Brigid O’Keefe’s New Soviet Gypsies offers a window into one of the most understudied ethnic groups in the former Soviet Union. The book elucidates the pitfalls and advantages of the official nationality policy between 1917 and the 1930s for the Roma. While her focus is on the Romani people, O’Keefe’s conclusions are relevant for many of the non-titular minority groups in the country during this period. As O’Keefe explains (xi), the title reflects the terminology used in the country to describe this ethnic group; as a result, she retains the term Gypsy when discussing official discourse, but uses Roma/Romani in other contexts.
The introduction provides an historical overview of the Roma in pre-revolutionary Russia and the stereotypes associated with them. She explains (20) that the Roma were not a unified ethnic group, but were divided into three distinct groups (Russka, Servi, and Vlax) based on their origin points before immigration to Russia. These distinctions, particularly between the Russka and Vlax Romani peoples, played a significant role in how the two groups coped with Soviet nationality policy and with each other during this period. O’Keefe’s extensive archival work reveals how the Roma performed stereotypes about them to their advantage in the context of minority policies.
Each chapter discusses an aspect of how official nationality policy factored into Romani integration into the Soviet Union. Chapter 1 gives an overview of the efforts of the All-Russian Gypsy Union. This group was founded by members of the Roma elite, mainly from Moscow, to address “Gypsy backwardness.” They sought to provide education about Soviet ideology and to establish Roma cooperatives, schools, and theatres. While the Union was short-lived, it established a model that capitalized on uncivilized and backward stereotypes that subsequent Roma activists would apply as a political tool.
In the early years of the Soviet Union, the goal was to provide education and published materials in all the minority languages of the USSR. Chapter 2 outlines the efforts to establish Romani elementary schools in the 1920s-30s. While this policy changed for non-titular minorities by the late 1930s, early efforts included creating an alphabet and grammar for each language. In this process, officials neglected to understand some important facts about the Romani population. First, their dialects were not mutually understandable, so that even if taught to read, the texts themselves may have been as strange as a foreign language. In addition, many were not speakers of any Romani dialect at all, but of Russian. Russian teachers also stigmatized both children and their parents as dirty, disease-ridden, and uncivilized. Early primers included, according to O’Keefe (87-88), “folkloric short stories” (likely tales or legends based on plot descriptions) that gave the rare Romani teachers pause, since they might valorize the “backward” values they were striving to eliminate in their pupils.
Chapter 3 is perhaps the most valuable for a folklorist. It explores how the negative stereotypes were embraced among the Roma themselves to integrate into the Soviet Union and to battle longstanding problems that they perceived in their community. Roma activists and educators drew on three particular beliefs: 1) that longstanding national persecution (in Russia and indeed in Europe broadly) had resulted in the degradation of Romani culture; 2) that the honest work that the Roma already performed in society had been discounted, when, in fact, they already were productive members of the proletariat; and 3) that there were “work-averse parasites” among them that needed a cultural revolution (113). In a chilling section, O’Keefe documents how the Russka Roma accused the Vlax Roma of parasitic behavior, a move that resulted in many deaths in Stalin’s purges.
In the last two chapters, O’Keefe focuses on shifting the traditional economic and cultural practices of the Romani people to conform to socialist ideals. Chapter 4 discusses the Soviet attitude toward nomads and the push to turn them into sedentary agriculturalists. The Roma presented a particularly intractable problem in the eyes of the authorities, because they were not only nomads but also inherently disinclined to labor. O’Keefe documents, as she does throughout the book, the twin problems of fighting against traditional practices and beliefs and the lack of government resources to support change. Roma who had adopted and adapted to Soviet-era values and had established collective farms (and/or schools, work collectives, and the like) often received little to none of the support promised by the government, often due to prejudice against them. Chapter 5 returns to theatrical performance, a hallmark of Romani social position in the pre-revolutionary period. O’Keefe presents a nuanced discussion of the orientalist stereotypes that made the Gypsy theatre both dangerous and enticing from the nineteenth century through the 1930s. Romani singers, musicians, and directors had to negotiate a complex array of threats to their livelihood after the Bolshevik Revolution and during Stalin’s reign. One important factor in preserving (to this day) Gypsy performance venues was to argue for theatre arts as “ethnographically authentic” presentations of minority culture. In this way, the USSR revealed the practices of minorities that had been obscured by tsarist oppression. However, performers faced serious opposition and were accused of being pornographic and bourgeois, and thus likely to corrupt Soviet citizens. In essence, this chapter encapsulates most clearly O’Keefe’s argument that to show “progress” as a minority group in the early years of the USSR, one had to conform to stereotypes (both good and bad).
This book is a welcome addition to the study of minority groups in the former USSR, particularly of a stigmatized group. The Roma have also been discounted because they did not conform to what a minority “should be” in the eyes of authorities. O’Keefe explores questions that will be of interest to folklorists, anthropologists, linguists, and historians studying the peoples of this region and also minority ethnic identity and how it is negotiated in institutional contexts.
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[Review length: 967 words • Review posted on January 27, 2023]