Terrible fact-checking and I doubt the good faith by Associate Press.
The authors (Monika Ścisłowska and Rafał Niedzielski) claim that Polonaise was banned in USSR, which is false. Neither it was ever banned in Russian Empire.
The culture.pl article mentions that
> dancing the polonaise was temporarily banned in the Congress Kingdom
Which could be the case, I don't know, but I couldn't google other sources in 10 minutes either.
alxlaz 2 hours ago [-]
> Terrible fact-checking and I doubt the good faith by Associate Press. The authors (Monika Ścisłowska and Rafał Niedzielski) claim that Polonaise was banned in USSR, which is false. Neither it was ever banned in Russian Empire.
>
> The culture.pl article mentions that > dancing the polonaise was temporarily banned in the Congress Kingdom
I'm not sure that qualifies for terrible fact checking, or in any case, none of this refutes any of it. Since the AP doesn't cite its sources, their claim could certainly be wrong, but neither of the facts you cite contradict its claims.
First, the AP piece doesn't say it was banned in the USSR, it says Poland’s post-World War II communist authorities banned it from schools, which ~~is actually supported~~ isn't refuted by culture.pl, too:
> [After 1933], the tradition of dancing the polonaise together by the students of the graduating classes returned to schools, but it disappeared again after 1948 for the duration of Stalinism.
I know culture.pl doesn't explicitly say "banned" but both the idiomatic translation and the parallel experience in virtually every country under Soviet occupation would indicate that. culture.pl unfortunately (and unforgivably) doesn't cite sources, so I can't follow the trail, and dance history is definitely not my field. But a social dance with notorious ethnic rules not being banned in that space would've been the exception, not the rule.
(Edit: If it happened, it wouldn't have had to happen by direct government dispatch, either, this would have typically been done on the "advice" of party activists at lower levels (e.g. in each school), operating under broader directives to discourage nationalist expression, not some specific dance. Each country has thousands of traditions, some of them with local names, you can't issue a document to ban each of them at central level).
Second: it not being banned in the Russian Empire has no bearing on AP's claim about it being banned in the "territories that Russia took over"
The Congress Kingdom was under Russian rule, first de facto, and then entirely de jure. It had nominal (but generally disregarded, hence "de facto" rule) autonomy until shortly after the November uprising in 1831. Then, through the Organic Statute of the Kingdom of Poland, the Kingdom's constitution, army and parliament were abolished, thus effectively making it an imperial subject, under direct rule after 1837, with a weird customs border (and, starting from 1867 IIRC, not even that).
These are "the territories that Russia took over" in the AP piece. The only way for the polonaise to be temporarily banned -- if it was actually banned, again, culture.pl doesn't cite its sources -- in the Congress Kingdom was by dispatch from St. Petersburg, unless somehow the Polish banned their own dances.
Up until 1867 (at which point the kingdom, already an administrative fiction for more than 50 years, was finally formally abolished) that could be done without it being banned in the Russian Empire proper, too. Afterwards, what was previously the Congress Kingdom retained governorate status, so the polonaise could be banned on its territory without being banned through the rest of the Empire, too.
justin66 1 hours ago [-]
That's the trouble with mainstream media, everybody's got an agenda when it comes to the topic of polonaise dance.
It's disappointing that neither Monika Ścisłowska with Rafał Niedzielski of apnews.com, nor Aleksandra Bogucka of culture.pl - all of them Polish people - bothered at least once to mention how this national dance is called in its mother tongue. So, here it is: polonez.
Majestic121 6 hours ago [-]
`polonez` is a deformation from the actual name `polonaise` (cf https://www.reddit.com/r/BoneAppleTea/), it makes sense that they don't mention it since it's obviously not Polish of origin (why would Polish people call it Polish dance ?)
They do mention the original Polish dance chodzony, extensively
where-group-by 6 hours ago [-]
Currently it's mostly referred to as "polonez", with that exact spelling. It's one of those loan words that got it's spelling changed in Polish.
viccis 7 hours ago [-]
Oh wow, like 3 letters difference, pronounced identically in English, glad you cleared that up.
piokoch 7 hours ago [-]
Russians considered Frederic Chopin music to be "Polish guns hidden in flowers" (one of the Russian officials citation) so they had to ban it (on the Polish territory occupied by Russia, in Russia itself it was legal to play Chopin...).
amszmidt 5 hours ago [-]
That quote is from Robert Schumann, a German composer contemporary with Chopin. It was not a citation from any Russian officials, nor was Chopin banned in Poland by the Russians (it was banned during the German occupation for a while).
