SPEAKER_04: Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel.com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace.com slash invisible for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In the months following the invasion of Ukraine, this one piece of graffiti started popping up on walls in cities across Russia. Eight asterisks written out all in a row. Eight asterisks instead of the phrase no war. In Russian it's eight letters.
SPEAKER_10: Alexandra Arhipova is a Russian anthropologist. She's been documenting different forms of protest happening inside Russia.
SPEAKER_04: Today Russians can face years in prison if they're caught speaking out against the war. In Russia you cannot say war. It's forbidden. It's absolutely forbidden.
SPEAKER_10: And so people are using symbols like the asterisks instead.
SPEAKER_04: It's coded language which people are trying to hide their messages in some innocent form to pretend that they're saying some innocent things.
SPEAKER_10: But in reality they're not. And those innocent looking codes are evolving fast.
SPEAKER_07: Take for example the image of a fish that started to appear across Russia.
SPEAKER_04: That's reporter Sophie Cotner.
SPEAKER_07: Back in September a woman in Russia wrote out the Russian word for no in chalk in the street. But then instead of writing out the Russian word for war, voinya, she wrote just the first and last letters of the Russian word with asterisks in between. Russian authorities had caught on to the asterisk thing by this point, so the woman was detained by police and tried in court.
SPEAKER_04: At the hearing she told the judge that the asterisk didn't represent the letters in the word war, but rather another word that's spelled almost exactly the same way.
SPEAKER_07: She told to the judge that it means no war. It means no war.
SPEAKER_10: And it's a special type of fish. The judge asked her why she wrote it. She said, I hate, I just hate fish. I can't stand the smell of fish. I hate fish. The judge let her go. And because it was kind of a funny excuse, the story was picked up by the media and spread around the country.
SPEAKER_10: And after that, there is a lot of jokes and graffiti with the symbol of fish. And now the image of fish, the picture of fish means no war.
SPEAKER_04: As the restrictions on language and demonstrations in Russia have gotten more and more draconian, the dissent has gotten more and more outrageous.
SPEAKER_10: They are coming to the very strange paradox. The situation became much more terrible and the signs of protest became funnier and funnier. That's why in the very dark moments, the level of humor, political humor is going up, up and up.
SPEAKER_07: This kind of cunning protest art makes for a good story. It shows how creative and resilient people can be in the face of political repression. It can be hard to gauge its real world impact. Painting a fish on the side of a wall probably isn't going to bring down the regime.
SPEAKER_04: But there is an example from Soviet history of a time when art and humor actually made a massive difference in the trajectory of a different country. Poland.
SPEAKER_07: In the 1980s, a Polish anti-communist group called the Orange Alternative also used a seemingly random symbol to spread its message, a mythical creature with a tiny pointed hat. And that innocent image amplified a powerful political message to the world, which ultimately contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union.
SPEAKER_02: The Orange Alternative was started by a man named Voldemort Frederick or Meyer, as he's called.
SPEAKER_04: Meyer is an artist with an eccentric reputation. I was in Europe this past summer and so I decided to pay him a visit.
SPEAKER_07: Hello. Nice to meet you. So nice to meet you. Thank you so much for having us. Meyer lives with his partner Agnieszka and their dogs in a cabin in the Polish countryside. I'm there in August and yellow flowers shoot up from the ground. We're close to a river and everywhere smells damp and fresh.
SPEAKER_09: Hello. I am Voldemort Frederick. I made the graffiti before Banksy.
SPEAKER_07: Meyer is in his late 60s. He has long white hair that's parted on the side and sits loosely on his shoulders. He speaks slowly, even in Polish, and his canvases are all over the cabin, filled with brightly colored abstract shapes. You paint with oil? No, this is acrylic. I'm going to bake bread now. Agnieszka puts a loaf of bread in the oven.
SPEAKER_07: She's making soup for dinner with mushrooms she foraged earlier in the day. I interviewed Meyer and Agnieszka too, with Agnieszka translating for Meyer as closely as possible.
