BesondersWeg

Smurfs as Socialist Surrealism

I am really digging A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989, which I’m reading for my Contemporary Europe class this week. Padraic Kenney is trying to answer the question of how the 1989 revolutions across Central Europe managed to bring thousands of people into the streets.

He does so by arguing that the post-Solidarity generation in Poland and elsewhere invented a new activist culture characterized by ideological pluralism and pragmatism–icking whatever battles they thought they could win that month, rather than the battles their ideology demanded. Instead of demanding that the regime allow free speech or national sovereignty, they would demand that the regime allow a homeless shelter, a folk music festival, or a support group for recovering alcoholics.

The most important new part of the dissenters’ toolkit was actually environmental issues. Especially after Chernobyl, local environmental hazards were potent mobilizers for people who had never thought of themselves as political before.

Mothers could march through Prague pushing children in their strollers, carrying anti-nuclear-power banners, relatively secure in the knowledge that the police would not risk the bad publicity of beating up a bunch of women and children.

Kenney also argues that this new dissent culture was characterized by humor and irony, taste for the carnivalesque This generation of activists had realized that a combative intellectual critique of the regime might get you put in jail, but making fun of the regime by dressing up as elves on Children’s Day and passing out candy to the cops might make you some friends.

Ultimately, then, by mixing a wide variety of issues and by inventing new, less threatening forms of participation, these post-Solidarity activists brought a wide variety of people into contact with their ideas and made those people more willing to flood the streets once the events we now call “1989” began in earnest.

The best thing that I learned is that Smurfs became a symbol of the opposition in Poland during the late 1980s. Police in Poland wore blue uniforms, and as part of this spirit of poking fun of the regime, sometimes dissenters would dress up as Smurfs themselves and start to sing songs like the following, from a 1988 strike in Gdansk:

I’ll be here on Saturday, and Sunday too,
But you Gargamels, you’re smurfed, you’re through!
Let them smurf away, let them run
In hell they’re expected, every one!
Boiling water, bubbling tar
Smurfs will be frying everywhere
Their blue color will boil away
Red looks better on them anyway

This is clearly the most awesome thing ever and outside of Kenney’s book, I can’t really find anything about it on the Anglo/Germanophone Internet.

I did find this steam engine aficionado’s account of traveling around Poland by rail in 1990. He writes that “Żagań depot seemed in earlyish 1990, to have developed a “thing” about those odd blue cartoon characters, the Smurfs. I saw on the smoke deflectors of at least one Ol49, quite skilfully-executed Smurf figures; and on the dashboard of a diesel loco, a splendid blue Smurf effigy. It crossed the mind to wonder whether this was just a random craze; or whether for some strange ideological reason, Smurfs had in Communist times been regarded as unacceptable, and Żagań’s loco crews were now celebrating their freedom to engage in whatever nonsense they might fancy.”

I also found this video, but have no idea who created it or why:

This has been your weekly dispatch from the trenches of historical absurdity.

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