The Rights of the Roma: The Struggle for Citizenship in Postwar Czechoslovakia 1107176271, 9781107176270

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The Rights of the Roma

The Rights of the Roma writes Romani struggles for citizenship into the history of human rights in socialist and post-socialist Eastern Europe. If Roma have typically appeared in human rights narratives as victims, Celia Donert here draws on extensive original research in Czech and Slovak archives, sociological and ethnographic studies, and oral histories to foreground Romani activists as subjects and actors. Through a vivid social and political history of Roma in Czechoslovakia, she provides a new interpretation of the history of human rights by highlighting the role of socialist regimes in constructing social citizenship in postwar Eastern Europe. The post-socialist human rights movement did not spring from the dissident movements of the 1970s, but rather emerged in response to the collapse of socialist citizenship after 1989. This is a timely study in light of the major refugee crisis facing Europe, which raises questions about the historical roots of nationalist and xenophobic attitudes towards non-citizens. Celia Donert is Senior Lecturer at the University of Liverpool. She received her PhD from the European University Institute, Florence, and has held research fellowships in Berlin, Bratislava, Paris, Potsdam, and Prague.

Human Rights in History Edited by Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, University of California, Berkeley Samuel Moyn, Harvard University, Massachusetts This series showcases new scholarship exploring the backgrounds of human rights today. With an open-ended chronology and international perspective, the series seeks works attentive to the surprises and contingencies in the historical origins and legacies of human rights ideals and interventions. Books in the series will focus not only on the intellectual antecedents and foundations of human rights but also on the incorporation of the concept by movements, nation-states, international governance, and transnational law. A full list of titles in the series can be found at: www.cambridge.org/human-rights-history

The Rights of the Roma The Struggle for Citizenship in Postwar Czechoslovakia Celia Donert University of Liverpool

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107176270 DOI: 10.1017/9781316811641 © Celia Donert 2017 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2017 Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Donert, Celia, 1975– author. Title: The rights of the Roma : the struggle for citizenship in postwar Czechoslovakia / Celia Donert, University of Liverpool. Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom, New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, [2017] | Series: Human rights in history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017023933 | ISBN 9781107176270 (Hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Romanies–Czechoslovakia–History–20th century. | Romanies–Czechoslovakia–Legal status, laws, etc. | Romanies–Czechoslovakia–Political activity. | Czechoslovakia–Ethnic relations–History–20th century. Classification: LCC DX222 .D65 2017 | DDC 323.11914/97043709045–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017023933 ISBN 978-1-107-17627-0 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For my family

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements

page viii x

Introduction

1

1 Legacies of 1919

14

2 Stalinist Gypsy Workers

48

3 But Roma Are Rural!

84

4 Cracking Down on Nomadism

115

5 Into the 1960s: Politics Gets Personal

143

6 Prague Spring for Roma!

180

7 The 1970s: Human Rights, Minority Rights, Roma Rights?

214

8 Losing Rights after 1989?

247

Conclusion

271

Bibliography Index

277 295

vii

Figures

1.1 Gypsy identity card for Juraj Bogdan, issued 30 April 1929. From the collections of the Museum of Romani Culture, Brno, Czech Republic. page 27 2.1 The main characters in the film My Friend Fabián, played by Otto Lackovič and a young Dušan Klein. National Film Archives, Czech Republic. 57 2.2 Poster for the feature film My Friend Fabián, directed by Jirˇí Weiss, 1953. National Film Archives, Czech Republic. 58 2.3 Photograph from the set of My Friend Fabián, showing director Jirˇí Weiss in conversation with Romani actors, c. 1952. National Film Archives, Czech Republic. 60 2.4 The Květušín School of Peace and teacher Miroslav Dědič, 1950s. Private collection of Miroslav Dědič, Museum of Romani Culture, Brno. 73 3.1 Nursery school and blacksmith’s forge, Košariská, Slovakia, 1966. From the private collection of Dr. Emília Horváthová, Roma Institute, Bratislava, Slovak Republic. 103 4.1 Lovara, near Prˇíbram, Czechoslovakia, 1959. Nomadic Roma settled by the state. Photographer: Eva Davidová. From the Gypsy Lore Society Collections, University of Liverpool Special Collections and Archives. 128 5.1 Roma in Kendice, eastern Slovakia, 1960. Photographer: Eva Davidová. From the Gypsy Lore Society Collections, University of Liverpool Special Collections and Archives. 160 5.2 Exhibition of photographs by Eva Davidová entitled Gypsies yesterday, today and tomorrow, Košice, Czechoslovakia, 1962. Photographer: Eva Davidová. From the Gypsy Lore Society Collections, University of Liverpool Special Collections and Archives. 161

viii

List of Figures

ix

6.1 Founding congress of the Czech Union of Gypsies-Roma (Svaz Cikánů-Romů, SCR), 29 August 1969, Brno. Ing. Miroslav Holomek elected president of the SCR. From the collections of the Museum of Romani Culture. Photographer: Andrˇej Pešta. 190 8.1 Founding congress of the Roma Civic Initiative (Romská občanská iniciativa, ROI), Palác Eden, Prague, 1990. From left: Karel Holomek, Emil Ščuka. From the collections of the Museum of Roma Culture. Photographer: Petr Matička. 252 C.1 Author and activist Elena Lacková, Prešov, 1990. From the collections of the Museum of Roma Culture. Photographer: František Sysel. 274

