

Speaker 3 (12:14):
Agreed, Yes, I'm weird and they are very weird.

Speaker 2 (12:18):
Yeah, exactly exactly. I'm saying this is a weird person,
but then those before weird. Waldeck figured he'd wind up
a priest, but not like a boring existing god, but
to a new one he'd make up as when he's
a little kid. By the time he's in high school,
he founded a secret society called the Union of Bacchus

(12:38):
and has helped its members get fake doctor's notes to
get out of class, and they held secret movie screenings
of foreign films in the basement. And since they're in
a like Soviet block country, right and getting a foreign
film is a big deal. He went off to a
technical college that was run in a military fashion, and
so everyone had to wear uniforms of green berets. No
one was allowed to have a beard, and he couldn't

(13:00):
have long hair. So we wanted to rebel, so he
shaved his head completely and he was like, oh, it
is totally gonna spread everyone to shave their heads. He
was the only one who did it. It did not
start a movement, and everyone just started calling him baldy.
Then he went off to university. If you ask me
the difference between technical college and university in Poland in
nineteen sixties, I do not know the answer. But he

(13:22):
went off to university and he grew his hair and
his beard long, and he became a theater kid, which
is another common trope on this show.

Speaker 3 (13:31):
That's hilarious, Like a welder and a theater kid.

Speaker 2 (13:35):
Yeah, yeah, Well, I think the technical college, I don't
even know whether it was like technical college to like,
I don't even know what they trained him in. I'm
like annoyed at a lot about what I have available
to me about this story.

Speaker 3 (13:49):
Singing and dancing for sure, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (13:52):
Yeah, he absolutely is learning those. And when he's off
in theater kids' school while he's in university and is
a theater kid at the school, everyone is really paranoid,
right because they live in a communist country, and so
there are these things called rubber ears, which is slang
for secret informants, and they're like, every class has a
rubber ear in it. One of your students is an informant.
It's going to turn you into the party if you

(14:13):
say and do the wrong things right, And Waldeck like
never stops being paranoid about this, which is fair because
it's also true.

Speaker 3 (14:24):
Yeah, I would be so paranoid, Are you kidding me?

Speaker 2 (14:27):
Yeah? Yeah, But he becomes kind of like obsessed with
the rubber ears. He like gets really excited when he
meets one. You know, he's like, I found a rubber ear.
And he's like always trying to figure out who's a
cop or not, which really fucks with his personal life.
He is a wild anti state rebel. Soon enough, he
runs a student radio show and he makes fun of
communist propaganda on the show. The problem is the state

(14:50):
paid for the radio station, and so not only did
they shut down his show, they shut down the entire
radio station. About this time, he wrote a cliche that
when I first read this as a footnote and I
like post as social media, being like, check about this thing,
everyone I know who's like from a Soviet bloc country
was like, oh yeah, yeah, no, we grew up knowing this.
This is not a like a wal deckism. This is

(15:12):
just a thing you grow up knowing, which is quote,
Communism must always be understood as mathematically inverse to capitalism.
In capitalism, a man is exploited by another man, and
in communism it's the other way around. Wait what okay,
so the same thing? No, no, no, it's okay. So

(15:33):
in capitalism man is exploited by man, but in communism
it's the other way around. Man is exploited by a man.

Speaker 3 (15:40):
Same, they're both bad. Okay.

Speaker 2 (15:42):
Yes, that is the argument that is being made, and
I like it too, right because like I feel like
a lot of people have forgotten, the modern left is
sort of forgotten what the Soviet block eras were like
for people, Right.

Speaker 3 (15:56):
Yeah, like the super bad parts of communism.

Speaker 2 (15:59):
Yeah, all the authoritarianism is not so good. And everyone
who grew up in it, like or everyone I've ever
met it grew up in it, sure isn't happy about it.
But it doesn't mean that they were all like, and
therefore we love capitalism. They might be like, therefore we
love blue jeans and you know, soda and choice and
music and things like that. Right, And somewhere along this way,

(16:20):
I don't know exactly when Waldeck starts identifying explicitly as
an anarchist. In this long tradition of you know, anti
state leftism, he spent more time scrawling anti government graffiti
and bathrooms than he did studying. So soon enough they're
going to kick him out school because he sucks at school.
So he transfers to go to a different school, and
he moves to a city called vrote Swaff, which I

(16:43):
have always, for my entire life believed was pronounced roe
Claw because it looks like roe Claw. But it's a
rote Swaff. So if I get it wrong elsewhere throughout
the script, I am sorry, my Polish friends. But for many,
many years I have read about this city and had
an assumption about how to pronounce it, because most Polish

(17:03):
things are pronounced like they look anyway whatever. In Froutz Swaff,
he found his people because these theater kids they go
hard and not just like politically like he cares about that,
but they go hard as like weirdo artists. They are
not afraid of being controversial and critical. And when you
would come into class, they would black out the windows

(17:26):
and take your watch away, so you have no sense
of time, so you're truly with the moment. Either of
you do theater. I never did theater, but I yes, sadly.
I mean, I'm recovered, not well. What was your Sophie, Sorry,
I didn't here well okay.

