Lenin with a Mohawk: Revolutionary Rhetoric, Symbols & Icons in Alternative Culture in 1980s Poland

Dariusz Paczkowski, "Lenin", flyer from the 80s, Association of Applied Graphic Designers, small, Dariusz Paczkowski, "Lenin", ulotka z lat 80., fot. Stowarzyszenie Twórców Grafiki Użytkowej

#performing arts

We are familiar with the iconic images of shipyard strikes and tanks imposing martial law that have come to define the 1980s in Poland, but they don't offer the full picture of the era. There were dwarves on the streets. Socialist Realism gussied up with sequins. Lenin with a mohawk. The alternative culture of the 1980s offered an irreverent vision of what might have been.

Polish historical debates in the 21st century about the last decade of the Polish People's Republic are focused on the role of the Solidarity union and dissident intellectuals in fights against the socialist regime. Historians, writers, and publicists are convinced that understanding of the dynamics of the conflict between Solidarity and the government is crucial for the adequate comprehension of what happened later, during the Round Table Talks in 1989 and the transition toward liberal democracy and free-market capitalism. Discussions about the divisions, conflicts (both ideological and personal), purposes, methods, and strategies of Solidarity, as well as searches for undercover agents and collaborators with secret services, are still at the centre of the political contests in contemporary Poland. Of course, those questions are important and need systematic, critical analysis. However, what is missing in such a discursive framing of social memory is the so-called 'third way' or 'the third circuit': the grass-roots alternative culture animated by radicalized youth, inspired by the myth of the May '68, the New Left, and neo-anarchism.

The critics and reformists from the 1960s, so-called 'revisionists' because of their unorthodox approach toward Marxism-Leninism, were, in fact, reproducing the ethos of Polish critical intelligentsia and aspiring to lead and shape the rest of the nation. As Michał Siermiński shows in his book Dekada Przełomu (The Decade of a Breakthrough), that inherited ethos caused young critical intellectuals who were inspired by Marxism but disillusioned by the nationalist and antisemitic politics of the Polish government in 1968, to gradually turn toward political and economic liberalism, or even conservatism, at the end in the 1980s and thus become the advocates of liberal democracy, free market, and unhampered capitalism.

The next generations that in the 1970s and 1980s created the alternative culture and radical art were, to a certain extent, the inheritors of that ethos and attitudes related to it. Nonetheless, some segments of those generations actively strove to differentiate themselves from the 'old' dissidents and oppositionists. They tried to create their own music, art, literature, theatre, lifestyles, fashion, political ideas, and forms of organization. The revolutionary symbols and rhetoric were part of their autonomous culture known as 'the third circuit' or 'the third way': neither official, state, bureaucratic, nor conservative, clerical, or nationalist. The third way was carried between the ruling socialist party and the opposition gathered around the Catholic Church and intellectual elites.

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'The Time of Mothers' (Czas Matek) by Teatr Ósmego Dnia, photo: Przemysław Graf

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Scena z przedstawienia, fot. Przemysław Graf

Old slogans for a new era

In 1970, the Theatre of the Eighth Day (Teatr Ósmego Dnia) became one of the loudest voices of the youth culture. Established in 1964 as a student theatre with counter-cultural inclinations, within a few years, the group had evolved into kind of an anarchist or leftist commune, and their style changed from poetical and symbolic to openly politically engaged. They strongly criticized the anthropological searching for the authenticity of transcultural rituals of Jerzy Grotowski's theatre, proving that the political function of Grotowski's experiments with actors' bodies and workshops with young people longing for spontaneity was to legitimize the political order. They claimed that Grotowski was a beneficiary of public donations and splendours and thus turned a blind eye to social injustices while offering audiences vague mysticism rather than a realistic image of socio-economic relations.