SPEAKER_09: I was a little bit disappointed. I saw that I was not able to see the whole world.
SPEAKER_02: In the 1980s, he was like most of the Poles. He was for freedom.
SPEAKER_09: He was a strong supporter of peace.
SPEAKER_09: And I looked like a hippie.
SPEAKER_04: At the time, Poland was one of many Eastern European countries aligned with the Communist Soviet Union, which was in the throes of an economic crisis.
SPEAKER_02: We were under stress of poverty. I remember very well when I was a child. I had to wait six hours to buy bread. This was normal.
SPEAKER_04: In the early 1980s, Poland's government raised the price of food and other goods, but they didn't increase wages to match those price hikes, and so people couldn't afford their basic needs.
SPEAKER_01: It is the quintessential factor that people must remember is that before it turned into any kind of serious movement, it was just people wanting milk.
SPEAKER_07: Lisa Romanenko is a Polish-American sociologist. She's written about the tactics of the orange alternative.
SPEAKER_01: And of all the things the communist regime should have never done, they cut the vodka supply. And they really sent the movement in a frenzy. A labor movement took off under the name Solidarity.
SPEAKER_07: It was led by shipyard workers, and it was the first independent labor union in a Soviet-bloc country. And millions of Polish people supported it.
SPEAKER_01: People were having a backlash. They didn't necessarily want democracy, but they just wanted food, they wanted freedom, they wanted to be able to dress, they wanted expression of the arts. And once you take away vodka and children's food, there was nothing to live for. So people became very, very powerful, very courageous, and always on the streets.
SPEAKER_09: But the communist regime responded swiftly, placing the whole country under martial law in 1981.
SPEAKER_04: The armed forces now rule in Poland with martial law and the threat of execution for those who break it.
SPEAKER_04: The media became heavily censored, curfews were put into place, and everyday movement was restricted. And during this time, under martial law, people would leave graffiti with messages supporting Solidarity on walls around Poland, including in the city of Wrocław, where Meyer lived.
SPEAKER_07: Most of the graffiti in Poland at the time was written. It was just written slogans.
SPEAKER_02: But, what kind of graffiti does communism have?
SPEAKER_09: So for example, away with communism.
SPEAKER_02: Solidarity in struggle will win.
SPEAKER_02: But these slogans wouldn't last very long.
SPEAKER_02: And then as soon as they were written, the authorities would come with a fresh bucket of paint and just cover them up so you would have all these paint spots all over. Meyer grew fascinated with these paint spots. He was an undergraduate art history student at the time, and he was really into surrealism, which is all about using your irrational, unconscious mind, liberating yourself from the boundaries of reality.
SPEAKER_02: And some of those spots were very interesting from the artistic point of view. Yeah, I think that's why I was interested in the painting.
SPEAKER_02: So they intrigued him and he was wondering what he could do with them artistically.
SPEAKER_07: So Meyer turned to a traditional source of artistic inspiration. He smoked a joint and then passed out in public.
SPEAKER_02: He was high and he just fell asleep on a piece of grass by the sidewalk.
SPEAKER_07: He fell asleep next to a children's theater, and when he woke up, he saw a man in costume.
SPEAKER_02: The man was dressed as a dwarf.
SPEAKER_09: I was holding a bottle of beer in his hand.
SPEAKER_02: He was dressed as a dwarf.
SPEAKER_09: And then he had this enlightenment that, you know, that's exactly what he should be drawing on those splashes on those spots.
SPEAKER_02: So Meyer decided to paint a stick figure dwarf with a little pointed hat.
SPEAKER_07: Instead of the beer, he put a flower in its hand. Tell me more about why a dwarf?
SPEAKER_09: Because he was high, because he woke up, because he saw this surreal image of this dwarf with a bottle in his hand.