Speaker 4 (17:47):
I thought you were saying I did not recover well,
and I was like, that's also true.

Speaker 2 (17:54):
I couldn't do theater because my siblings did theater and
I had to be different from them, like aggressively.

Speaker 1 (17:59):
You know, I do feel some joy that my older
brother had to sit through all my bad theater camps
as a kid. We had to go see the final
play at the end of camp. I do feel joy
about that.

Speaker 2 (18:11):
And so now that he's this particular kind of theater kid,
he's you know, he's growing his hair longer and longer
his beard, and he's growing weed that was smuggled in
as seeds from behind the Iron Curtain. And so all
the like hippies are growing weed in their in their houses,
and there's this tension that keeps happening where you kind
of you sort of kind of need to pick whether
you're a political radical or going to grow weed.

Speaker 3 (18:34):
You know, why can't you be both?

Speaker 2 (18:36):
Because they like raiding your house when you're a radical.
Oh and then if you find weed, you're in like
extra trouble. This didn't stop a lot of people, but
it caused a lot of tension because they would go
to these like weed smoking parties and then everyone be like, no,
we can't get too political because we can't get the
secret police on us because we want to keep doing drugs.

Speaker 3 (18:53):
I love the tension, I know, I know.

Speaker 2 (18:57):
And when the hippies first showed up in Poland, you know,
this is a little bit late, right, this is the
late seventies intead of late sixties. And at first the
communist authorities are really happy about this new thing. Because
the American hippies are anti capitalists. They're like, ah, they'll
be good communists, right, But the Polish hippies were against
the communist regime. So eventually the communist authorities were like, Okay,

(19:20):
we're going to demonize the hippies, just like the West does.
But another thing that the West does really well is
interrupt podcasts to talk about products and services like these ones.

Speaker 3 (19:33):
Yay, and we're back.

Speaker 2 (19:44):
So when I say they were oppressed by cops, Poland
didn't have cops because cops is capitalist, bourgeoise stuff, right.
They had the people's militia. It's the same thing. It
is literally the same thing. They have cops. They just
don't call them cops because that has a bad kind
of They just call it a militia.

Speaker 3 (20:02):
I think a militia has a worse connotation for.

Speaker 2 (20:04):
In the usity. Yeah, like they're going neck and neck here. Yeah,
it is functionally identical to cops. Veteran of the pod
Mikhail Bakunin put it back in eighteen seventy three, when
the people are being beaten by a stick, they are
not much happier if it is called the people's stick.

Speaker 3 (20:23):
Nice.

Speaker 2 (20:25):
Yeah, I like that quote. I was really excited to
get to that. I actually in my head I thought
I remember that as an oral wal quote, it wasn't.
And so starting about thee I think nineteen seventy six,
life is getting really hard in Poland. The economy is
starting to crash a little bit. The cost of basic
living is going up and up. Communism doesn't actually really

(20:45):
distribute lots of stuff for free, and so communism is
increasingly unpopular. People are unhappy about the people's stick. Sugar
is being rationed, the cost of meat is going up,
and to quote Waldeck, a student who'd been distributing handbill
in Crackow died there in extremely suspicious circumstances. The secret

(21:05):
police were held responsible for his death, and a revolt
broke out at the university. Oh shit, and this is like,
you don't have protest movements in communist bloc countries. You know,
this is a huge deal.

Speaker 3 (21:22):
Did they dress it up like a theater flash mob?

Speaker 1 (21:25):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (21:26):
That's basically what I'm going to talk about for the
next two hours is that doesn't happen yet, but once
the artists get involved, that is absolutely what's going to happen. Okay,
can't wait. If flash mobs could bring down a government,
that's what this story is about. So I'm glad you
called it, and so this revolt breaks out, and it's
here that we have to talk about the main group.