The polemics with the symbolic and anthropological attitudes among the alternative theatres' movement were a clear signal of the political direction of the Theatre of the Eighth Day. The group found 'authenticity' not in the ancient roots of rituals, but in the everyday life of Polish citizens. The theatre staged performances about the shortages of food and other products in shops and exposed the falsehood of the state propaganda. In political conflicts, especially workers' strikes, the group took the side of the working class against ruling bureaucracy. In performance, the group often used socialist symbols, such as red flags, banners, and slogans, to show the emptiness hidden under the progressive and humanist statements or declaration of economic advancement. Examples of this critique are evident in the shows Sale for Everyone (Przecena dla Wszystkich) from 1977 and Poetry Toward the Streets (Poezja na Ulice) from 1978.

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'Europe' performance-action by the Akademia Ruchu, November 1976, Warsaw, photo: Stefan Okołowicz, © Akademia Ruchu

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Akademia Ruchu, ação performática "Europa", Novembro de 1976, Varsóvia, Foto de Stefan Okołowicz, © Akademia Ruchu

The Theatre of the Eighth Day denounced the systematic exploitation of workers and failures of social policy from the left side. The performers created a counter-cultural community and were under the influence of Western neo-anarchism and the New Left. In memories from that time, they recall posters of the West German Baader-Meinhof Group on the walls and excitement about the Italian Red Brigades and Che Guevara actions. Due to that radical left stance, the usage of socialist platitudes by the Theatre of the Eighth Day was ambiguous: from one side it was a refutation of the official propaganda; from the other, a reminder of socialist principles.

Another alternative theatre, the Academy of Movement from Warsaw, shared a similar attitude as the Theatre of the Eight Day. In 1976, the Academy of Movement created the performance Europe (Europa), which took place in public space. This spectacle was based on the futurist poem Europe by communist poet Anatol Stern from 1929. Members of the Academy of Movement ran through the streets with banners with words of the poem, illuminated by the headlights of cars and accompanied by noise from the klaxons. The show was controversial, as it reminded the government of its forgotten social principles.

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'Pass Me a Brick' by Aleksander Kobzdej, 1950, oil on canvas, 133x162 cm, photo: National Museum in Wrocław

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What in the 1970s was an eccentric fascination cultivated by performers from an alternative theatre, by 1981 had made its way into mainstream pop-culture. Izabela Trojanowska, a popular actress and pop-rock singer, already famous for her defiant image, both seductive and merciless, performed on the stage of the National Festival of Polish Song in Opole, the most important and reputable music festival in the Polish People's Republic. Trojanowska performed The Song of the Brick (Pieśń o Cegle), which was an obvious reference to the iconic socialist realist painting Pass Me a Brick (Podaj Cegłę) by Aleksander Kobzdej from 1950. The song was a pastiche of socialist realist poetry and party slogans calling for hard work. In 1981, when the Polish economy was falling into recession and the working class organized itself in the Solidarity union to fight for social and economic rights, the meaning of such a song had to be understood as a sarcastic joke of the previous propaganda of success. But that comprehension was possible only with consideration of the socio-political context. Literally, there was nothing ironic in the words of The Song of the Brick.

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Izabela Trojanowska at the Opole Song Festival, 1981, photo: Krzysztof Świderski / PAP

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The same ambiguity marked Trojanowska's performance. Her costume was based on the outfit of the Union of Polish Youth (Związek Młodzieży Polskiej), the Stalinist mass youth organization that existed from 1948 to 1956, similar to the Komsomol (the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League). But on Trojanowska, the characteristic red necktie was visibly exaggerated, as were her shoulder pads covered with sequins. During the whole song, she performed the typical gesture of passing on the brick from one bricklayer to another. The guitarist from the band Stalowy Bagaż (Steel Baggage), who accompanied Trojanowska, was wearing a futurist red suit. The choreography was completed by two naked athletes standing on the corners of the scene with bricks in hand (which they used to cover their more private parts). The astonishing performance procured much commentary in the popular press, ranging from enthusiastic to disgusted and even irritated. Was Trojanowska simply mocking the government, or did she seek to reassert socialist realist poetics into contemporary popular culture? Nowadays she is one of a few LGBTQ icons in Poland.

