Sociology professor Lisa (Lisiunia) Romanienko has argued it was among the most effective of Solidarity's factions in dismantling anxiety and fear surrounding the dictatorial regime, in order to bring about the labor (and later social and cultural) movement's success.

Afterward, beginning in 1985 and continuing through to 1990, the group organized a series of more than sixty happenings in several Polish cities, including Wrocław, Warsaw, Łódź, Lublin, and Tomaszów Mazowiecki.

[3] The first known actions of the Orange Alternative consisted of painting dwarf graffiti on spots created by the police's covering up anti-regime slogans on walls of the Polish cities.

Dwarves appearing in numbers all over Poland aroused the interest of both Polish pedestrians and the militia, whose intervention led to short term arrests of the graffiti artists.

These actions gained it enormous popularity among the Polish youth, who joined the movement, seeing it an alternative to the opposition style presented by the Solidarity, which they viewed as more stiff and boring.

The first modest happening called the "Burning of Tubes" was organized as early as 1985 in Wrocław by Major Waldemar Fydrych accompanied by a small group of artists to which belonged: Krzysztof Skarbek, Piotr Petyszkowski, Andrzej Głuszek, and Sławomir Monkiewicz.

[3] The breakthrough moment came in the fall of 1987, during the Open Theatre Festival in Wrocław, when the Village Voice reported the Orange Alternative's action known as "Distribution of Toilet Paper" – a happening that satirized the annoying lack of that consumer product at the time.

The biggest happenings however took place in the years 1987 through 1989, with the "orange" wave spilling over Poland into cities such as Warsaw, Łódź, Lublin and Tomaszów Mazowiecki, following Major Fydrych's arrest on 8 March 1988.

The culmination point in the movement's history was the action organized on 1 June 1988, known as the "Revolution of Dwarves", during which more than 10 thousand people marched through the center of Wrocław wearing orange dwarf hats.