I mentioned the idea here last year:
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One thing I have often wondered about is the creation of some sort of Roma national homeland in the USSR.
"Martin Holler (Humboldt U, Berlin). Towards a `Socialist Gypsy State': Plans for an Autonomous Region for Romanies in the Early Soviet Union. After the October Revolution, Soviet Romanies experienced the whole ambivalence of the Bolshevik nationalities program. Affirmative action for so-called `backward nationalities' and repression went hand in hand. Romanies were a small ethnic group and belonged to the 2% of the extraterritorial people that were spread all over the USSR. Nevertheless, a relatively great effort was made to include `Gypsies' into the building of socialism. Collectivisation, `political education' and alphabetisation were the catchwords, which resulted, among other things, in the creation of a `Gypsy alphabet' and the foundation of the Moscow `State Gypsy theatre "Romen"'. One of the most surprising Bolshevik projects was the founding of a socialist `Gypsy state,' with a cultural and (limited) political autonomy and Romanes - the `Gypsy language' (tsyganskii iazyk) - as the official language! `Gypsies' from all parts of the Soviet Union would have been settled in a compact, ethnically pure territory. Romani activists demanded parts of the Crimea, Southern Ukraine or the Northern Caucasus as areas for resettlement, while the Soviet authorities preferred Western Siberia or the Far East. Both the Romanies and the Bolsheviks referred to the Jewish example, especially to the `Jewish Autonomous Soviet Region of Birobidzhan.' Scientific expeditions in search of suitable territories were made and a special commission was set up. My paper presents the genesis and ideological background of the astonishing autonomy project and asks why it finally came to nothing. It is based on unpublished materials from post-Soviet archives."
https://web.archive.org/web/20070706021922/http://www.gypsyloresociety.org/conf07abstracts.html
For more on Soviet policies toward the Roma, see
http://romafacts.uni-graz.at/index....scrimination/soviet-union-before-world-war-ii The pattern is similar to that of other small Soviet nationalities--*korenizatsiya*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiya in the 1920's giving way to intensified repression in the 1930's. Still, what makes otherwise implausible ideas at least slightly plausible in the Soviet Union from 1929 to 1953 is that so much depended on the whims of one man. I can't see any reason Stalin would be sympathetic to the Gypsies but if for some reason he were, that could change a lot of things.
According to Brigid O'Keeffe, *New Soviet Gypsies: Nationality, Performance, and Selfhood in the Early Soviet Union* (2013) in 1936 there was apparently serious discussion of creating a suitable territory for the mass settlement of Roma, to get them to overcome their "backward" nomadic ways. A. I. Khatskevich, Secretary of the Central Executive Committee's Soviet of Nationalities, said "let the Gypsies settle in a fixed place and later there will be a Gypsy Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic." (p.183 but no such republic or Gypsy autonomous region or even so-called Gypsy special territory was ever formed. As O'Keeffe notes, one problem is that by the time a Gypsy autonomous territory was being advocated, the failure of Birobidzhan was already apparent. "Soviet officials confronting Roma's demands for a Soviet Gypsy homeland--a similarly grand project which could [unlike Birbobidzhan] in no way rely on foreign financial assistance--no doubt kept Birobidzhan's depressing yet seemingly instructive example in mind. By the time that Romani activists began in the 1930s to campaign for the creation of a Soviet Gypsy homeland, Birobidzhan had already proven itself an expensive experiment whose results did not justify its costs, or the headaches it inspired in Moscow." (p. 186)
BTW, O'Keeffe summarizes the fate of the idea at
https://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/brigid-o-keeffe/roma-homeland-that-never-was ("The Roma homeland that never was"):
"The 1926 Soviet census counted a Soviet Roma population of 61, 234 – data then recognised as incomplete owing to the inability to accurately account for nomadic Roma. Despite their relatively small population, Roma occupied an outsized place in the Soviet imagination. In Bolshevik eyes, Roma jeopardised socialist modernity as a peculiar ethnic menace. According to a prevailing racist logic that assumed Gypsies to be universally illiterate, peculiarly nomadic, stubbornly marginal, socially parasitic, thieving, diseased, and superstitious, Roma threatened to jeopardise all of the Soviet Union’s modernising goals.
"Of all the supposedly defining features of Roma, it was their purported nomadism that most perplexed Soviet modernisers. Theirs was, in the eyes of Soviet officialdom, a uniquely subversive, irrational, and unruly nomadism. In the Soviet bureaucratic imagination, labor-averse Gypsies wandered aimlessly and anarchically throughout Soviet territory. They escaped the state’s gaze, but also its demand that “backward Gypsies” become New Soviet Men and Women who contributed labor to the socialist economy. Gypsies were stereotyped not merely as peripatetics, but also as parasites who produced nothing of economic value.