A colourful alternative

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The 'LUXUS' Group's first zine, 1982, photo: Museum of Modern Art in Wrocław

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The peak of the popularity of socialist, especially Soviet, symbols occurred in the second half of the 1980s, when alternative youth appropriated these visual elements as a part of the new popular culture. After the explosion at the nuclear plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine in April 1986, two Polish underground artists, Waldemar Fydrych and Piotr Gusta, started producing anti-nuclear posters. Fydrych was previously one of the leaders of the New Culture Movement, a student organization affiliated with Wrocław University that participated in the students' strike and buildings' occupation in autumn 1981, just before the imposition of martial law in December 1981. The New Culture Movement was a radical group of hippies and bohemians politically inspired by the New Left, neo-anarchism, and situationism. Piotr Gusta was a member of an art group called Luxus, a collective of young artists who combined in their works neo-expressionist dynamic style, neo-dadaist sense of humour, and images of popular brands and idols. Together, Fydrych and Gusta prepared posters parodying the state propaganda. Slogans about 'The Nuclear Cavalry' or 'Scientific and technological revolution' were put beside symbols of the red star or hammer and sickle. The message was clear: the official statements and images were empty. In the following years, Fydrych managed to fill this emptiness with a new sense, giving a second life to the symbols that were discredited in the eyes of many.

In 1987, Fydrych and his colleagues began organizing street happenings in Wrocław. Around these happenings, from the milieu of hippies, young artists, and students of humanities, the Orange Alternative movement was formed. The happenings very quickly became popular among high school students, punks, and Rastafarian groups. The term 'happening' was used to underline the artistic value of the events, because the police did not brutally assault such non-political gatherings. However, the typical Orange Alternative happening was a combination of a political demonstration, rock concert, street party, guerrilla theatre, and innocent cosplay. We might think of their happenings as an example of the 'Temporary Autonomous Zone' conceptualized by Hakim Bey. It was an informal, non-hierarchical, and joyful meeting of people from different social groups, a moment of liberating imagination and creativity, a celebration of communication not mediated by images. Of course, that was the intention of happenings' organisers. Behind the scenes there were hidden rules, leaders, and even tight scripts. There were also a lot of social and political issues at play in spite of the happenings’ declared artistic character; from the shortages of basic products such as toilet paper to undemocratic and militaristic features of the state, to global peace and ecology.

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Waldemar "Major" Fydrych during an Orange Alternative performative happening called 'Only Dwarfs Will Heal Poland', 2009, Warszawa, photo: Robert Kowalewski / AG

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Waldemar "Major" Fydrych podczas happeningu Pomarańczowej Alternatywy "Tylko krasnoludki uzdrowią polską", 2009, Warszawa, fot. Robert Kowalewski / AG

About Orange Alternative, sociologist Bronisław Misztal wrote:

'It constitutes a form of building up the social experience through a process of a spontaneous spectacle, being at that itself a response to the official spectacle that dominates the public life, holding some sort of power over minds and desires of the masses: workers, officials, students, and pupils’.

Misztal interpreted the Orange Alternative phenomenon as a counterbalance to the 'dead seriousness' of the public life in Poland and an antidote to the false dignity of the political spectacles. 'Compared to such mainframe political action', wrote Misztal, contrasting Orange Alternative to the Workers' Defence Committee, 'the Orange Alternative was certainly an anti-movement; it was a sui generis alternative to the dominant ideology of the system, and equally, to the dominant modus operandi of the opposition'. Misztal called the Orange Alternative 'the Polish version of situationism', struggling with the mass disillusionment with socialist ideas in Poland on the one hand, and the black or white perspective of the Solidarity union on the other. From the autho'’s point of view, the Orange Alternative was an alter-socialist movement which 'offered a liberalizing experience, freeing young generations of the messianism, mysticism and religious nationalism so much present in the trade union movement'.