SPEAKER_02: That's a feeling he had. It was a feeling. It's not making enough conscious effort to make a certain way. It's just following your, your guts.
SPEAKER_04: In Polish, the word for this dwarf elf gnome-like mythical creature is krasnoludik, and they are a big part of Polish folklore, especially children's tales. They're less like the dwarves from The Lord of the Rings and more like the borrowers, like little spirits who live in your house and cause mischief. So for example, we have sayings, zrobiwitow krasnoludki, you know, little dwarves did it.
SPEAKER_02: For example, somebody, you know, did something wrong, and he says, it's not me. Oh, no, it's the little dwarves that did it, you know. And then we have the song, me jesteszme krasnoludki, we are the dwarves.
SPEAKER_07: Can you sing it?
SPEAKER_02: Oh, you don't want me to? Okay, I'll sing for you just the first line. Me jesteszme krasnoludki hopza-za, hopza-za, bodgrypka minashe budgi hopza-hopza-za. Okay, that's an additional instrumental. Me jesteszme krasnoludki hopza-za, hopza-za, bodgrypka minashe budgi hopza-za.
SPEAKER_07: So Meyer and some of his artist friends started painting dwarves on walls all around Wroclaw. They had to be careful because the city was still under martial law, so they would do it secretly at night.
SPEAKER_04: And the result was a surreal stack of images painted over each other. First you had the original solidarity slogan, then a layer of paint that the authorities had used to cover up that message. And then those blotches of fresh paint became the perfect canvas for Meyer and his friends to paint a jolly little dwarf.
SPEAKER_07: The orange alternative painted hundreds of these dwarves in cities across Poland. And the silly images resonated with Polish people, in part because they broke through the monotony of martial law.
SPEAKER_02: Because nothing was appearing during the martial law and suddenly something would appear that is new that was already a great idea by itself.
SPEAKER_04: After about a year and a half of martial law, the Polish government had regained some control over the country. Thousands of solidarity activists had been arrested and many remained in jail. Meanwhile, outside of Poland, international pressure was mounting. Sanctions put in place by the United States were hurting the Polish economy. And in July of 1983, martial law was officially lifted.
SPEAKER_01: I actually got on a plane with my father two days after martial law was lifted and experienced Poland as close to having lived through the hell as any future scholar could have been. Lisa Romanenko again.
SPEAKER_07: I had my own personal soldier with a gun pointed at me and following me the day I arrived in
SPEAKER_01: Warsaw. So although I was a teenager, you know, just to be able to see what the aftermath of what the worst of the times that people were living under.
SPEAKER_07: Even though martial law had been lifted, political repression went on. And so anti-communist groups continued to organize underground.
SPEAKER_04: The Solidarity Labor Movement was allied closely with the Catholic Church and had the support of the pope.
SPEAKER_07: Which was a problem for Meyer and his artist friends. They supported solidarity, but they also wanted to distance themselves from the Catholic Church.
SPEAKER_01: Being artists, they said, well, we have to be in between Vatican yellow and communist red and the color we must focus on is the blend of yellow and the red, which is orange.
SPEAKER_07: And so the orange alternative was born.
SPEAKER_04: The artists in the orange alternative were anti-authoritarian and advocates for free expression. They published a satirical political magazine and began staging ridiculous demonstrations that they called happenings. They took the dwarf graffiti, which by then had popped up all over Poland and brought it to life in the real world.
SPEAKER_01: Everybody put on an orange elf hat and an orange scarf and pranced and danced through the streets like there was no tomorrow.
SPEAKER_07: Since they couldn't advocate for their own rights, they would stage skits and sing songs that advocated for the rights of the Krasnoludek.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, when you looked at the videos and the footage from back in those days and you see tanks rolling through the streets like you saw in Tiananmen Square, and rather than a guy holding his supermarket bags, you see people donning orange caps and orange capes, large, large groups of orange elves. So wherever those tanks were going, they had to keep stopping because these elves were just dancing.
