To Settle and Civilise? Roma and Soviet Nationalities Policy

One of the most remarkable and counter-intuitive developments in the early Soviet Union was the promotion of nationalism.

From the early 1920s onwards, formerly oppressed ethnic groups were encouraged to develop a national consciousness by fostering their own cultures, languages, and indigenous political leaders. Just so long, of course, as they didn’t stray from the official dogmas of the Communist Party.

The policy, known as indigenisation (or nativisation), was encapsulated by the mantra ‘national in form, socialist in content’. While nationalism in much of Europe after 1918 therefore veered towards the political far right and fascism, in the USSR it became indispensable to Communist ideology.

Large national groups were given their own territories, where their language was given official status and local elites given power to manage state and Communist Party affairs. In many places, this process assumed the name of the national groups themselves (thus, indigenisation in Ukraine became Ukrainianisation, and so on). Even under Stalin in the late-1930s, where whole ethnic groups were placed under suspicion and national elites purged in the face of the supposed threat of ‘bourgeois nationalism’, the policy was never actually reversed.

 

Roma and the Civilising Mission

Some of the most striking aspects of this policy were revealed in its application to smaller ethnic groups. For many, especially those who were not settled (i.e. nomadic travellers) or not European in ethnic origin, Soviet nationalities policy turned into a kind of civilising mission more commonly associated with European colonial empires, to raise the supposedly inadequate ‘cultural level’ of 'backward' peoples.

In this way, as historian Sheila Fitzpatrick suggests, it fitted into a broader aim of civilising those ‘backward’ groups who had failed to develop the adequate cultural traits needed to build socialism.

Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism (1999)

While backwardness was seen as a problem for the Soviet Union as a whole, some people were considered obviously more backward than others. The Soviet Union was a multiethnic state, but the ‘friendship of peoples’ that linked its different ethnic groups together was often represented in terms of an elder brother, Soviet Russia, leading and teaching younger siblings. The Muslim peoples of Soviet Central Asia and the reindeer-herding ‘small peoples’ of the north, regarded as the most backward of the union, were archetypal beneficiaries of the Soviet civilizing mission. But ethnicity was not the only determinant of backwardness. Peasants were backward compared to town-dwellers. Women were backward, generally speaking, compared to men. The Soviet civilizing mission was raising the cultural level of all these backward groups.

 

A supposed need to ‘civilise’ was seen as particularly important in the case of Soviet Roma, known officially in the USSR as ‘Gypsies’ (tsygane). Having long faced persecution in Russia, Roma were predominantly nomadic and were widely considered by Communist officials to be (with the possible exception of Kazakh nomads) the USSR’s most ‘backward’ people.

The nomadic culture of the Roma makes it hard to know exactly how many lived in Russia and the USSR. In 1897, the first all-Russian census recorded around 44,500. In the first Soviet census of 1926, 61,234 were officially recorded. The real numbers were likely far higher, even if census takers were unable to accurately record them. Most Roma moved around regularly, although several thousand were settled on farms and in cities by the 1920s.

The Roma presented Soviet officials with problems which tested their nationalities policy to its limits. Firstly, as a nomadic group, they had no territory of their own. This problem was of course not unique to the Roma. Diaspora nationalities, perhaps most obviously Jews, also posed the question of where exactly their Soviet homeland might be. But the situation was aggravated in the case of the Roma. As a predominantly nomadic group, any kind of territorialisation demanded they first settle on the land.

Secondly, the culture of the Roma did not obviously fit into official Soviet understandings of national culture. Romani language had many different dialects, making it difficult to know which language might be officially recognised. In any case, only around 64 percent of Roma actually spoke a Romani language at all.

Romani traditions also jarred with Soviet aspirations for a settled, productive, socialist population. Their nomadism, along with persistent allegations of the criminality and lack of work ethic, brought scorn from Soviet officials, who accused the Roma of leading ‘parasitic’ lives that contributed nothing to the economy.

As historian Brigid O’Keeffe, the leading authority on Soviet Roma, notes, this placed them in an invidious position.