8 hours ago [-]
akho 6 hours ago [-]
Can someone give a source for communists banning polonaise? It sounds implausible, and googling did not produce a satisfying result.
krige 2 hours ago [-]
The sources come from Polish language books.
Folk dances were a part of school curriculum in the first half of the XXth century, and part of the maturity exam was ceremonial dancing of polonez. In 1948 the whole education system was changed to be in line with USSR programs, and folk dances, including the polonez ceremony, were removed as class "unjust". This was not a hard ban, and the tradition slowly, unofficially at first, came back a couple decades later anyway.
FWIW the Imperial Russia didn't like the Chopin polonez (the music) either and considered it "a cannon hidden in a bocquet", forbidding its performance in their part of the occupied/partitioned territory (ironically it was perfectly fine to play it in Russia itself).
akho 2 hours ago [-]
There is a large distance between “removed from curriculum” and “banned”. I suspect that it’s not in the current school graduation requirements either.
The “cannon hidden in the flowers” quote comes from Schumann, who wasn’t Russian. Chopin, of course, sympathized with the November uprising and renounced his Russian citizenship, so Tsarist Russia was not happy about that. That does not tell you anything about the polonaise itself, though.
where-group-by 5 hours ago [-]
Surface google searches do not return anything meaningful. It would be also weird to call one of the domestic car lines after something that is supposedly banned.
It's interesting, I asked ChatGPT about this and it said it was not banned, then I turned on "search the web" and it says it was - citing AP News and VoA, basically this very article. I wonder if there's any more info.
Edit: funnily enough DeepSeek gives an answer that sounds plausible: apparently during the Stalinist period of 40s-50s while it supposedly wasn't outright banned "overt displays of national pride were often discouraged" ... That seems to fit, and a bit of judgement over whether something is banned explicitly or simply so unthinkable in the official climate that it may as well be banned.
everdrive 4 hours ago [-]
>It's interesting, I asked ChatGPT about this and it said it was not banned,
Asking ChatGPT is useless for finding a definitive answer for anything, and all the more so when the facts are in question.
p_l 5 hours ago [-]
Imperial Russia, not communists
amszmidt 5 hours ago [-]
AFAIR .. it wasn't even banned during the Imperial Russian times; rather it was just considered a "Russian" dance.
Never heard of the Polonez being banned during PRL times... We sure danced it out in the fields then (though this was later times).
vkazanov 2 hours ago [-]
As a half Polish half Russian who grew up in soviet Lithuania i still remember hating to learn polonez in the late soviet period. Dancing doesn't involve computers...
Anyways, as a single statistically insignificant fact: polonez was not banned in late ussr.
And a glamorous version of polonez was also taught in higher imperial circles. At some point everything polish was quite trendy. Probably not around the big 19th century uprising though.
The full story of the dance and the music in the empire is quite a bit more complicated than just "banned" or "not banned". Many polonezes were written by Polish aristocrates integrated into imperial elites and were very popular.
One example is Oginsky's polonez. Oginsky was one of the uprising avtive participants. And also an imperial senator.
There's also Kozlovsky (orthodox Polish from belarus or something) whose polonez was an unofficial imperial hymn at some point.
So go figure. History is never as simple as narrative builds try to put it.
p_l 1 hours ago [-]
Polonez certainly wasn't banned under PRL or USSR, but it would not surprise me if Chopin arrangements of Polonez were banned in "Congress Poland" but allowed in "proper Russia"
akho 3 hours ago [-]
The article’s title is “Once banned by communists, Poland’s stately 18th century dance garners UNESCO honors”.
Imperial Russia also never banned the polonaise, obviously.
anticodon 4 hours ago [-]
Wasn't banned by Imperial Russia either. There was a very short period of time (1799-1828) when all kind of waltzes were banned, but the ban was never enforced and it had nothing to do specifically with polonez or Poland.
sparky_z 3 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't describe 29 years as "a very short period of time".
akho 3 hours ago [-]
And the de facto Russian national anthem at the time was a polonaise.
Rendered at 14:06:21 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
The culture.pl article mentions that > dancing the polonaise was temporarily banned in the Congress Kingdom
Which could be the case, I don't know, but I couldn't google other sources in 10 minutes either.
I'm not sure that qualifies for terrible fact checking, or in any case, none of this refutes any of it. Since the AP doesn't cite its sources, their claim could certainly be wrong, but neither of the facts you cite contradict its claims.
