| This dissertation is a study of how Bolshevik nationality policy facilitated Roma's self-fashioning as conscious, integrated Soviet citizens between 1917 and 1939. With the slogan "national in form, socialist in content," the Bolsheviks assaulted what they termed ethnic "backwardness" with expansive nation-building projects designed to assimilate minority peoples into Soviet civilization. Early Soviet nationality policy entitled---theoretically, at least---non-Russians to a host of declared benefits that included, most notably, the purported accoutrements of nationhood: territories, alphabets, schools, theaters, and a wide range of other "national" institutions. Suffused with "socialist content," these "national forms" were intended by the state to "civilize" and inure minority peoples to a distinctly Soviet way of life. Nationality policy, this dissertation argues, offered minority peoples a stake in the building of socialism and a manipulable framework of self-Sovietization.;Roma---known in Soviet parlance as "Gypsies" (tsygane)---serve as both an archetypal and unique case of a minority people engaging the early Soviet regime of nationality. Like most nationalities formally recognized by the Soviet state, Roma were categorized as "culturally backward." Yet Roma figured in the Soviet imagination as an exceptionally intractable people and thus as a powerful threat to the empire's civilizing mission. Roma, however, recognized their own ascribed "backwardness" as valuable political capital. They invoked their ostensibly extreme alterity in their claims on nationality policy and in their diverse efforts to reinvent themselves as Soviet. Roma thus actively participated in constructing the category of "backward Gypsy." They contributed to the development of a messianic political culture that demanded the supplantation of both "backwardness" and "Gypsiness" by Sovietness. The more Roma participated in the forms of "Gypsiness" granted them by nationality policy, the more they fashioned themselves into settled, literate, laboring, and integrated Soviet citizens. The more Roma internalized Sovietism, the less recognizable they were as "Gypsies."... |
