"Backward Gypsies," Soviet citizens: The All-Russian Gypsy Union, 1925-28

Kritika

Volumn 11, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 283-312

  O'Keeffe, Brigid ^a  

^a CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 77952126765     PISSN: 1531023X     EISSN: 15385000     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/kri.0.0158     Document Type: Review

References (67)

1. Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) f. 1235 (All-Russian Central Executive Committee), op. 120, d. 27, l. 63 (Narkompros memorandum circulated to all regional and provincial Narkompros departments, 6 April 1926). As an official nationality, Roma were categorized in the Soviet Union as tsygane, or Gypsies. The Romani subjects of my inquiry self-identified and were identified by the state as tsygane. In Russian-language sources produced in the early Soviet period, the use of the words "Roma" and "Romani" - even by Romani activists - was exceedingly rare. To accurately reflect the categories that were employed and the stereotypes that prevailed insofar as Roma in late imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union were concerned, I reproduce the grammatical variants of "Gypsy" when both reporting direct speech and describing the documented perspectives of historical actors. When speaking for myself, I employ the terms "Roma" (nominative plural) or "Romani" (adjective). In this, I have benefited greatly from the careful example of Alaina Lemon. For a nuanced discussion of how the terms "Gypsies" and "Roma" have been used by Roma and non-Roma alike, and for a model of exemplary academic writing on Roma, see Lemon's Between Two Fires: Gypsy Performance and Romani Memory from Pushkin to Postsocialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), esp. 4-5
2. For an exhaustive institutional analysis of early Soviet nationality policy as a "soft-line" Bolshevik strategy to contain the threat of non-Russian nationalism on the part of minority peoples aggrieved by imperial Russian rule, see Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). Francine Hirsch has persuasively argued that the Bolsheviks adopted their nationality policy as a short-term strategy designed ultimately to modernize and, indeed, to Sovietize "backward" minority peoples
3. Hirsch aptly refers to this strategy as "state-sponsored evolutionism.0" See her Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), esp. 5-7
4. As an attempt to better understand nationality policy "from below," however, this article speaks directly to Yuri Slezkine's earlier suggestion that non-Russian status had the potential to serve as an "asset" for minority citizens of the Soviet Union. In Slezkine's view, the Soviet nationality regime produced more than an institutional capacity to repress citizens on account of nationality. It also opened possibilities for Soviet citizens to advance and redeem themselves as "backward" minorities. See Yuri Slezkine, "The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism," Slavic Review 53, 2 (1994): 52-76
5. In his pioneering study of the Soviet subject's civic duty to master the Soviet self-transformation regime, Stephen Kotkin focused on the base requirement of all citizens to participate in, and thus legitimize, the categories of Sovietism - a phenomenon he termed "speaking Bolshevik." See his Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)
6. More recently, Jochen Hellbeck and Igal Halfin have examined autobiographic practices in the Soviet Union as subjectivizing mechanisms through which citizens sincerely worked to internalize the content of Soviet ideology and to hone their Soviet selves. See Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006)
7. and Igal Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003)
8. Eric Naiman, however, rightly advocates caution in the study of Soviet subjectivity, reminding scholars that the urge to make blanket statements about historical actors' sincerity or insincerity in submitting to the dictates of self-Sovietization threatens to flatten the Soviet subject into a "uniform figure." See Naiman's "On Soviet Subjects and the Scholars Who Make Them," Russian Review 60, 3 (2001): 307-15