Playful revolutionaries

It was significant that the neo-anarchist or alter-socialist happenings movement achieved its popularity among youngsters with the adaptation of the revolutionary rhetoric and symbols to its own goals. Organizers of the happenings encouraged people to put on costumes of dwarfs with red hats, arguing that the Red Army soldiers were wearing red hats as well, and moreover dwarfs in fairy tales used to perform hard, physical jobs, just like the contemporary working class. By this same logic, Santa Claus was described as a communist because of his red suit and egalitarian attitude. The Orange Alternative celebrated official socialist holidays, such as Militia Day and Army Day. For example, during Militia Day, on 7th October 1987, performers gave flowers to police officers and 'helped' them by guiding traffic. As Fydrych wrote in his memoirs, 'They began to observe the lights, direct the movements of pedestrians, and whistled at people who broke the traffic laws and chased them. When the lights changed, they sounded a gong. When they were green a kettle drum was used to help pedestrian traffic. Then the lights turned red. Someone began crossing the road and then ran back in a panic. They were given an honorary fine'. Army Day was celebrated by manoeuvres in which performers in a cardboard paper tank with an inscription 'The Warsaw Pact – Vanguard of Peace' arrived on the main street of Wrocław.

One of the most outstanding happenings, the Eve of October Revolution, took place on 6th November 1987, the day before the official celebrations of the Anniversary of the Great Socialist October Revolution. The Council of the People's Commissaires of the Orange Alternative, as the performers called themselves, published a handout in which they urged people to dress in red and take to the streets to joyfully praise the revolution. 'Let us meet Comrades in the reunion celebrating the revolution!!! Let the ideas of Lenin and Trotsky be alive forever!!!', the handout encouraged. The event was announced by posters featuring familiar symbols – the hammer and sickle, a red star, and an image of Lenin. The police, of course, knew about the plan and were prepared to cease the event and arrest its main actors. However, the blockade of the street set up by the police resulted in the gathering of a crowd of passers-by at the place of the happening, which was paradoxically an advantage for the performers. They were split into a few groups, each wearing different historical uniforms: sailors from Kronstadt; the Red Guard; the Red Cavalry; and Cossacks. Their 'manoeuvres' on the streets provoked the policemen, who chased and seized Orange Alternative members, as well as random bystanders in the resulting confusion and disorder. The rejoicing crowd kept shouting, 'Revolution! Revolution', while police officers called, 'Catch the Red!'.

One year later, the Orange Alternative in Wrocław and Warsaw organized the Revolution Days on 6th and 7th November 1988. In both cities, the events were based on the appropriation of the communist iconography. The Red March in Wrocław gathered several thousand people enthusiastically celebrating the anniversary of the revolution. There were portraits of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, red flags, and banners with slogans: 'We don't allow a divorce with the neighbours from the East', 'Long live Lenin!', and 'Dwarfs of the world unite!'. In Warsaw, Orange Alternative staged the happening The Revue of Soc-Fashion, for which organizers urged participants to prepare their outfits with the inspiration of milk bars, harvests of colza, and other stereotypical images from the East Bloc countries. They combined the image of Lenin with a bottle of Coca-Cola – a mixture of official ideology and desired commodity.

Ironic icons & unexpected allies

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'Who is Afraid of Toilet Paper?' performative action, Wrocław, 1 & 15 October 1987, photo: M. Michalak

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Akacja "Kto się boi papieru toaletowego", Wrocław, 1 i 15 października 1987, fot. M. Michalak

