New Soviet Gypsies

As perceived icons of indifferent marginality, disorder, indolence, and parasitism, “Gypsies” threatened the Bolsheviks’ ideal of New Soviet Men and Women. The early Soviet state feared that its Romani population suffered from an extraordinary and potentially insurmountable cultural “backwardness,” and sought to sovietize Roma through a range of nation-building projects. Yet as Brigid O’Keeffe shows in this book, Roma actively engaged with Bolshevik nationality policies, thereby assimilating Soviet culture, social customs, and economic relations. Roma proved the primary agents in the refashioning of so-called “backwards Gypsies” into conscious Soviet citizens. New Soviet Gypsies provides a unique history of Roma, an overwhelmingly understudied and misunderstood diasporic people, by focusing on their social and political lives in the early Soviet Union. O’Keeffe illustrates how Roma mobilized and performed “Gypsiness” as a means of advancing themselves socially, culturally, and economically as Soviet citizens. Exploring the intersection between nationality, performance, and self-fashioning, O’Keeffe shows that Roma not only defy easy typecasting, but also deserve study as agents of history.

In this fully updated edition with a new foreword by Andre Liebich, David M. Crowe provides an overview of the life, history, and culture of the Gypsies, or Roma, from their entrance into the region in the Middle Ages up until the present, drawing from previously untapped East European, Russian, and traditional sources.

David Crowe draws from previously untapped East European, Russian, and traditional sources to explore the life, history, and culture of the Gypsies, or Roma, from their entrance into the region in the Middle Ages until the present.

In 1956 Khrushchevs Thaw triggers the Hungarian Revolution and upheaval in the Soviet Empire. During Khrushchevs first state visit to Helsinki, Dosha, star rider of the Soviet Dressage Team and her horse defect with the help of local Gypsies. The novel follows the life of Dosha, a Gypsy in disguise. It offers unique insight into the tribal life of nomadic Gypsies, who under Stalin joined partisans fighting Nazi invaders, only to face entrapment during Khrushchevs Thaw. By then Dosha and her talented circus horse have been drafted into the dressage team in Leningrad. Navigating political intrigue, narrowly escaping discovery by the KGB, she enters a love forbidden to Gypsy women. One goal remains uppermost in her mind leading her tribe and her horse to freedom in the West.

Is the concept of "race" applicable to Russia and the Soviet Union? Citing the idea of Russian exceptionalism, many would argue that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while nationalities mattered, race did not. Others insist that race mattered no less in Russia than it did for European neighbours and countries overseas. These conflicting notions have made it difficult to understand rising racial tensions in Russian and Eurasian societies in recent years. A collection of new studies that reevaluate the meaning of race in Russia and the Soviet Union, Ideologies of Race brings together historians, literary scholars, and anthropologists of Russia, the Soviet Union, Western Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America. The essays shift the principle question from whether race meant the same thing in the region as it did in the "classic" racialized regimes such as Nazi Germany and the United States, to how race worked in Russia and the Soviet Union during various periods in time. Approaching race as an ideology, this book illuminates the complicated and sometimes contradictory intersection between ideas about race and racializing practices. An essential reminder of the tensions and biases that have had a direct and lasting impact on Russia, Ideologies of Race yields crucial insights into the global history of race and its ongoing effects in the contemporary world. Contributors include Adrienne Edgar (University of California, Santa Barbara), Aisha Khan (New York University), Alaina Lemon (University of Michigan), Susanna Soojung Lim (University of Oregon), Marina Mogilner (University of Illinois, Chicago), Brigid O'Keeffe (Brooklyn College), David Rainbow (University of Houston), Gunja SenGupta (Brooklyn College), Vera Tolz (University of Manchester), Anika Walke (Washington University, St. Louis), Barbara Weinstein (New York University), and Eric Weitz (City University of New York).

Jekatyerina Dunajeva explores how two dominant stereotypes—“bad Gypsies” and “good Roma”—took hold in formal and informal educational institutions in Russia and Hungary. She shows that over centuries “Gypsies” came to be associated with criminality, lack of education, and backwardness. The second notion, of proud, empowered, and educated “Roma,” is a more recent development. By identifying five historical phases—pre-modern, early-modern, early and “ripe” communism, and neomodern nation-building—the book captures crucial legacies that deepen social divisions and normalize the constructed group images. The analysis of the state-managed Roma identity project in the brief korenizatsija program for the integration of non-Russian nationalities into the Soviet civil service in the 1920s is particularly revealing, while the critique of contemporary endeavors is a valuable resource for policy makers and civic activists alike. The top-down view is complemented with the bottom-up attention to everyday Roma voices. Personal stories reveal how identities operate in daily life, as Dunajeva brings out hidden narratives and subaltern discourse. Her handling of fieldwork and self-reflexivity is a model of sensitive research with vulnerable groups.

One of the greatest challenges during the enlargement process of the European Union towards the east is how the issue of the Roma or Gypsies is tackled. This ethnic minority group represents a much higher share by numbers, too, in some regions going above 20% of the population. This enormous social and political problem cannot be solved without proper historical studies like this book, the most comprehensive history of Gypsies in Romania. It is based on academic research, synthesizing the entire historical Romanian and foreign literature concerning this topic, and using lot of information from the archives. The main focus is laid on the events of the greatest consequence. Special attention is devoted to aspects linked to the long history of the Gypsies, such as slavery, the process of integration and assimilation into the majority population, as well as the marginalization of Gypsies, which has historic roots. The process of emancipation of Gypsies in the mid-19th century receives due treatment. The deportation of Gypsies to Transnistria during the Antonescu regime, between 1942-1944, is reconstructed in a special chapter. The closing chapters elaborate on the policy toward Gypsies in the decades after the Second World War that explain for the latest developments and for the situation of this population in today's Romania.

This book is the first to offer a concise, accessible overview of the evolution of the Soviet Union as a multiethnic empire. It reflects on how the Soviet Union was home to many ethnic minorities, and how their fates, and that of the USSR itself, were bound to the question of how the Soviet state responded variously throughout its existence to the fundamental question of ethnic difference across its vast and diverse territory. The book then examines how the Soviet collapse in 1991 fractured the Union along markedly national lines, leading to a variety of new nation-states – including the Russian Federation – being born. Brigid O'Keeffe explains how and why the Bolsheviks inscribed ethnic difference into the bedrock of the Soviet Union and explores how minority peoples experienced the potential advantages and disadvantages of ethnic politics within the Soviet Union. Ukrainians and Georgians, Jews and Roma, Chechens and Poles, Kazakhs and Uzbeks – these and many other minority groups all distinctively shaped and were shaped by the Soviet and post-Soviet politics of ethnic difference. The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise gives you the historical context necessary to understand contemporary Russia's relationships and conflicts with its 'post-Soviet' neighbors and the wider world beyond.