9. Choi Chatterjee and Karen Petrone have similarly cautioned against "essentializing the Soviet self " in their review essay "Models of Selfhood and Subjectivity: The Soviet Case in Historical Perspective," Slavic Review 67, 4 (2008): 967-86, esp. 985
10. I. I. Rom-Lebedev, Ot tsyganskogo khora k teatru "Romen" (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1990), 10. Rom-Lebedev completed the bulk of his memoirs in 1985, and they were published serially in that same year in the Soviet journal Teatr. However, his memoirs were not published in their entirety or as an independent volume until 1990. It also deserves pointing out that Rom-Lebedev's given surname was that of his father, Lebedev. Upon discovery of the benefits that Soviet nationality policy potentially offered him as a minority citizen, he changed his name to Rom-Lebedev in 1923, thereby emphasizing his Gypsy nationality
11. I. I. Rom-Lebedev, Ot tsyganskogo khora k teatru "Romen" Ibid., 13
12. See B. J. Gilliat-Smith, "Russian Gypsy Singers," Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, 3rd series, no. 1 (1922): 59
13. If a Romani wife, Rom-Lebedev explained, was a "famous singer or dancer, this was a great honor for her spouse" (Ot tsyganskogo khora, 53)
14. For an excellent discussion of "the Gypsy" as a persistent image of desirous, wild freedom in Russia, see Alaina Lemon, Between Two Fires, esp. 31-55
15. Quoted in K. A. Baurov, Tsyganskie khory starogo Peterburga (St. Petersburg: n.p., 1991), 5
16. Efim Druts and Aleksei Gessler, Tsygane: Ocherki (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1990), 212
17. Rom-Lebedev, Ot tsyganskogo khora, 41-42
18. A. V. German, Tsygane vchera i segodnia (Moscow: Tsentrizdat, 1931), 44
19. On widespread efforts made by Soviet citizens to inscribe themselves into the Bolshevik revolutionary narrative via performative acts of allegiance and self-identification, see Frederick C. Corney, Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004)
20. Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind
21. and Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain
22. "V Administrativnyi otdel Mossoveta: Protokol no. 1 sobraniia chlenov uchreditelei Obshchestva organizatsii proletarskikh otstalykh tsyganskikh mass gor. Moskvy i Moskovskoi gubernii," 10 January 1924 (GARF f. 1235, op. 119, d. 9, ll. 3-6)
23. "Ustav Souiza tsygan, prozhivaiushchikh v gor. Moskve" (GARF f. 1235, op. 119, d. 10, l. 52)
24. "V Prezidium VTsIK: Ot Tsentral'nogo pravleniia Vserossiiskogo soiuza tsygan. Doklad o rabote sredi tsygan," 10 August 1925 (GARF f. 1235, op. 120, d. 27, l. 179)
25. "V Prezidium VTsIK: Ot Tsentral'nogo pravleniia Vserossiiskogo soiuza tsygan. Doklad o rabote sredi tsygan," Ibid., ll. 179-79 ob. In narrating the history of Roma in Europe, ARGU members were undoubtedly drawing from ethnographies published in late imperial Russia. These ethnographies had characterized Western Europe as barbarous in its treatment of Roma. Unlike ARGU members and Soviet ethnographers, however, Russian ethnographers of the late empire argued that the tsarist government treated its Romani subjects in a humane and rational manner. They thereby drew a distinction between the "enlightened" Russian Empire and its "savage" counterparts in the West
26. See V. I. Papazian, "Armianskie bosha (tsygane)," Etnograficheskoe obozrenie 49, 2 (1901): 93-158
27. K. P. Patkanov, Tsygany: Neskol'ko slov o narechiiakh zakavkazskikh tsygan. Bosha i karachi (St. Petersburg: Imperatorskaia akademiia nauk, 1887)
28. M. M. Plokhinskii, "Tsygane staroi Malorossii (po arkhivnym dokumentam)," Etnograficheskoe obozrenie 7, 4 (1890): 95-117
29. and N. G. Shtiber, "Russkie tsygane: Etnograficheskii ocherk," Ezhemesiachnye literaturnye prilozheniia k Nive (1895): 519-54
30. "Plan rabot Kul't-otdel Vserossiiskogo soiuza tsygan" (GARF f. 1235, op. 120, d. 27, l. 94)
31. "Otchet o peredelannoi rabote i perspektivakh budushchei raboty VSTs" (GARF f. 1235, op. 120, d. 27, ll. 133-33 ob.)