(21:47):
When people talk about I know, it's a big thing.
You go to a party and people are like, oh,
let's talk about the social movement that brought down the
Polish Communist government in nineteen eighty nine. It's like a
thing that comes up a lot, right, And usually when
people talk about Polish opposition to Communism, they talk about
a trade union called Solidarity, and this is the first
independent trade union in the Soviet Bloc, or rather as

(22:09):
the first legally recognized trade union. All the others were
entirely illegal, where Solidarity was only mostly illegal, And the
fact that it managed to be mostly legal instead of
totally illegal was because it had ten million members by
nineteen eighty one.

Speaker 3 (22:23):
Damn, Can I ask what's illegal about it?

Speaker 2 (22:27):
You're just not allowed to have a trade union that
within the communists countries, the state controls trade unions, gotcha.

Speaker 4 (22:34):
Yeah, so they are in charge of just everything, so
you can't like have these separate groups.

Speaker 2 (22:40):
Yeah, yeah, pretty much, especially since they perceived themselves as
a leftist government. They are like, no, we're your trade union, right,
you know, we are everything. But in Poland, by nineteen
eighty one, after only a year of its existence, solidarity
is running around with a third of the adult population
of the country. So they have to be reckoned with

(23:04):
and it's hard to completely illegalize something that a third
of the people are trying to do. And what's really
confusing about this time wise is that I can look
and know exactly when solidarity started. It started in August
nineteen eighty because a woman named Anna Volantinowitz was fired
from a shipyard for being part of an illegal trade union,
right because she was unionizing, and so she was fired,

(23:26):
and then the rest of her crew went on strike, right,
and then they managed to form this other union and
it blew up and became this big thing. But now
I get really annoyingly confused because now in nineteen seventy nine,
a year before that, there's something called the Solidarity student
committees that are forming and the author is like, and
they're part of solidarity, but they can't be solidator whatever.

(23:48):
It's just history books don't always make sense, okay, or
they're not always entirely accurate. The students all over the
country because a student has died form solidarity student committees
at universities to try and do something about the fact
that a student has been killed for passing out handbills.

(24:08):
They start setting up groups. This is a big deal.
I keep saying this, but it's just it's such a
big deal. This happening stuff that we really take for
granted in the US. Obviously, like in the US, student
movements also get attacked by police, right, but we have
to like pretend that they did something illegal first, right,
you know, like beyond the lawn. Never mind if I
said this a year ago, I've had entirely different ways
of talking about this. And in Rhodeswaft at the cathedral,

(24:33):
a handful of students showed up to protest, and the
protest organizers are like terrified. They're like, this is to
be so low key and non confrontational, you guys, it's
still the first protest the city is seen in decades,
so they're like, we really got to play this simple.
But the people who were there, including Waldeck, broke from
the organizer's wishes and they went wild. And by that

(24:54):
I mean they marched to a big landmark statue and
someone read out one of the handbills to the crowd ooh,
and this blew everyone's minds. Soon enough, the opposition movement
at this university was huge. About half of the faculty.
We're in on these like secret meetings, which also meant
that the secret police are in on it. They're infiltrating,

(25:16):
they're arresting people, they're raiding people's dorms and houses and
things like that. Right, and there's this supposedly revolutionary group
in Routswaff that sets up an organization to be like,
we're going to take this further, We're going to have
a revolution. And in order to be super serious, they
need to do something that seems very obvious. They forbid

(25:36):
women from coming to this secret revolutionary organization because, after all,
the men will be distracted if there's women there.

Speaker 4 (25:45):
Yes, and they'll get their periods everywhere and all kinds
of stuff.

Speaker 3 (25:48):
It's dangerous.

Speaker 2 (25:50):
Yeah, they're just too emotional. It just won't work, you know.
So Waldeck is actually part of forming this, but he
like isn't the leader of it, and he writes about
it kind of right away, being like fuck, what the
hell is this shit? Like, you know, but when I
first read it, I was like, God, damn it is
this gonna be it? Because there's this thing that happens
a lot on the show where I'll read about a
man and then he like sucks, he's a misogynist. Like

(26:11):
I get halfway through the book and then he's a misogynist.
I'm like, fuck him, it's too late. I can't change
my topic. Waldeck is not a misogynist. He's not down
with kicking the women out. He's actually very actively feminist
and soon enough is going to be cross dressing it, protests.

Speaker 3 (26:25):
Oh, we love it, okay.

Speaker 2 (26:28):
Yeah, and so yeah, he's not going to last long
in this traditional misogynist revolutionary structure.

Speaker 3 (26:33):
Was he pissed about these what are the ears called.

Speaker 2 (26:36):
The rubber ears?