SPEAKER_04: And it just cracked people up at a time when they really needed it.
SPEAKER_01: Spontaneous laughter was so hard to come by and that these artists and performers were trying so hard to get people to laugh.
SPEAKER_07: But the orange alternative provided more than just comic relief. They also started handing out basic goods that were in short supply in Poland. At their happenings, they would give out things like toilet paper and tampons. They had boxes and boxes of sanitary protection.
SPEAKER_01: They really had their finger on the pulse of what the people really wanted. So if you showed up at a happening, you were going to walk away with something that was really crucial for your family's safety. And they were brilliant in that way.
SPEAKER_07: The police didn't treat the orange alternative lightly. There were many arrests. But the cops also didn't really know what to make of these artists in costumes handing out tampons. Once after Maia was arrested, he was sitting in the back of a police car and he heard the officer up front call for backup. Like, hey, there are a bunch of dwarves running around down here.
SPEAKER_02: And the other guy responded, are you drunk? What dwarves? Basically, the police also started talking about them as dwarves, you know, not men dressed as dwarves, but as dwarves. And that's what made it really, you know, even more interesting.
SPEAKER_07: It made a joke of the police and showed everyone just how absurd the situation they were living in had become. In the realistic situations, you know, have, you know, people, police running around after
SPEAKER_02: dwarves, you know, and I mean, come on, that's just so surrealistic. People even policemen, they understand, they participate in something, you know, completely goofy.
SPEAKER_01: And it was even absurd to your, you know, your typical communist. So the soldiers were laughing, the tank drivers were laughing. And even, you know, Moscow had to be like chuckling.
SPEAKER_02: And what I like about the orange alternative is that it's very peaceful because the force meets vacuum. If you are the force meets another force, you have a conflict. But if the force meets vacuum, the force dissipates. And that's what orange alternative is for me.
SPEAKER_04: By 1988, Poland was alive with revolution. The Solidarity Labor movement was holding mass demonstrations, and the orange alternatives happenings grew huge. They spread to cities across Poland, including Warsaw and Lotz. Thousands of people would gather to chant dwarves, dwarves, dwarves.
SPEAKER_02: By bringing the militia to the point of ridicule, basically people started losing fear of militia. And that allowed the people, that freed them, to do things in the streets that they wanted to do and to, for example, come to happenings with their own ideas, you know, they stopped being afraid. So it broke the fear. You cannot be afraid of things that are ridiculous and funny. Unless you're a politician. No, you're very afraid.
SPEAKER_07: As all this was happening, a growing sense of patriotism was percolating in Poland, a sense that Polish people had their own identity separate from the Soviet Union. And the Krasnoludek played a role. They were these distinctly Polish characters from Polish fairy tales.
SPEAKER_01: And the orange alternative understood that it was between Polish people in the military, Polish leaders of the communist government, Polish artists, Polish steel workers. This was a conversation between us that we had to have.
SPEAKER_07: And as that Polish identity was growing stronger, the end of communism was getting closer and closer.
SPEAKER_04: By the late 1980s, people all over Central and Eastern Europe were taking to the streets and demanding freedom and democratic reforms. The Soviet Union was losing its grip on the people.
SPEAKER_00: Poland today came one step closer to becoming the first East Bloc country not led by communists in more than 40 years. President Jaruzelski formally...
SPEAKER_04: In 1989, facing pressure from the public, Poland's government agreed to hold parliamentary elections. When the votes were counted, leaders of the Solidarity Labor Movement won out over the communists. socialism fell in Poland, and it led to a domino effect that ended up taking down the entire Soviet Union.
SPEAKER_07: It's hard to say exactly how important the artists of the orange alternative were to Poland peacefully winning its independence. But Lisa gives them a lot of credit. I would attribute the successes of the entire revolution and the entire lack of bloodshed,
SPEAKER_01: which could have been much worse than it was to the amazing brilliance of Meyer and the orange alternative.