32. "Vypiska iz protokola no. 50 zasedaniia Soveta narodnykh komissarov," 28 October 1925 (GARF f. 1235, op. 120, d. 27, l. 118)
33. For greater detail on these measures, see Brigid O'Keeffe, "Becoming Gypsy, Sovietizing the Self, 1917-1939" (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2008)
34. "Zaiavlenie: V Federal'nyi komitet po zemel'nomu delu pri Prezidiume VTsIK" (GARF f. 1235, op. 121, d. 31, l. 240)
35. See, for example, GARF f. 1235, op. 120, d. 27, l. 63. In the Soviet imagination, nomadism distinguished the empire's most "backward" nationalities. Yet for Soviet bureaucrats in particular, Roma threatened the state as the national personification of a distinctly irrational mode of itinerancy. In this view, "Gypsies" were not mere peripatetics but "parasites" whose nomadism centered not on livestock herding but on a deep aversion to "honest labor." Soviet officials generally regarded Romani service nomads as deviants who produced nothing but instead only consumed. For characteristic Soviet accounts of nomadism as a marker of exceptional "backwardness" and, in particular, of "Gypsy nomadism" as uniquely beyond the pale of even the most remotely rational economic life, see S. M. Dimanshtein, ed., Voprosy osedaniia kochevnikov (Moscow: Vlast' sovetov, 1932)
36. "Soveshchanie po voprosam osedaniia kochevykh khoziaistv i zemleustroistva kolkhozov natsional'nykh respublik i oblastei," Revoliutsiia i natsional'nosti, no. 10 (1935): 83-89
37. "Soveshchanie po trudoustroistvu i kul'turno-bytovomu obsluzhivaniiu tsygan," Revoliutsiia i natsional'nosti, no. 2 (1936): 61-72
38. and A. P. Barannikov, Tsygany SSSR: Kratkii istoriko-etnograficheskii ocherk (Moscow: Tsentrizdat, 1931), esp. 28
39. On the efforts and failures of 20th-century states to rationalize or "make legible" populations in the putative service of more effective governance, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998)
40. "Vypiska iz protokola no. 37 zasedaniia Prezidiuma VSTs," 15 February 1927 (GARF f. 1235, op. 121, d. 31, l. 193)
41. Germano, Tsygane vchera i segodnia, 46-47
42. "Postanovlenie TsIK i SNK SSSR o merakh sodeistviia perekhodu kochuiushchikh tsygan k trudovomu osedlomu obrazu zhizni," 1 October 1926 (GARF f. 1235, op. 121, d. 31, l. 12)
43. "Protokol no. 1 zasedaniia Komissii pri Pereselencheskom Otdele NKZema po zemleustroistvu trudiashchikhsia tsygan," 27 October 1927 (GARF f. 1235, op. 121, d. 31, l. 221)
44. A number of solicited responses can be found in GARF f. 1235, op. 121, d. 31. See also "Plan rabot Vserossiiskogo soiuza tsygan na 1926-oi god" (GARF f. 1235, op. 120, d. 27, ll. 99-102)
45. I borrow the concept of an imperial "information order" from C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For a masterful account of the Bolsheviks' attempt at "conceptual mastery" over the diverse and fragmented Soviet population
46. see Hirsch, Empire of Nations
47. A. S. Taranov, "Ot kochevki k osedlosti," Izvestiia VTsIK, 21 January 1927, 6
48. "Vypiska iz protokola no. 37: Zasedanie Prezidiuma VSTs," 15 February 1927 (GARF f. 1235, op. 121, d. 31, l. 193)
49. This bilingual poster, "To the Gypsy Population of the RSFSR," is archived at GARF f. A-296, op. 1, d. 46, l. 31
50. and reproduced in A. V. Germano, Bibliografiia o tsyganakh (Moscow: Tsentrizdat, 1930), 69-71. By the time of the poster's printing, several ARGU activists had joined with a professor of Romance languages at Moscow State University, M. V. Sergievskii, to create a Romani-language alphabet based on the Russian Cyrillic script
51. See E. Popova and M. Bril', "Tsygane v Soiuze SSR," Sovetskoe stroitel'stvo, no. 2 (1932): 127-28
52. "Protokol no. 38: Zasedanie chlenov uchreditelei VSTs," 18 July 1927 (GARF f. 1235, op. 121, d. 31, ll. 112-13)
53. "Protokol no. 40: Zasedanie pravleniia uchreditelei VSTs," 30 August 1927 (GARF f. 1235, op. 121, d. 31, ll. 110 ob.-11)