Posters and graffiti were used by Orange Alternative activists to spread the message about their happenings. This type of medium was very popular among youngsters in the late 1980s, when spray paint became relatively inexpensive and one could easily go on the street and paint something on the wall. Political, pro-democratic, and anti-communist slogans painted by members of Solidarity and other opposition groups were a common sight on the streets. Against this backdrop, the young graffiti artists created new, amusing pictures. They'd had enough of serious criticism of the Party, the government, and the army. What they proposed was a subversive change from negation to affirmation. Thus, they painted slogans praising communist heroes, such as 'Lenin be with you!', 'General Jaruzelski – the father of the nation', 'Militia – this is it!', 'I am with you, Lenin', 'Communists are the masters', 'Get off the General!', 'Polish United Workers' Party fights', 'We apologize Comrade Edward Gierek!', 'Communism is the hope for the world!', and even 'We want freedom without solidarity!'. They depicted Wojciech Jaruzelski, the present head of the party, as Superman, Lenin with a skateboard, Lenin in a punk leather jacket, and finally, Lenin with a mohawk. The author of that last famous picture was Dariusz Paczkowski, the antifascist and animal rights activist. He remembered that the image of Lenin with a mohawk had lived its own life. It was on walls, on posters, on jackets, on punk cassettes, and on pages of fanzines. Just as if Lenin was a punk icon.

In such a context, the use of socialist slogans, pictures, and signs in the happenings was not merely an anti-communist statement of the youth. It was really ambiguous. Firstly, it was explicit evidence that the young generation was familiar with pictures and monuments of Lenin, Stalin, and Polish communist leaders, such as Bierut, Dzierżyński, or Jaruzelski. Red stars, hammers and sickles, and red flags became a common part of the visual space of Polish cities. Stories about the October Revolution, Battleship Potemkin, cruiser Aurora, Kronstadt rebellion, and Trotsky's expulsion from the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, returned not only as well-known narratives, but also elements of the social imaginary.

Secondly, the adaptation of the emblems of the revolution was not only parodic, it also created a new pop culture language in the socialist state, mixing Party slogans with advertisements and lyrics of pop songs. In the alternative culture of the late 1980s, historical revolutionaries such as Vladimir Lenin and Ernesto Che Guevara, as well as popular heroes such as Bruce Lee and Marylin Monroe, or even Mickey Mouse, had the same status – and mostly positive connotations. Thirdly, the Orange Alternative Movement, particularly, and the alternative culture, generally, used these figures, symbols, and rhetorics to laugh at both the more and more nationalist and reactionary Polish United Workers' Party and the clerical, conservative, and moderate Solidarity union. Participants of the alternative culture endeavoured to mock both ideological blocks within dominant social groups and the very social order founded on this symbolic division.

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Major Fydrych's presidential campaign, Wrocław 1989, photo: M. Michalak

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Kampania wyborcza Majora Fydrycha, Wrocław 1989, fot. M. Michalak

It is worth mentioning that some participants of the Orange Alternative were in fact members of Solidarity. That was the case of Józef Pinior, who was a leader of Solidarity of the Lower Silesia region and a member of the national management of the union. From 1987, Pinior participated in Orange Alternative happenings and represented the movement in the foreign media as one of its Council of the People's Commissaires. It was Pinior who popularized the name 'Orange Alternative' in the media. Ideologically, Pinior was a Trotskyist; in 1987 he was in a democratic socialist group that renewed Polish Socialist Party on the basis of the left wing of Solidarity. When Pinior engaged himself in Polish Socialist Party activity, Fydrych reacted by announcing the revival of the Polish Workers' Party. Historically, the Polish Socialist Party was a pre-war social democratic party focused on Polish independence. After the war, it merged with the communist Polish Workers' Party, bringing about Polish United Workers’ Party, the ruling party in the Polish People’s Republic till 1989. Fydrych, together with another performer, Krzysztof Albin, began publishing Polish Workers’ Party papers and leaflets with revolutionist expressions, and painting on the streets the graffiti 'PPR' (the acronym of the name of the party). Within the Orange Alternative milieu, everybody knew that it was a prank and Fydrych and Pinior remained colleagues; but from both the secret service and Solidarity point of view, it was an act of political hooliganism. But was all that jazz only a play inside a relatively small group of young artists, activists, students, punks, and hippies?