Speaker 3 (26:38):
The rubber ears? Was he pissed about them arresting folks?

Speaker 2 (26:41):
I get that impression, But the way he writes about
it all, he writes it as if he's like playing
a chess game against the state. So he's like the
brilliant strategist General so and so came and you know,
did all these things, And I have to respect how
effective that was. You know, he's a he's still alive.
If you're listening to this Waldeck, I'm sure, I got

(27:02):
lots of stuff wrong, but it's half your fault because
your book is very confusing.

Speaker 3 (27:06):
What the fuck am I doing here? Why don't you
get Waldack himself?

Speaker 2 (27:10):
No, I don't know no as to how the show works.
I like learning things and then explaining them instead of
you know. Also, because like he and I would have
a very different conversation, it's much better to have what
we call in the business the podcast idiot. Okay, I'll
be the idiot, the person who doesn't know the thing,
which would have been me a week ago. It's not
that I actually knew this stuff.

Speaker 1 (27:31):
We call them podcast dummies.

Speaker 2 (27:33):
Oh dummies.

Speaker 3 (27:34):
Sorry.

Speaker 2 (27:36):
So another thing about living in well, actually lots of
countries do this. The US doesn't do it, but lots
of countries do. Poland had mandatory military service at the time,
and so he's called up for mandatory military service. And
I want to shout out there's a tactic that is
tried and true that Waldeck did before some of my friends,
but I learned about it first. Of my friends. I

(27:58):
have a few friends who've grown up in societies with
man tory military service. Like some Finnish friends just were like, no,
we could do public service instead of joining the military.
It's fine. My Israeli friends grew up in an evil
empire of oppression and were like, how do we get
out of joining the IDF? And they actually all managed
to get out of joining the IDF. Most of them

(28:18):
did so by just leaving the fucking country and going
to Europe.

Speaker 3 (28:22):
Brilliant.

Speaker 2 (28:23):
Yeah. One friend, like a lot of resisters, just went
to jail. He just went in and said no, I
will not serve in the IDF, and they put him
in jail. And then I have a friend named Yoni,
and Yoni pulled an Alice's Restaurant. You ever heard this
song Alice's Restaurant? Mm hmm, Okay, there's this old song
about someone evading the draft by acting crazy. My friend

(28:46):
Yoni went into the recruiter's office, head held high, and said,
I want a gun. Give me a gun. I want
to kill people. I don't know who I'm gonna kill.
It might be you, it might be me. Just give
me a gun. I want to kill people.

Speaker 3 (28:58):
Okay, pull crazy, love it.

Speaker 2 (29:00):
And they were like, no, we don't want you. You
can't join.

Speaker 3 (29:04):
You're too excited.

Speaker 2 (29:05):
Yeah, what's funny is what happens in the song Alice's
Restaurant as he goes in and he's like, I want
to kill I want blood in my teeth, and the
recruiters like, great, you're exactly who we want. But you know, anyway,
so it works for Yoni. Waldeck does this too. He
is mostly known as Major Valdemir Fiedrich. Why is he

(29:26):
known as major because when he was called in for
mandatory service and now I hear there's three different versions
of this. Either he marched in in a major's uniform
and he insisted that he was already a major and
they were like, all right, you're crazy, to get the
fuck out of here. Or he just wore a suit
vest with a bunch of metals pinned on it. Or
and this is the thing that I think actually happened,

(29:48):
he went to a psychiatrist and acted crazy in order
to get a note from the psychiatrist to say that
he didn't have to do his mandatory military service.

Speaker 3 (29:56):
Did he know about bone spurs? Just do bone spurs?

Speaker 2 (30:00):
I know, I know, right, There's so much he could
have learned. It is so funny how it's like like overall,
like I'm not mad at people trying, like like not
serving in Vietnam is like good, right, you know, right,
but it's really annoying when people claim to be like
super patriotic and send other people after their deaths and
then didn't have the courage to actually do it themselves.

Speaker 3 (30:20):
My grandpa did.

Speaker 4 (30:21):
He was Mennonite, so he got whatever that release was
where he just like had to go work at hospital
or whatever during World War two.

Speaker 2 (30:29):
Yeah whatever, No, it makes sense. Yeah, And it's so different, right,
like war to war, you know, because like I mean,
it makes sense for mena nits and another past fists
to go to hospital services so to faing World War two, right,
you know, but like I.

Speaker 3 (30:41):
Would be like I will fuck your shit up. I
will be like yelling during battle. You don't want me,
you do not want me?