Brigid O’Keeffe, New Soviet Gypsies (2013)

Gypsies’ stereotyped livelihoods – fortune telling, begging, crafty horse-dealing, or horse-thieving – represented […] a still greater moral and financial investment in their Soviet transformation into modern citizens. The sedentarization [i.e. settling on the land] of Gypsies and their transformation into farmers, moreover, was an investment that many Soviet officials doubted would produce anything but the most negligible returns. Soviet officials perceived the distinctive service nomadism of Roma as still more backward, irrational, and deviant than even the pastoral nomadism practiced by Kazakhs and other minority peoples in Siberia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus.

 

New Soviet ‘Gypsies’

Nevertheless, Soviet nationalities policies – however patronising and dismissive they might have been towards the Roma – provided some ambitious Romani individuals with an opportunity to fashion themselves into new national representatives. Energetic, literate, and politically savvy activists took up the challenge. In 1925, they established the All-Russian Gypsy Union. With government backing, they set up schools and cultural organisations to promote national consciousness.

A Romani Cyrillic (Russian character) alphabet developed in 1926 aided the publication of journals and books for Roma, while the ‘Romen’ theatre founded in 1931 promoted the supposed development of Roma from ‘backward Gypsies’ into enlightened Soviet citizens. These cultural initiatives opened up new spaces for Romani activists, most prominent amongst them the writer and playwright, Alexander Germano, himself a leading member of the Gypsy Union.

Romani activists had one foot in two worlds: Roma and Soviet. In the early years of Stalin’s rule, the journalist Maurice Hindus visited the USSR and encountered a large ‘Gypsy’ encampment where he was introduced to an activist and the director of a local Romani club, Rosa. From the city of Smolensk, Rosa came from a settled Romani family and was able to articulate her ambitions for the Roma in the language of Soviet nationalities policy.

Recording his conversation with her in his brilliant (if deeply flawed) memoir Red Bread, Hindus relays both Rosa’s passion for Romani culture and her hopes that the USSR would modernise her people. Her words (however accurately they may have been recorded) seem to highlight a dilemma Romani activists saw in the ‘modernisation’ of the Roma.

Maurice Hindus, Red Bread (1931)

I was too good a revolutionary to allow myself to be affected for long by sentimental misgivings. I realized of course that these Gipsies might have joy, but sorrow they could not escape. […] No, I thought, there was no hope for them in vagabondage — no salvation in their resistance to science and knowledge. Deliverance, I felt convinced, could come only through enlightenment, through productive work, through becoming part of this great society of laboring citizens that we are building in Russia. My task then was clear – to help civilize and modernize these eternal wanderers, to bring them in touch with all the advanced thought of the world, so that they could enjoy all the fruits of this thought.

 

Roma and the Limitations of Soviet Nationalities Policies

It proved difficult to transform Romani life in practice. Despite laws passed in 1926 to encourage Roma to adopt a settled lifestyle and in 1928 to provide them with land, many refused to abandon their nomadic lives. A handful of Romani collective farms (kolkhozy) were established under Stalin in the 1930s.

But by this point, the Gypsy Union no longer existed. In February 1928, citing its failure to change Romani ‘conservative culture’ and its own organisational weaknesses, the Soviet government shut down the Gypsy Union. Undeterred, Union activists would continue their work to develop Romani culture and identity.

By 1939, official census data suggested over 88,000 Roma lived in the USSR. Soviet nationalities policies had hardly transformed Romani life, even if it had forced the Roma to adapt to a new Communist reality. But with war now looming, a new and existential threat faced Roma life and traditions.

To be continued…

 

Further Reading

David M. Crowe, A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia (2^nd ed.), Palgrave Macmillan (2007)

Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s, Oxford University Press (2000)

Maurice Hindus, Red Bread: Collectivization in a Russian Village (forward by Ronald Grigor Suny), Indiana University Press (1988; first published 1931)

Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939, Cornell University Press (2001)

Brigid O’Keeffe, The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise, Bloomsbury (2022)

Brigid O’Keeffe, New Soviet Gypsies: Nationality, Performance, and Selfhood in the Early Soviet Union, University of Toronto Press (2013)

Beyond ‘A Male Dominated Society’: Interrogating the Concept of Patriarchy in Russia and the USSR

Big words with big meanings are powerful – if you know how to use them.

Among the biggest, and most frequently used, of these words I’ve found students using is ‘patriarchy’. Behind the word lies a highly complex concept, which students tend to reduce to the startling simple formula of ‘a male dominated society’.