"Soviet officials responsible for solving the “problem” of Romani nomadism were intimidated by the seeming enormity of the task. Yet nationality policy provided them with a ready-made solution: give the “backward Gypsies” a territory on which they could settle and undertake productive agricultural life. The “national form” of territory would impose the “socialist content” of sedentary, socialist agriculture and the everyday life of Soviet cultural values. Ideally, territorialisation would mean sedentarisation as well as economic and cultural integration. In this way, “backward Gypsies” would become New Soviet Gypsies.
"Early Soviet efforts to sedentarise and productivise presumed Romani nomads began with efforts to settle them on collective farms.
"In the late 1920s and early 1930s, as many as fifty Romani collective farms were established across the Soviet expanse. The rare successful farms among them were those established by sedentary Roma whose families had been farming for generations – whose sedentary life began long before the Bolsheviks endeavored to violently transform agriculture, let alone to settle Romani nomads. While many of the Romani collective farms collapsed almost as quickly as they had been created, hundreds of formerly nomadic Romani families found themselves, by 1933, settled on characteristically ramshackle collective farms that were scattered from Ukraine to Siberia, from the North Caucasus to Central Asia.
"Although generally regarded by bureaucrats in Moscow as failures, these collective farms were already showing some signs of success. Namely, the Romani collective farms were integrating their inhabitants into the lamentable agricultural sector of the socialist economy and Soviet culture.
"Romani collective farmers learned quickly that nationality policy was a potentially productive framework for making claims on the state. They mastered the logic of nationality policy and soon began making fluent pleas to Moscow – begging for more state resources and invoking their own ascribed ethnic backwardness.
"Romani collective farmers began – alongside urban Romani activists – to lobby for the establishment of a special Gypsy territory within the Soviet Union.
"Only a Soviet Gypsy homeland, they argued, would enable the successful transformation of “backward Gypsies” into New Soviet Gypsies.
"Roma’s lobbying for a Soviet Gypsy homeland fatefully coincided with the Soviet attempt to establish an ersatz Zion for Soviet Jews. Known as Birobidzhan and formally established in 1934, the Soviet Union’s remote Jewish Autonomous Region offered Roma a possible template upon which to base their own autonomous Gypsy territory within the Soviet Union.
"Yet state efforts to create a Soviet Gypsy homeland also resulted from a renewed bureaucratic focus on battling nomadism throughout the Soviet Union. Officials within the Commissariat of Agriculture and the Soviet of Nationalities began, in 1935, to collaborate in crafting plans to establish an autonomous Gypsy region where, it was believed, the possibilities of rationally expending resources on the transformation of the USSR’s nomadic Roma population could be most effectively realised. A special commission was established to scope out suitable territory within the USSR to be transfigured into an autonomous Gypsy region.
"The commission reached out to colleagues in a diverse array of Soviet regions to inquire about the suitability of establishing an autonomous Gypsy region within their administrative borders. Notably, they received positive responses from officials in the Gorkovsky (now Nizhny Novgorod) Region and in Western Siberia. Exploratory expeditions to these regions and bureaucratic reports soon followed.
"For a brief moment in the winter of 1935-1936, it seemed the Gypsy autonomous region might transition from the imaginative space of bureaucratic paper and Romani lobbyists’ petitions to the literal space of Soviet territory. In January 1936, the chairman of the Soviet of Nationalities exuberantly hailed a Soviet future that included a Gypsy Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. This Gypsy ASSR, he argued, would be the definitive answer to integrating Romani nomads into Soviet culture and the socialist economy.
"In the spring of 1936, however, plans for an autonomous Gypsy region were scrapped. They were replaced with the decision to refocus bureaucratic energy and resources toward the strengthening and expansion of Romani collective farms.
"Roma national territory within the Soviet Union would continue to be realized in the smaller forms of scattered and impoverished collective farms.
"The archives of the former Soviet Union reveal more than the dream of a Soviet Gypsy homeland that was embraced by a significant number of Roma and bureaucrats alike in the 1930s. They also testify to why that dream was abandoned. Soviet officialdom decided that it would be far too expensive to create from scratch a Gypsy homeland from underpopulated forest territories that were not the well-suited for agriculture and for a people regarded – through the prism of pernicious stereotypes – as ill-suited for sedentary agricultural life.
"It is also clear how the fates of Jews and Roma converged in 1936 to help quash plans for a Soviet Gypsy homeland. Almost as soon as it was created, Birobidzhan was widely regarded in Soviet bureaucratic circles as an epic failure afforded at an astronomical price. Similar stereotypes, too, tethered the fates of Jews and Roma. Like Roma, Jews appeared in Soviet bureaucratic and popular imaginations as a scattered people with a perceived aversion to “honest labour” and especially to agriculture. Soviet officials confronting Roma’s pleas for a Soviet Gypsy homeland in 1936 were no doubt chastened by Birobidzhan’s depressing yet instructive example of a grandiose modernizing vision dissolving into the mud of inhospitable, even if Soviet, terrain..."
A thought: Maybe what is needed to have some sort of Soviet Gypsy autonomous region or district (60,000 people seems too few for an autonomous republic) is for the Soviets to try implementing the idea *before* Birobidzhan was tried and found to be an expensive fiasco...