Familiar faces in a new struggle

The following years brought about the political radicalization of the youth in groups of anarchists, Trotskyists, democratic socialists, ecologists, and pacifists. Many young people considered the transition from state socialism to free-market capitalism critically. The Gallery of Maniacal Activities established in Łódź by Krzysztof Skiba as an informal local branch of the Orange Alternative was extremely critical of the round table talks and the first neoliberal economic reforms that were initiated by the government of Mieczysław F. Rakowski in the late 1980s. Happenings performed by the Gallery of Maniacal Activities were different from the Orange Alternative events in Wrocław; they were much more like guerrilla theatre than carnivalized pageants. While happenings in Wrocław were close to Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of the carnivalesque in their excessive, anti-authority inversion of social hierarchies, the events in Łódź were political acts of disapproval over the agreement between elites of the Party and Solidarity. The Gallery caricatured the Round Table Talks and exposed the increasing poverty of Polish society that was hidden beneath the refinement of those in power.

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The unveiling of the statue of Bolesław Bierut in Lublin, 1979, photo: Leszek Łożyński / PAP

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Probably the most notorious show performed by Orange Alternative took place in Lublin just after Solidarity leaders had taken over the power in the country. The political transition, defined by Fydrych as 'going from a cheerful dictatorship to a sad democracy', had an impact on public spaces; new private enterprises began to spread their advertisements and the new authorities introduced the process of 'de-communization', for example changing the names of the streets, squares, schools, factories, and public institutions. In the beginning of 1990, the new authorities from the Solidarity, elected in the free, democratic vote in Lublin, decided to remove the statue of Bolesław Bierut, the Stalinist president of the People's Republic of Poland in the 1950s. Bierut was condemned for a 'totalitarian' reign of terror. The reaction of the Orange Alternative in Lublin, this time under the name of Polish Political Party, was fast and amusing. The underground artists built a new, wooden monument of Bierut, and placed it in the same location as the original statue. Moreover, Małgorzata Bierut, the granddaughter of the communist leader, participated in the unveiling ceremony. Such an event was shocking for both citizens and city hall, and the new statue of Bierut was soon destroyed. The happening was a blunt act of the youth resistance against the new government and new elites.

Unlike the right side of the so-called youth opposition, groups such as Polish Socialist Party, Anarchist Intercity Federation, Lublin's Autonomous League of Anarchists, Alternative Society Movement, Orange Alternative, Federative Workers' Union 'Freedom', A-Cyclists, and many others, mostly representing the anarchist-ecological orientation, strove to stop the transition toward free-market capitalism and bourgeois democracy. They attempted to bring about a new wave of revolution and to push Solidarity's liberal elites back from the power. Their vision of the political change was anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, and anti-nationalist. Not parliamentary democracy, but direct democracy. Not privatization of enterprises, but workers' self-governance. In that attempt, the radical left youth once again used rhetoric, symbols, and icons derived from a revolutionary vocabulary and iconography. Publicly overthrown heroes and exorcised symbols returned as powerful images of the unclean. Bierut came back to the main city square, sailors from Kronstadt provided a model of a social resistance, and Lenin with a mohawk appeared with students on strike. Of course, the imaginary anarchist revolt had never happened in Poland, but it is worth remembering the utopian idea of a combination of the radical style of the artistic underground with radical politics of revolutionary leftist movements.

Written by Xawery Stańczyk, 4 Oct 2017

Xawery Stańczyk is an assistant professor in the Institute of Polish Culture at Warsaw University and in the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at Polish Academy of Sciences. He received his PhD from the Faculty of Polish Studies at Warsaw University in 2015 for a thesis about alternative culture in Poland in the years 1978-1996. He published papers in many Polish academic and popular journals and co-edited an urban studies anthology, Miasto na Żądanie: Aktywizm, Polityki Miejskie, Doświadczenia (City on Demand: Activism, Urban Politics and Experience, 2013).

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