Like all simple formulas, this has a very large element of truth to it. Like all simple formulas, it also overlooks the inherent complexity of the concept.

From the perspective of Russian and Soviet history, what did patriarchy look like in practice? Here, I’ll pick up on three elements of a dynamic patriarchal society that come through clearly in this context.

"But what really IS the value of a source?" Getting A-Level Students to Approach Sources Like Historians

Some parts of teaching History can feel a bit soulless.

This has been my impression of teaching primary sources for some time. At best, it can feel like a rather run-of-the-mill exercise in identifying relevant features in order to have students write something of merit for their exam. At worst, it can feel like having students blindly groping around for anything they can attach at least a bit of coherent knowledge to.

Recently, I've started to worry that some of our A-Level students really have no idea what a primary source is to a historian or why a historian even bothers with them. Asked in their exams to identify content, provenance, and tone, they approach the exercise in a tick-box manner, dutifully plodding through often lively and fascinating documents in order to tell us who wrote them and what they did, what that kind of source might focus on, a contemporary event or two, and what bits of their contextual knowledge they know about the main points raised.

Part of my concern here is stylistic. Writing about sources like this seems stilted and lifeless. But mostly, my concern is methodological. I just don't think that any historian would begin to approach sources that way.

There's loads of great writing on approaching sources, which I don't want to simply summarise here. Instead, I'd like to briefly sketch out a general approach to sources which is hopefully both methodologically valid (i.e. mirrors the kind of thinking historians actually engage in) and practically deliverable (i.e. can be used in the classroom).

In broad terms, my proposed approach hinges on two questions:

• Why do historians actually use sources?
• What language allows them to analyse sources?

I doubt much if any of this is very original, but it might provoke some thought and discussion (and I'd love to know your thoughts on it, too!).

A-Level History Coursework: 8 Traps Students Fall Into (and 8 Ways to Avoid Them)

Writing an extended piece of coursework, or non-examined assessment (NEA) as part of A-Level History is no easy task. In fact, it's probably the trickiest single thing A-Level History students have to do. If students are to succeed, they need to know what to look out for. So do we, as their teachers!

Here are 8 of the most common traps that I've seen our students fall into over the past few years and 8 ways to avoid them.

                        

(The accompanying examples are all hypothetical and are meant to illustrate good practice to students only. They are not directly relevant in context to our NEA topic of the Crusades.)

This post is available as a downloadable document here.

Holocaust Memorial Day Trust Prohibits Discussion of Gaza (Again): One Teacher’s Response

Over the past two years, a number of teachers and educators have watched with alarm and frustration as the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (HMDT) has sought to quash discussion of atrocities in Israel and Gaza as part of Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD).

The HMDT has now reiterated its guidance that it “does not recommend” any discussion of Israel and Gaza. Its guidance, which can be found in full here, raises several arguments in support of this position, including that:

• “There are many diverse and strongly felt opinions on current conflicts taking place around the world, and it is important to be clear that HMD is neither a time for commenting on current conflicts, nor for decisiveness.”
• The purpose of HMD is, rather “to commemorate the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, and the millions more murdered under Nazi persecution. It is also a day to recognise that prejudice still exists within our communities and to learn and commemorate where persecution led in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.”
• “Opening a discussion or making statements on the conflict [in Israel and Gaza] at an HMD event will be almost certain to divide and upset the audience – whereas HMD seeks to bring people together with a shared purpose. Further, it will take the event further from its central purpose of commemoration of the Holocaust.”
• “Focusing on the situation in Gaza at an HMD event while making no reference to other global conflicts risks appearing one-sided.”

I’ve written twice to the HMDT this year, ahead of HMDT 2025 and again ahead of HMDT 2026 to raise a number of concerns and objections. These have not been in any way addressed by the HMDT’s reissued guidance.

Instead of revisiting old letters, here I’ll offer a critique of the reissued HMDT guidance.

I hope this might offer some constructive thoughts from the perspective of a teacher with an interest in commemorating the Holocaust and other instances of genocide since 1945.

This post is not designed to be any kind of definitive “final word” on the matter, but instead a working through of some of my ongoing thoughts.

In particular, I hope it might be of use to other teachers and educators in a similar position when considering options for commemorating HMD 2026 with young people.