SPEAKER_06: With any type of resistance or nonconformity, it's easy to dismiss it as silly and trivial.
SPEAKER_07: Joy Neumeier is a historian who studies Russia in Eastern Europe.
SPEAKER_06: Or on the other hand, it's easy to lionize it as bold, as consequential as bringing down the regime one little figure at a time. And I think the truth is very much somewhere in between.
SPEAKER_07: Joy recently wrote about a protest movement happening in Russia now, which some people have compared to the orange alternative. It's called the little picketers.
SPEAKER_06: The first time I came across the little picketers was actually in a photo in a Polish newspaper. And the author of that article made the comparison to orange alternative. Oh, like this looks a little bit like those wars from Wrocław in the 80s.
SPEAKER_04: The little picketers are small clay figurines about the size of the palm of your hand that are placed throughout Russian cities. They're cute and silly and colorful.
SPEAKER_06: In Russian, it's called molin kipikiat, which means little protest. So yeah, they are miniature protesters.
SPEAKER_04: Some of them hold peace signs or Ukrainian flags or anti-war messages. One of them is pictured holding a fish. It's easy for anyone to get some clay and make a little picketer and then discreetly drop it off in a public space without anyone else noticing. They usually get thrown away pretty quickly by Russian authorities. But before that happens, a photo is taken and submitted to an Instagram account.
SPEAKER_07: Joy likes the little picketers in part because of how different they look from the imagery coming out of the regime.
SPEAKER_04: The most prominent pro-war symbol in Russia right now is the Z. You'll see these big aggressive Zs spray painted on tanks and cars. They look intimidating and warlike.
SPEAKER_07: And the little picketers just feel like the opposite, which is in itself subversive.
SPEAKER_06: This idea of trying to create something in contrast to the dominant reality around you which can seem hegemonic and overwhelming. Trying to create little strange things that are at odds with that dominant reality and that point to some kind of other possibilities or other ideas or other ways of acting or being in the world other than what the state wants you to do and think.
SPEAKER_07: I spoke to the creator of the little picketers who will keep anonymous for safety reasons. He said he sometimes hears criticism that Russians aren't doing enough to protest the war.
SPEAKER_11: And that's the position of critic Russian people. You are just viewers. You didn't do anything. Why don't you go out on the streets and demonstrate? Of course, yeah, a great idea.
SPEAKER_07: He worries that even talking about the war inside his own home could get him arrested and thrown in jail.
SPEAKER_11: I feel very paranoid and started to hearing voices behind the walls of my neighbors. And that was the paranoid which I shared with very, very huge amount of different of all Russians. I know that your neighbors can call to police anytime. It's very scary thing.
SPEAKER_07: But despite this constant fear and anxiety, he still feels compelled to do something. He thinks a lot of Russians do, which is why he created the little picketers.
SPEAKER_11: For Russian people, I think it's a training machine mostly. To feel yourself, feel your muscle of protest. To therapy yourself. Yeah, I did it. It's not important, but it's important. It's important because it's not so important. It's daily routine. In another way, protest is to feel who are you? Can you do this? It's funny. And that's funny because can I do this small thing? Of course I can.
SPEAKER_07: The little picketers are one of a number of ways that some people inside Russia are using play and humor to express their dissent against a very serious brutal war, a war that's already killed tens of thousands. If nothing else, these small actions offer self-preservation, like a way to save your own soul.
SPEAKER_04: And you never know, sometimes a silly little symbol catches on.