Speaker 2 (30:50):
Yeah, fair enough. So he goes to the doctor and
he passes the doctor notes being like we can't talk freely.
I've been bugged, And then he passes more notes that
are like and then the doctor puts the note in
his journal, you know, and he's like, no, no, no,
you have to eat the note. He passes another note,
but it's like, no, you have to eat the note.
What are you doing, and it's possible, and I think

(31:15):
implied that this particular psychiatrist pretty much dedicated his life
to helping people evade mandatory military service and then put
them in touch with each other to organize revolution. All right,
I'm not certain, but if so, thanks doctor for bringing
down a communist regime.

Speaker 3 (31:35):
That's a special you know, discipline of medicine.

Speaker 2 (31:39):
Yeah, totally quack but good. However it goes down, he
doesn't serve in the military, and he becomes forever after
known as the Major. He would go everywhere with his
long hair and his long beard, which is funny cause
like long hair and long beard by like today's standards,
they're not particular like chin length hair and like a
beard that's not like a He doesn't have a wizard beard,

(31:59):
you know. But he does have a big black long
military coat with shiny silver buttons that he wears everywhere.
And while Deck and his friends they set up an
alternative to the boring no women revolutionary structure, and it
seems to have been either called the army or the regiment.
Eventually it's going to be called the Orange Alternative, but
for now they're like they all take on the name,

(32:19):
like Lieutenant so and so and all of this stuff, right,
and women joined and were called amazons. Yes, they called
all of their various actions. Whenever they go to an action,
they'd be called maneuvers, like all we're going out on
maneuvers tonight. It'd be like graffiti or whatever, you know.
And at one point they went on a maneuver to
a big hippie camp to distribute revolutionary handbills and they

(32:41):
did it without anyone getting arrested. So they were like
celebrated their successful maneuvers with no casualties. And they held
elections every week because I think they either had an
over enthusiasm for democracy or they wanted to make it
clear that their governing structure is sort of an absurdity
and they are anti authoritarian. Everyone is a leader.

Speaker 4 (33:02):
Okay, yeah, I would be exhausted by all the elections.

Speaker 2 (33:06):
I know, but they're having fun with it. I think
it's all a game to them. Okay, they start all
the hippies and revolutionaries, they start taking shit kind of seriously,
even though they do it all with like a laugh.
Right to quote the major back then, during a discussion
about social issues, the meaning of life or the quality
of various highs. People would start constructing a crew, often spontaneously.

(33:31):
A crew was a group that would wander the country,
often during vacation, sleeping wherever, finding new experiences and getting
high together. And then so these like vagabond crews start
also organizing revolution. So I really like it because that's
my own background, So I think it's really cool. He
starts traveling around the major he's avoiding train fares, he

(33:52):
joins whatever trouble he can get into. He travels with
people with names like the tramp Amazing and a dog
named Dog. There's so many dogs in a story and
none of them get hurt, Sophie.

Speaker 1 (34:07):
That makes me happy. Yeah, they've a lot of bummer
dog stuff on Robert Show lately.

Speaker 2 (34:13):
Yeah, and then even once on my show and I
didn't mean to. Yeah. Major strikes break out in the
city of Gadansk, and these are the first prolonged protests
anywhere in the communist world. People are like throwing molotovs
and shit, and as best as I can tell, this
is organized by a group called the Young Poland Movement.
I don't know much about. Students and vagabonds converged on

(34:35):
the city, gathering in hostels off to like then go
together and go see the strike and to try and
help out. And so the Major and his friends and
presumably Dog made it back to Roodeswaf and they started
the New Culture movement, the RNK. They just name new
things constantly whatever. Honestly, the name isn't going to be
super important to the rest of it. If you're like me,

(34:56):
and acronyms and initials just go in one ear and
out the other. Don't worry about this one. You can
just remember dwarves, elves, gnomes and the Orange alternative and
you'll be good. They put on debates, They published a
single issue of a gazette called a They Smoked Weed,
and they talked about how life could be. And their
heroes were first and foremost friend of the Pod Peter Kropotkin,

(35:19):
who's one of the main anarchist communist theorists from Russia
from one hundred years earlier, and future friend of the
Pod Bob Marley. That's their thing, dead old Russian guy
and Bob Marley love it. The Major described Kropotkin as
quote a zoologist, a royal prince, and a figurehead of
classical anarchism with a splendid beard. He was an excellent

(35:40):
role model.

Speaker 3 (35:42):
I appreciate all the weed smoking. I would be in
it just for the weed smoking.

