New Soviet Gypsies

"This is a very interesting book because it looks at the very first recognition of the Roma as an ethnic or national minority anywhere. It is somewhat ironic that it happened in the Soviet Union, but that said it did only last a few years from the late 1920s until the late 1930s. The book focuses on the activities of a small circle of Romani activists and how they managed to create a special status for the minority after the Communist revolution. It was really a survival strategy. The Roma were always a self-employed and free enterprise loving people and the new Soviet economic structure introduced serious impediments to them continuing to live as they had for generations. The authorities had also taken to banning Romani cultural performances and characterising them as degenerates. Their whole way of life was being brought into question, and they needed to somehow discover a way of fitting in. Of course, there was no tradition of political activism within Romani communities, so these activists had to reinvent the Roma to try and convince the authorities that they were a nationality like any other. They did this by turning popular stereotypes to their advantage. They suggested that the Roma were backwards and needed special support to become good socialist citizens and argued that they could only get that support if they were recognised as an individual ethnic group. Through that argument they managed to set up special schools and teaching training programmes as well as industrial and agricultural collectives for Romani people. What impresses me in particular, because of my work on Romani language, is that they also, for the first time ever, initiated a state programme to create a Romani literary language. To this day, there has never been a comparable quantity of Romani language publications produced in any one country. Four to five hundred books were published in Romani, including translations of Pushkin and others, but also political propaganda and educational material. Unfortunately, much of it was destroyed at the end of the 1930s. This was when centralisation was stepped up and there was a general reversal of the liberal nationalities policy. The only institution that survived was the Romen Theatre, which still exists today. It’s an irony of history that this traditional image of the Roma as performers on stage is the only thing that was allowed to survive from the whole experiment."