Communist assimilation
The communist states of Eastern Europe, home to most of Europe's Roma, ban nomadism, move Roma into factory jobs and housing estates, and try to dissolve them into the working class, with mixed and lasting results.
- The East European Gypsies: Regime Change, Marginality, and Ethnopolitics — Zoltan Barany, Cambridge University Press (2002)
- The Time of the Gypsies — Michael Stewart, Westview Press (1997)
- The Gypsies — Angus Fraser, Blackwell (1992)
- The Destiny of Europe's Gypsies — Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon, Chatto-Heinemann for Sussex University Press (1972)
After 1945 most of Europe’s Roma lived under communist rule. Marxist governments generally saw them not as a nation but as a “backward social stratum” to be modernised. The Soviet Union banned nomadism in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1958 (registering and fixing travelling Roma where they stood), and Poland in 1964, the “Great Halt” remembered by Polish Roma as the end of their wagon life. Bulgaria’s regime forced Muslim Roma, like Turks, to take Slavic names in the 1970s–80s.
- The East European Gypsies: Regime Change, Marginality, and Ethnopolitics — Zoltan Barany, Cambridge University Press (2002)
- The Gypsies — Angus Fraser, Blackwell (1992)
Policies had real benefits: guaranteed jobs, usually unskilled work in factories, mines and state farms, flats in new estates, healthcare and rising literacy. But they also broke up communities, moved Roma into the worst housing, and placed large numbers of Romani children in schools for the “mentally handicapped”. In Hungary, the anthropologist Michael Stewart found Roma who worked in socialist factories yet insisted on their own values of brotherhood and trading. When the planned economies collapsed after 1989, the unskilled jobs disappeared first, and Roma unemployment soared.
- The Time of the Gypsies — Michael Stewart, Westview Press (1997)
- The East European Gypsies: Regime Change, Marginality, and Ethnopolitics — Zoltan Barany, Cambridge University Press (2002)
- The Destiny of Europe's Gypsies — Donald Kenrick and Grattan Puxon, Chatto-Heinemann for Sussex University Press (1972)
Why it matters today
Many older Roma in Central and Eastern Europe remember communism with surprising nostalgia: there were jobs, flats and a certain security, and open racism was officially frowned upon. But the era also banned their way of life, pushed their children into "special schools" and denied that they were a people at all, and its collapse left them the first to lose everything.