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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).

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akho 4 days ago | parent [-]

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.

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alxlaz 4 days ago | parent [-]

> There is a large distance between “removed from curriculum” and “banned”. I suspect that it’s not in the current school graduation requirements either.

Not necessarily, early on things got dropped from the curricula all the time because the GUKPiW had banned them, either specifically or by topic.

Blanket bans on general topics or activities make it extremely difficult to discuss censorship post-factum. For example, Juliusz Slowacki wasn't banned, but while some of his works could be freely published in some media they were fully or partially banned in other media (notoriously, Television Theatre got in trouble over parts from Kordian). Lots of cultural activities or works weren't banned directly, or not in all forms.

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akho 4 days ago | parent [-]

Yes, “large distance” implies that many in-between options exist. Folk dances, however, were a whole thing with Stalinists (“culture that is national in form, and socialist in content”), so an outright ban would seem out of character.

I would probably remove folk dances from school graduation requirements too, if I somehow fumbled into a position where I take those kinds of decisions.

	▲	alxlaz 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Folk dances, however, were a whole thing with Stalinists (“culture that is national in form, and socialist in content”), so an outright ban would seem out of character. Folk dances and culture in general were a whole thing with Stalinists, but authorities exerted a considerable degree of influence and a ban on some specific folk dances (or cultural manifestations), or on some specific aspects of them, wouldn't have been out of character at all. Where I'm from, a whole range of folk dances, songs and theatre were banned not by name but under either a ban of the religious denominations that prominently practiced them or a blanket ban on public celebration of major Christian holidays, especially Christmas and Easter. Folks dances, too, are kind of murky in this area. Perhaps one of the most widely-displayed folk dances of the Eastern Bloc in the communist era, a Romanian dance called "Căluș", retained some of its essential choreography, but was otherwise radically changed to drop its religious undertone, to the point where it was pretty much a different thing by the end of the sixties. Some of it was "recovered" in the eighties, when a peculiar for of protochronism began to permeate some official circles so doing the ancestors thing was cool again, but during the high Stalinist period the "old form" fell under a general repression of what was officially termed "religious mysticism". This led to an entirely peculiar situation where the dance was technically okay, kids learned something resembling it in school and danced it during official ceremonies at the city hall, but grown-ass adults who'd learned it from their parents (edit: not literally from their parents, the way it was taught was a whole thing and didn't help with the whole mysticism issue but anyway) and practised it outside official cultural institutions got rounded up.