SPEAKER_04: Sophie Cautner goes hunting for dwarves after this. Some folks choose to take it as the foundation of a healthy breakfast or lunch, while others lean on it as a delicious protein-packed snack to curb cravings and reduce grazing. If you're in a hurry, you can just add two scoops of Kachava Superblend to ice water or your favorite milk or milk alternative and just get going. But I personally like to blend it with greens and fruit and ice. Treat yourself nice. Take a minute and treat yourself right. You'll get all the stuff that you need and feel great. Kachava is offering 10% off for a limited time. Just go to kachava.com slash invisible, spelled K-A-C-H-A-V-A and get 10% off your first order. That's K-A-C-H-A-V-A dot com slash invisible. Kachava dot com slash invisible. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world. And the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. Things are, you're listening to 99% Invisible on your phone, probably while you're on the go. Think of all that you do on your phone the moment you leave your front door, whether it's looking up directions, scrolling social media or listening to your favorite podcast. It requires an amazing network. That's why you should switch to T-Mobile. T-Mobile covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else and helps keep you connected with 5G from the driveway to the highway and the miles in between. Because your phone should just work where you are. It's your lifeline to pretty much everything you didn't bring with you. So next time you head out, whether you're taking a trip or going to work or just running errands, remember T-Mobile has got you covered. Find out more at T-Mobile dot com slash network and switch to the network that covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else. Coverage is not available in some areas. See 5G details at T-Mobile dot com.
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SPEAKER_07: Thanks for signing off on my trip to Poland. Any time. I mean, it sounded delightful.
SPEAKER_04: How did you enjoy it?
SPEAKER_07: Poland was super interesting. As you know, I went to the Polish countryside and interviewed Meyer at his cabin, which was really beautiful and peaceful. But I also went to the city of Wroclaw. That's where Meyer lived and where the orange alternative came to be. And I was really excited to find that a big thing tourists do there is go hunting for Krasnoludek.
SPEAKER_04: So what is hunting for Krasnoludek mean? Like what does dwarf hunting entail?
SPEAKER_07: So let me set the scene. Wroclaw has this big medieval market square in the middle of its old town. It's surrounded by these tall sort of pastel colored buildings that have amazingly detailed moldings. There's actually a spiral motif, like a swirl on a lot of the buildings that I'm obsessed with. It sounds beautiful, really charming.
SPEAKER_04: Yes, it was very, very charming.
SPEAKER_07: But anyway, Wroclaw also has these little bronze statues all over town. They're the statues of Krasnoludek dwarves with tiny pointed shoes, pointed hats. They sort of look like garden gnomes, but all bronze. And there are hundreds of them. Something like 450 of them. Oh, wow. Yeah, they basically have their own world within Wroclaw. And tourists run around, try to spot them all. I actually hopped on a free dwarf tour while I was there with a local guide.
SPEAKER_05: So welcome to Wroclaw everybody. And as I have said, first of all, we'll take a little walk around this square to see some of those statues. That would be like the first part of the tour. We saw tons of dwarves on this tour.
SPEAKER_07: They're all posed in different ways. Like there's one smiling and holding a sunflower. I personally love this one, sleeping next to a little bronze cellar door.
SPEAKER_05: This is usually referred to as the entrance to the dwarf underworld, because you can see like the entrance going down.
SPEAKER_07: And some of them are harder to find than others.
SPEAKER_05: Some of them are like moving. There are, for example, dwarves in Wroclaw trumps, in Wroclaw boats, in public transport. Many of them are indoors. For example, in a moment we are going to pass post office. There is a dwarf in the post office, a little feather. There is KFC restaurant. Inside of the restaurant, there is a dwarf eating hot wings, for example, right?
SPEAKER_07: That one's sitting on a little bronze KFC bucket. And a lot of the Krasnoljutik are advertisements like that. They advertise for local businesses. There's one outside a bank that's using a little bronze ATM. There's one eating ice cream outside an ice cream shop. Another one is drinking vodka outside a bar.
SPEAKER_05: Those businesses, they actually pay a lot of money to have those dwarves because this is like their advertisement. So if you'd like to have such dwarves, for example, like your podcast would open an office in Wroclaw, if you'd like to have like a dwarf at your door.
SPEAKER_07: 99 PI Krasnoljutik. I'm all for it.