Speaker 2 (35:46):
Yeah, that's how a lot of them got into it. Yeah.
But that weed smoking, those hippies and shit was enough
that Russia shows up with tanks trying to quell the
rebellious hippies. Which it's fun to remember that Poland is
not Russia, it is not the ussr right, and Russia's like, no,

(36:07):
we don't care, can't let a communism fall here, and
so tanks they come in. If you ever hear anyone
on the Internet called a tanky, it's because of this.
It is not because of it happening in Poland, but
it happening in Hungary in nineteen fifty six, when Russia
is like, let's send tanks to quell anyone who dislikes
the USSR. So Major gets out of the country for

(36:31):
a minute. He goes to Czechoslovakia, he talks with folks
there about what's going on in Poland, and then he
goes home and he writes the Manifesto of Socialist Surrealism,
and then he falls in love and it turns out
she's into this, so it's not creepy, but he starts
graffeeding his CRUSH's name in the halls all over campus,
like in Hearts, you know, okay, and his CRUSH's name

(36:53):
is Yogi Booboooo. At least that's how he wrote it
down in his book. And she's not creeped out, but
she's actually more radical than him. He asks her out,
He's like, starts by just grafeiting her name, which kids,
if you're listening down, start with that. Start with asking
out yes, consent, yeah. But he asks her out and

(37:18):
she's like, yeah, i'd love to meet up. Let's go
on a day tomorrow. And he's like hell yeah. And
then she calls later that night and is like, I
can't go on a day tomorrow. There's a student strike.
I have to go to the student strike. And he's like,
don't you want to just go on a date with
me instead of going to the protest, And she's like no,
and so he's like, hey, babe, I'm gonna come to

(37:39):
the protest. And that's how Yogi Booboo destroyed the Soviet Union.
I mean, many, many people are involved in all of this,
but I just love all the little weird threads where
if Yogi Booboo hadn't, I don't know whatever.

Speaker 4 (37:53):
Anyway, I was going to ask you if when they
let the girls in, if they all start a fucking
But it sounds like, yeah, maybe a little bit.

Speaker 2 (38:01):
Yeah, absolutely, it's also pretty queer, and we're going to
talk a little bit more about that later. But yeah, no,
they're all like, there's a lot of reference to like.
And then I went and hung out with my girlfriends
and you're like, Okay, I don't know entirely what's happening here,
but I hope everyone's having fun, you know. And so
the New Culture movement joins the strike and they formally

(38:23):
endorse it because they're like, well, it's a good piece
of art, right, we'll go to the protest as art
and they're a weirdo art radical clubs. So of course
they have to print a newspaper first. So they get
their shit together to finish something they've been working on
for about six months called the Orange Alternative, and they
go out and they print it. I have a couple
different ideas about where they get this interest in the

(38:43):
word orange as part of the name of their movement, right,
But what I also am interested in is advertisers interrupting
the middle of my sentence. That's great and we're back.
So they finished the orange alternative, And in one way

(39:07):
they're inspired by this protest movement from the earlier seventies
called the Cabalter movement in Amsterdam, right, and they used
orange a lot. And if so, that's because it's Dutch.
But the other argument I've heard is that the orange
alternative is presenting a third way because the two things
that are being presented as you either have the red
Bolsheviks or you have the yellow Vatican, like the Catholic Church, right,

(39:31):
And they're like, what about something different, And so it's like,
not anti religious and not anti well, it's anti communist,
but it's against the Catholic Church and it's against the
Bolshevik Communist Party. But it's like a lot of religious
people are in it and a lot of socialists are
in it, as best as I can tell.

Speaker 4 (39:49):
I wonder if the word orange like nothing rhymes with
it in Polish either, because that would also make sense
if they were like, you don't like.

Speaker 2 (39:57):
Yeah, we want everything to be unique. I'm hoping. I
think orange is one of the ugliest words in the
English language. I hate saying the orange alternative over and
over again. It just it's not poetic to me. So
I'm hoping it's poetic and polish, whether or not at
rhymes with anything. And yeah, So because a hippie anarchist
boy wanted to impress his crush by going to the strike,
she was going to. The Orange alternative is born. Waldeck

(40:19):
showed up at the strike. He set up a tent
and he painted love and anarchy on it. Counter protesters
showed up basically like right wing communist youth groups, like
kind of the equivalent of like right because if your
society is the communist society, the like right wing thugs
who defend the government are basically the same kind of
person that they would be in our society. And they

(40:42):
start tearing down the posters this like, you know, the
counter protesters, and so the surrealists some of them are like,
all right, let's go throw chairs at them and fight
them and shit, right, and other ones are like, no, no, no,
we gotta do this. We got to just confuse the
shit out of them. So they go to the window,
they open the window and they all start singing the
Internationale at the top of their lungs, which is like

