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)