SPEAKER_04: It would be a reason enough to open up an office in Poland. That would be amazing. A little Polish studio.
SPEAKER_07: Oh, I'd love it.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah. So for the most part, everyone I met in Wroclaw was a huge fan of the dwarf statues. People love them. Except Meyer. Meyer hates them.
SPEAKER_04: I think I can guess why, but tell me, well, why does he hate the Krasnoljutik around the
SPEAKER_07: town? So the first Krasnoljutik statue was put up in 2001 and that one was explicitly an homage to the orange alternative. It's on a pedestal in the middle of a street where a lot of the orange alternative happenings went down. But since then, as more and more dwarf statues have gone up, they've basically become a marketing play for the town at large. And the history is kind of backseat.
SPEAKER_04: Do the dwarves around town, do they work to reinforce this revolutionary history or is it really just marketing at this point? Has it all been obscured by other uses of the dwarf?
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, I would not say that they reinforce the history in any way. I think the people who lived through the revolution in Poland remember the orange alternative for the most part. But other than that, it's not really common knowledge anymore. It's not like something that's being taught in schools in Poland. I mean, it's not super surprising because like 60s revolutionary stuff in this country
SPEAKER_04: isn't really taught in schools that much. But it is kind of disappointing, especially since those symbols are everywhere.
SPEAKER_07: Right. And what really bothers Meyer about it is that the city of Rotswaf itself started using a Krasnoljutik drawing in their marketing materials, like as a logo. And it looked a lot like Meyer's original Krasnoljutik graffiti. So to him, it was a copyright issue, plagiarism issue. He actually sued the city a few years back and he won. So they don't use that Krasnoljutik logo anymore. Wow.
SPEAKER_04: Okay. So he has like a personal stake in this and them overusing or misappropriating that logo, like even to the point of plagiarism. That's interesting.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah. And I really liked my tour guide's take on the whole thing.
SPEAKER_05: Let's say that this, you know, the legal suit, the lawsuit he filed, this is one more happening on his behalf, right? Because he was creating funny happenings for life. And this is also maybe like the last time he was trying to kind of, you know, make people question this whole story, whether it's like, okay to use a symbol of anti-communist era for marketing, right?
SPEAKER_04: So this is just another big happening, a big meta commentary by the Orange Alternative. I like that interpretation. That's pretty fun. Exactly.
SPEAKER_04: Well, thank you, Sophie. This is so much fun. I just enjoyed the story.
SPEAKER_07: Thanks, Roman.
SPEAKER_04: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Sophie Cautner, edited by Emmett Fitzgerald, original music by our director of sound, Swan Rial, with additional music by Jenny Conley-Drizos, John Neufeld, and Nate Quiri. Sound mix by Martine Gonzalez, fact checking by Graham Haysha. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Vivien Ley, Christopher Johnson, Jason De Leon, Lajimodone, Jacob Maldonado Medina, Kelly Prine, Joe Rosenberg, Sophia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. Special thanks this week to Harry Tarpey, Martha Golonko, Agnieszka Griz, Megan Zires, Carly Olson, and the Orange Alternative Foundation. 99% Invisible is part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me, at Roman Mars, and the show at 99pi.org, or on Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99pi at 99pi.org. And so people are using symbols like the asterisks, the asterisks instead. And so people are using symbols like the asterisks, like the asterisks, like the asterisks, like the asterisks, like the asterisks, like the asterisks. Like the asterisks. You're going to have to come. I can't read the whole sentence and get it right. Great sleep can be hard to come by these days, and finding the right mattress feels totally overwhelming. Serta's new and improved Perfect Sleeper is a simple solution designed to support all sleep positions with zoned comfort, memory foam, and a cool to the touch cover. The Serta Perfect Sleeper means more restful nights and more rested days. Find your comfort at Serta.com.
SPEAKER_02: Isn't
SPEAKER_08: Hmm, no, you'll have to find the elevators yourself.
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