First, the AP piece doesn't say it was banned in the USSR, it says Poland’s post-World War II communist authorities banned it from schools, which ~~is actually supported~~ isn't refuted by culture.pl, too:
> [After 1933], the tradition of dancing the polonaise together by the students of the graduating classes returned to schools, but it disappeared again after 1948 for the duration of Stalinism.
I know culture.pl doesn't explicitly say "banned" but both the idiomatic translation and the parallel experience in virtually every country under Soviet occupation would indicate that. culture.pl unfortunately (and unforgivably) doesn't cite sources, so I can't follow the trail, and dance history is definitely not my field. But a social dance with notorious ethnic rules not being banned in that space would've been the exception, not the rule.
(Edit: If it happened, it wouldn't have had to happen by direct government dispatch, either, this would have typically been done on the "advice" of party activists at lower levels (e.g. in each school), operating under broader directives to discourage nationalist expression, not some specific dance. Each country has thousands of traditions, some of them with local names, you can't issue a document to ban each of them at central level).
Second: it not being banned in the Russian Empire has no bearing on AP's claim about it being banned in the "territories that Russia took over"
The Congress Kingdom was under Russian rule, first de facto, and then entirely de jure. It had nominal (but generally disregarded, hence "de facto" rule) autonomy until shortly after the November uprising in 1831. Then, through the Organic Statute of the Kingdom of Poland, the Kingdom's constitution, army and parliament were abolished, thus effectively making it an imperial subject, under direct rule after 1837, with a weird customs border (and, starting from 1867 IIRC, not even that).
These are "the territories that Russia took over" in the AP piece. The only way for the polonaise to be temporarily banned -- if it was actually banned, again, culture.pl doesn't cite its sources -- in the Congress Kingdom was by dispatch from St. Petersburg, unless somehow the Polish banned their own dances.
Up until 1867 (at which point the kingdom, already an administrative fiction for more than 50 years, was finally formally abolished) that could be done without it being banned in the Russian Empire proper, too. Afterwards, what was previously the Congress Kingdom retained governorate status, so the polonaise could be banned on its territory without being banned through the rest of the Empire, too.
[0] https://culture.pl/en/work/dancing-through-history-the-polon...
They do mention the original Polish dance chodzony, extensively
Folk dances were a part of school curriculum in the first half of the XXth century, and part of the maturity exam was ceremonial dancing of polonez. In 1948 the whole education system was changed to be in line with USSR programs, and folk dances, including the polonez ceremony, were removed as class "unjust". This was not a hard ban, and the tradition slowly, unofficially at first, came back a couple decades later anyway.
FWIW the Imperial Russia didn't like the Chopin polonez (the music) either and considered it "a cannon hidden in a bocquet", forbidding its performance in their part of the occupied/partitioned territory (ironically it was perfectly fine to play it in Russia itself).
The “cannon hidden in the flowers” quote comes from Schumann, who wasn’t Russian. Chopin, of course, sympathized with the November uprising and renounced his Russian citizenship, so Tsarist Russia was not happy about that. That does not tell you anything about the polonaise itself, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FSO_Polonez
Edit: funnily enough DeepSeek gives an answer that sounds plausible: apparently during the Stalinist period of 40s-50s while it supposedly wasn't outright banned "overt displays of national pride were often discouraged" ... That seems to fit, and a bit of judgement over whether something is banned explicitly or simply so unthinkable in the official climate that it may as well be banned.
Asking ChatGPT is useless for finding a definitive answer for anything, and all the more so when the facts are in question.
Never heard of the Polonez being banned during PRL times... We sure danced it out in the fields then (though this was later times).
Anyways, as a single statistically insignificant fact: polonez was not banned in late ussr.
And a glamorous version of polonez was also taught in higher imperial circles. At some point everything polish was quite trendy. Probably not around the big 19th century uprising though.
The full story of the dance and the music in the empire is quite a bit more complicated than just "banned" or "not banned". Many polonezes were written by Polish aristocrates integrated into imperial elites and were very popular.
One example is Oginsky's polonez. Oginsky was one of the uprising avtive participants. And also an imperial senator.
There's also Kozlovsky (orthodox Polish from belarus or something) whose polonez was an unofficial imperial hymn at some point.
So go figure. History is never as simple as narrative builds try to put it.
Imperial Russia also never banned the polonaise, obviously.