54. Here Romani activists engaged in the commonplace practice of defining one's own self as Soviet against others whom they deemed insufficiently politically conscious. In her examination of denunciations in the Stalinist 1930s, Golfo Alexopoulos has similarly shown how the language and practice of terror enabled citizens to fashion themselves as good Soviet citizens vis-à-vis those whom they foiled as "enemies of the people." See Golfo Alexopoulos, "Victim Talk: Defense Testimony and Denunciation under Stalin," in Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, ed. David Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis (New York: St. Martin's, 2000), 204-20
55. See "Dokladnaia zapiska o polozhenii voprosa o tsyganakh, zhivushchikh na territorii SSSR," 1 October 1927 (GARF f. 3316, op. 20, d. 653, ll. 13-22)
56. "Dokladnaia zapiska o polozhenii voprosa o tsyganakh, zhivushchikh na territorii SSSR," Ibid., l. 20
57. "Postanovlenie Narodnogo komissariata vnutrennykh del o zakrytii 'soiuza tsygan, prozhivaiushchikh na territorii RSFSR,' " 15 November 1927 (GARF f. 1235, op. 120, d. 27, ll. 47-47 ob.)
58. See "Moskva (po telefonu)," Krasnaia gazeta, 13 February 1928
59. and Tsirk i estrada, no. 3-4 (February 1928): 15. In May 1928, the NKVD shut down the Assyrian Union on the basis that it, too, had failed to effect a transformation of the empire's Assyrians. See GARF f. 1235, op. 123, d. 47, ll. 3-4 ob
60. "V Prezidium TsIK SSSR: Ot aktiva tsygan. Dokladnaia zapiska" (GARF f. 1235, op. 120, d. 27, ll. 30-38). This document can also be found in GARF f. A-296, op. 1, d. 416, ll. 15-23 and GARF f. 1235, op. 121, d. 31, ll. 250-59. In the first two versions here cited, the memorandum is signed "From Gypsy activists" while in the version last cited, it is signed "From Gypsy members of the VKP/b/ and VLKSM."
61. Romani activists inherited the trope of the "noble [minority] savage" as an embodiment of revolutionary hope and, ultimately, as a primitive communist from the imperial Russian ethnographic tradition. On the 19th-century ethnographic invention of non-Russian "noble savages" and "primitive communists," see Mark Bassin, "Inventing Siberia: Visions of the Russian East in the Early Nineteenth Century," American Historical Review 96, 3 (1991): 763-94
62. Bruce Grant, "Empire and Savagery: The Politics of Primitivism in Late Imperial Russia," in Russia's Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700-1917, ed. Daniel R. Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 292-310
63. Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), esp. 113-29
64. and Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov, The Social Life of the State in Subarctic Siberia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), esp. 44-72
65. As Kotkin noted nearly 15 years ago, "It was not necessary to believe. It was necessary, however, to participate as if one believed" (Magnetic Mountain, 220)
66. Tied to questions of authenticity, competing conceptions of performativity and performance are also at the heart of scholarly debates on Soviet selfhood. Alexei Yurchak, for example, employs performativity theory to argue persuasively that participation in Soviet authoritative discourse cannot be reduced to "pure masquerade and dissimulation." Yurchak shows how participation in Soviet ideology not only potentially empowered subjects to create a multiplicity of new meanings from the scripts of Soviet authoritative discourse but also constituted the subjectivity of those whom he casts as "normal" Soviet people (Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006], quotation on 16)
67. Alternatively, Sheila Fitzpatrick has adopted the category of performance strictly as a metaphor for social role-playing and treats Soviet citizens' everyday participation in Soviet ideology as "more a matter of behavior than essence." Fitzpatrick's historical actors thus emerge rather uniformly as resourceful and creative imposters whose social masks reliably immunized their "true" selves from the state's ideological contamination (Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005], quotation on 13)