(41:04):
basically the second national anthem of communist Poland. Right. It's
this like communist bombastic song about the ray communism, you know,
and the right wing group is like, wait, that's our song,
and they just get confused and leave beautiful yeah, and
word goes around the rest of the school. They're like, oh,
the orange alternative newspaper is cool as hell, and they

(41:26):
successfully defended their building against counter protesters. The organizers of
the strike were the like stuffy no girls allowed and
no fun club, and so they're pissed because they're starting
to lose the masses because people are like, wait, the
hippies let us girls in and are also fun and
they have weed, you know. And the official strike committee

(41:47):
put out a statement that the new culture movement was
banned and their newspaper was banned. But the whole protest
movement is about how we don't like the communist government
because it's a censorship government, right, and so everyone's like,
we're not going to censor shit, what the fuck are
you talking about? Yeah, And so basically the stuffy no
girls allowed club people were like, oh, you're just the

(42:08):
Bolsheviks all over again. Fuck you, and for some weird reason,
women in particular were drawn to the movement that let
them in instead of the movement that didn't let them in.
That's crazy, I know, you think that they would just
be extra excited to try and get into patriarchy instead
of organizing as feminists. Yeah, the whole communist movement is
freaked out by the student strike in Poland. Even the

(42:31):
resistance to communism is a little bit worried about it.
They were like, oh, the conditions aren't right for a
big strike, right, we have to build up to that.
You can't just go out and have a revolution. You
have to wait till the material conditions are perfect or whatever.
And so they're like not in control. So they're upset.
The strike committee, the No Girls Club took orders top

(42:53):
down from solidarity, that larger movement. I was talking about
the students themselves. They're organized bottom up, and so the
student's form and this is meant as a joke. The
Council of People's Commissioners of the Orange Revolution, and they
made alliances with other striking groups in order to avoid
having the strike dismantled from the top down. Eleven universities

(43:13):
across the country agreed to keep going despite pressure from
the opposition authorities who wanted to get everyone to give up.
They wanted the strike to cancel. Poland went into martial
law over this. The army occupied the cities and the
strikes were broken by force. And it was probably important
strategically that, rather than just giving up, the strike went

(43:36):
until the government was forced to destroy it because forcing
the state into martial law, while it sucks, because then
you get martial law for a while, helped the movement grow.

Speaker 3 (43:47):
It's a lot of people on your side. Yeah, what
kind of violence were they breaking it up with?

Speaker 2 (43:53):
I am under the impression, but it again, I am
not entirely confident about this person I'm reading. I'm under
the impression that the Polish govern was repressive, but not
quite like murder, torture repressive. Okay, I am under the impression.
It will look similar to how you would expect something
like this to be brought, like similar to how things
were broken up actually at the student movement this year

(44:16):
in the United States, where there's violence, there's plenty of
hitting and arrests that make no sense and stuff, but
it's not like machine gunning the crowd. Yeah, okay, good, Yeah,
my best impression of it and what the government did
once they declared martial law. The major he's like sick,

(44:37):
He's like home with a cold, and he goes out
into the streets one day and he sees these posters
that have put up that were like, we have arrested
all of the ring leaders of the strike. Don't worry,
your streets are safe, and they would like list all
of the names of all the people who've been arrested.
And the Major's like, wait, that's my name, though, why

(44:57):
is my name on the list of people who've been detained?
Like that very much, and I don't feel like I
have been detained. And then one of his friends was
arrested soon after one of his friends who was also
on the list but hadn't yet been arrested, and so
he's like, I'm going to go into hiding now. This
is not the right time to be hanging out of
my house. Yeah, And so it goes to warsaw and

(45:19):
people in Poland didn't take martial law. Lying down students
in dorms. They lit candles in the windows and like
banged pots and pans, and this freaked out that these
cops are really easy to piss off. After a couple
of days of it, they like laid siege to the dorm,
I think, and then evicted everyone from the dorm, and Solidarity,
true to its name, got together and figured out how

(45:41):
to get everyone housed. The local priest organized his congregation
to put all the students up in parishioners' houses. Because, yeah,
the anti communist movement under Solidarity was incredibly politically diverse,
from Polish nationalists, anti Fulitarian leftists to the Catholic Church.
And then May Day nineteen eighty one, it was a
big to do. In Warsaw. May Day is the International

(46:04):
workers holiday and in communist countries it's the big state holiday.

