by alxlaz | 2025-04-18 11:38:50+00:00
> 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.