COURAGE

connecting collections

Wojciech Sobolewski (1966) is a sociologist, philosopher, the historical leader of the Warsaw’s Orange Alternative in the 1980s. He co-organized all of the “orange” happenings in Warsaw. Sobolewski also collaborated with the Independent Students’ Union but had never joined the organization.

Till the studies at the University of Warsaw Sobolewski did not engage in a political activism. As a student of sociology, he began making small graphic works for the Independent Students’ Union, like projects and illustrations for papers, leaflets, and posters. When in autumn 1987 the rumors about the Orange Alternative's happenings in Wrocław came to the students’ milieu in Warsaw, Sobolewski together with Krzysztof Płaska and Rafał Szczęsny organized on November 29 the football match between teams KS Misery and FC Welfare. During the game, the referendum was conducted with the question: “Are you in favor of the severe winter, even if it lasts two or three years”. The happening was interrupted by the police intervention. Next happenings took place in Warsaw in 1988. The “Relatively Huge Maneuvers AntiMON-SB”, on April 27, was a battle of tanks made of cardboard. The action was a protest against compulsory military schooling at a university.

Soon the creators of happenings from Warsaw and Wrocław decided to coordinate their actions. The “Revolution of Dwarfs” was conducted simultaneously in both cities, on June 1. However, after that happening there was a split in Warsaw: Szymczak and Płaska created the Catch 22 group, while Sobolewski started to organize happenings under the name of Warsaw’s Orange Alternative. Sobolewski conceived that happenings needed the active participation of the public as well as interventions of the police to awaken the dynamics of the event. According to these assumptions, the happening “Pollock Can” on February 24 was carried. The mob gathered by the organizers collectively painted walls, lanterns, pavements, and shop’s fronts in the passage in the Downtown Passage (now Passage of Stefan “Wiech” Wiechecki). The Warsaw’s happenings differed from others by cracked costumes (e.g. one of the participants of the “Rev-Revue of Soc-Fashion” happening on November 6, 1988, disguised himself as a Palace of Culture and Science) as well as parodies of official rhetoric and symbols. Contrary to the Orange Alternative in Wrocław and Łódź, the Warsaw’s Orange Alternative had funds from the Committee of Independent Culture. The financial inequality was a cause of tensions inside the movement.

On October 7, 1989, Sobolewski announced the end of the Warsaw’s Orange Alternative, due to the lack of public interest and reactions of the police. In 1995 he made his master degree on the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw about the happenings of the Warsaw’s Orange Alternative.

Sergei Soldatov (1933-2003) was a well-known dissident in Estonia. Although he was of Russian origin, he was born and lived in Estonia until the mid-1970s, and later in exile. He was an engineer by profession, and until 1970 he worked in different positions in his field. He began his dissident activities in 1967, when he formed the underground Democratic Group with several others. He was persecuted by the KGB from 1968. Despite this, in 1969 he formed the Democratic Movement of the Soviet Union with Artem Juskevich and Oleg Tyutryumov, and others. He concentrated on publishing the journal Luch Svobody (Ray of Liberty), while waiting at the same time to be arrested. He also cooperated with Estonian democratic movements, such as the Estonian National Front (Eesti Rahvusrinne) and the Estonian Democratic Movement (Eesti Demokraatlik Liikumine). 
He was arrested and tried in 1975, and sentenced to six years in a hard labour prison camp in Mordovia. He was freed in 1981 and forced to emigrate. After that, he worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty until 1993. In addition, he was an active publicist, writing several books about Estonian history and about his life. In 1987, he founded his own publishers, Ost-West Renaissance, and in 1998 the independent research centre for history and philosophy Katharsis. Soldatov returned to Estonia in 2000, and continued his writing activities. 
After his death in 2003, a 15-volume collection of his works, edited by his wife Ludmilla Grünberg-Soldatova, was published.

Ottília Solt (1944–1997) was a Hungarian sociologist, journalist, educator, a member of the democratic opposition, and an MP of the first freely elected Hungarian Parliament in the term of 1990–1994.

She was born in Budapest into an intellectual family: her father was a doctor and her mother a teacher. In 1967 she graduated with a degree in Hungarian philology and Philosophy and started to work at the Institute of Economic Studies. She took part in research conducted by István Kemény on the living conditions of the poor and helped organize the social science and economics lectures that Kemény gave, initially at the university and then in his own home. In 1972 she left the Institute of Economic Studies and took up a position at the Institute of Education, where she continued her sociological research. Kemény participated in this research illegally and under a false name, because he had been dismissed and was banned from publishing the results of his own work. In the summer of 1977, Ottília set out for Paris, where Kemény was then living in exile, in order to hand him several articles and publications forbidden in Hungary. At the border the material was confiscated and she was arrested. Her trial ended with a warning from the police, the loss of her job, the withdrawal of her passport, rigorous surveillance, and the risk of a penal trial if she committed the same offence again.

Despite the dangers, Ottília was not deterred: she took part in numerous initiatives organized by opposition circles and in acts of solidarity with the signatories of Charter ’77 in Czechoslovakia. She worked in a primary school and then as a librarian. In 1979, along with other members of the Kemény circle, she set up the “Fund for Aiding the Poor.” In 1981 she lost her job definitively and suffered constant threats of house searches, arrests, and fines from the police, but she refused to be intimidated: she joined the editorial staff of the underground magazine Beszélő (Speaker), where she published the most important programmatic documents of the democratic opposition, especially in the field of social and political analysis. She was signatory to all the protests against human rights violations and joined the main opposition initiatives organized to mark the anniversary of the 1956 revolution and Hungary’s National Day of the 15^th of March.

Despite constant surveillance by the police, tapping of her telephone, and repeated searches of her home, in 1988 she played a decisive role in setting up the “Network of Free Initiatives.” She also helped draw up the programmatic declaration entitled “There Is a Way Out,” published in the same year in Beszélő, in order to turn the network into a political party with the name “Association of Free Democrats” (SzDSz). She was a member of the party’s National Council right from its inception. On 15 March 1988, she was stopped by the police and interrogated at length. In 1989 she took up a research post at the Budapest University’s Institute of Sociology and helped the samizdat Beszélő emerge as a legal weekly. She remained a member of its editorial staff until 1995. In 1990 she was elected a member of parliament and joined the social commission, acting as vice president until 1994, the year in which she withdrew from political life.