Speaker 3 (46:10):
Oh I didn't know that.

Speaker 2 (46:11):
Yeah, I get really better about it because, like it
was started because some anarchists were killed for being anarchists
in Chicago in eighteen eighty seven.

Speaker 3 (46:19):
I thought May Day was like this fun spring. I'm
an idiot.

Speaker 2 (46:26):
No, Noviously, you're also not wrong, right, So, like bell
Tane is like an old pagan tradition and it's like
a common thing I think across a lot of cultures.
And I think it's not a coincidence that there were
these like big protest marches in Chicago in eighteen eighties
on May Day, called for Mayday, called for May First,
and then the state broke them up with incredible violence

(46:49):
and a lot of people were killed and like they
were machine gunning crowds and things like that, or I
guess hand gunning crowds. And seven anarchists were put on
trial for the crime of being anarchists because they were
part of the labor movement fighting for the eight hour
work day at the time, and five of them were
killed by the state. And ever since they became the
Haymarket Martyrs, and May First has been celebrated as the

(47:12):
workers Holiday.

Speaker 3 (47:14):
Oh fascinating.

Speaker 2 (47:15):
Yeah, And it got really heavily recuperated by the communist governments, right,
and so it's the big Communist Day. And so in
Warsaw nineteen eighty one, there's the official communist march and
then there's the unofficial march, which is an anti government march,
and street fighting breaks out. There's a huge riot. Red

(47:36):
flags are being burned in the streets. People fought, the
cops laid into the night, and the major went home
to Vroutswaft to tell everyone what he'd seen about what
was possible and by June thirteenth, that city too broke
into rebellion. But if you want to hear about that rebellion,
and even more importantly, about when everyone starts dressing up

(47:56):
as dwarves and gnomes and elves and things, yes, wait
to Wednesday. Well you don't have to wait. You only
have to wait like five minutes. But everyone else has
to wait till Wednesday. It's the cruel fate of not
being the guest.

Speaker 3 (48:09):
Sorry, suckers.

Speaker 2 (48:11):
Yeah, but if people don't want to wait, is there
any other podcasts that they could listen to in the
meantime to tide them over?

Speaker 4 (48:19):
I don't know, maybe Private Parts Unknown You guys, I
released an encore edition of My Tokyo Happy Ending Massage recently,
so probably want to check that out. I'm also considering
maybe this is a really I'm a forty and I'm
thinking maybe now I'll have a kid, so I'm like

(48:41):
trying to figure that out on my podcast.

Speaker 1 (48:43):
So cool.

Speaker 3 (48:44):
So if you want to listen to like an incredibly
Confused old Woman, you can tune in for that.

Speaker 2 (48:52):
People get enough Confused Old Woman of my podcast, Maybe
there's another that this room for more Confused Old Women
podcast yeah.

Speaker 3 (49:00):
Margaret, I have to tell you so.

Speaker 4 (49:02):
I have been working on a manuscript, memoir, manuscript, and
I quoted you in my manuscript based on my last appearance.

Speaker 3 (49:12):
On the podcast.

Speaker 2 (49:13):
Oh yeah. People should also check out the last time
Courtney was on the podcast. We've talked about the history
of sex work in the West.

Speaker 4 (49:20):
Yeah, fascinating in your quotes about stolen valor brilliant. Anyway,
I wanted to tell you that I have no idea
what the quote was, but hopefully someday it gets published
and people can read it.

Speaker 2 (49:30):
Hell yeah, Sophie. Do we have any new podcasts here
on cool Zone Media.

Speaker 1 (49:36):
We do. We have our newest podcast called Weird Little Guys.
It's hosted by journalist Molly Conger. It's a weekly podcast.

Speaker 2 (49:43):
It's about gnomes.

Speaker 1 (49:44):
It's about gnomes.

Speaker 2 (49:45):
It's about the.

Speaker 1 (49:47):
The worst guys that you've never heard of that are
ruining our daily lives as we know it. And it's
it's a good time and Molly hosts it and Molly's
the best.

Speaker 2 (49:57):
Hell yeah, Well, that's it for us this week and
we will be back.

Speaker 4 (50:01):
Not this week.

Speaker 2 (50:02):
That's it for us today, but I released twice a
week so you can come back on Wednesday and hear
about how a bunch of people wearing red and then
orange hats brought down I keep being like they didn't
single handedly do it, but they were a huge part
of it, and it was really cool, and you are
going to actually really enjoy it, and I'll talk to

(50:22):
you soon May.

Speaker 1 (50:29):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.