Acknowledgements

Over the years I have accumulated too many debts to thank everyone who has helped to shape the arguments in this book. My greatest thanks go to Victoria de Grazia, my dissertation supervisor at the European University Institute in Fiesole, Italy, for her unwavering support and patience. I am very grateful to the members of my dissertation committee, Eagle Glassheim, Michael Stewart, and Philipp Ther, for their thoughtful comments. I have benefitted enormously from presenting my work in various forums, including the research project on Socialist Dictatorship as Sinnwelt at the Institute for Contemporary History in Prague; the Transformation of the Political research group at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam; the interdisciplinary research group on Civil Society, Citizenship and Political Mobilization at the Wissenschaftszentrum für Sozialforschung in Berlin; the Marie Curie European Doctorate in the Social History of Europe and the Mediterranean at the Slovak Academy of Sciences; the Marie Curie European Protest Movements network; and the ÉHÉSS in Paris. I am particularly grateful to all those who have assisted my research in the Czech and Slovak Republics, especially the staff of the National Archives in Prague, the Slovak National Archives in Bratislava and in Košice, the archivists at the Museum of Romani Culture in Brno, and at the Romani Institute in Bratislava. I am indebted to Dr. Eva Davidová, Josef Koudelka, the Rómsky Inštitút, the Museum of Romani Culture, and the Czech National Film Archive for permission to use the photographs in this book. Every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright holders prior to publication. I owe a great deal to conversations with Ilsen About, Yasar Abu Ghosh, Henriette Asséo, Michal Frankl, Jan Grill, Will Guy, Ana Kladnik, Pavel Kolárˇ, Michal Kopeček, Yaron Matras, Malgorzata Mazurek, Rastislav Pivonˇ, Filip Pospíšil, Michal Pullmann, Petr Roubal, Helena Sadílková, Matěj Spurný, and Michael Vorˇíšek. In Bratislava and Košice, I learnt a huge amount from Michal Barnovský, Arne Mann, and Anna Jurová. At Liverpool, Will Ashworth, Stephen Kenny, Eve Rosenhaft, and Nigel Swain kept me x

Acknowledgements

xi

going until the finish line, while Martin Conway, from afar, made sure I actually crossed it. Over the past few years, the European Academic Network on Romani Studies has been a source of inspiration and reflection. I would like to thank Deborah Gershenowitz and Michael Watson at Cambridge University Press, as well as the two anonymous readers, and above all Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, for their help and encouragement. Finally, I thank my family, who have lived with this book for far too long. Parts of this book draw on arguments that I have published elsewhere. Chapter 2 draws on my article ‘“The Struggle for the Soul of the Gypsy”: Marginality and Mass Mobilization in Stalinist Czechoslovakia’, Social History, 33:2 (2008), 123–144. An earlier version of Chapter 6 was published as ‘The Prague Spring and the “Gypsy Question”: A Transnational Challenge to the Socialist State’, in Hara Kouki and Eduardo Romanos (eds.), Protest without Borders: Contentious Politics in Europe since 1945 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 32–48, while the argument in Chapter 7 builds on an earlier article, published as ‘Charter 77 and the Roma: Human Rights and Dissent in Socialist Czechoslovakia’, in Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (ed.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 191–211.

Introduction

Roma have typically appeared at the centre of human rights stories as victims rather than actors. Advocacy organisations such as the European Roma Rights Center in Budapest speak about ‘Roma rights’ to draw attention to the multiple abuses of human rights that are inflicted daily upon Europe’s largest transnational minority. Just as Hannah Arendt spoke of stateless people in Europe after World War II as the litmus test of our ‘right to have rights’ by virtue of our humanity, so today the European Roma seem to embody the paradoxical failure of human rights to guarantee the humanity of those who most need their protection. The plight of Roma in Eastern Europe is often central to this story of Roma as victims, since it was after the collapse of Communism in 1989 that migrant Roma from former socialist countries such as Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, or Romania began appearing on the streets of Western European cities, sparking accusations in the media about begging, petty crime, and benefits fraud. More recently, stories about the internment of Roma migrants in camps in France and Italy have hit the headlines. Romani activists have been struggling to convince European policymakers to recognise Roma as victims of genocide during World War II; the European Parliament recognised the genocide of Roma only in 2015. As a result, Roma either have been vilified by populist politicians as a ‘menace’ or upheld as the quintessential human rights dilemma for democratic societies in a Europe that now encompasses the formerly socialist countries of East Central and South-Eastern Europe as members, or applicants for membership, in the European Union.1 Yet a far more complex history lies behind these preconceptions about ‘the Roma’ as an undifferentiated group of victims of human rights violations in twentieth-century Europe. In this largely forgotten history, 1

Michael Stewart (ed.), The Gypsy Menace: Populism and the New Anti-Gypsy Politics (London: Hurst, 2012); Eva Sobotka and Peter Vermeersch, ‘Governing Human Rights and Roma Inclusion: Can the EU be a Catalyst for Local Social Change?’ Human Rights Quarterly, 34 (2012), 800–822.

1

2

Introduction

Roma were not on the margins but at the very centre of struggles for citizenship rights as activists, intellectuals, workers, students, or women. Moreover, these struggles took place in a region that rarely enters into conventional narratives about human rights: state socialist Eastern Europe. The ‘people’s democracies’ established in the Soviet bloc after World War II were home to the largest Romani minorities on the continent. Today a large proportion of an estimated 10–12 million European Roma live in the post-socialist states, although the question of who counts as Roma remains highly politicised.2 Eastern Europe was also the region that bore the brunt of the most vicious occupation regimes and military conflict in Hitler’s empire. Between 1933 and 1945, more than 200,000 people were murdered as ‘Gypsies’ by the Nazis, their allies, and other states across Europe; many more were subjected to forced labour, arbitrary internment, sterilisation, or medical experiments.3 Persecution and mass murder, as paradigmatic of genocide as the Holocaust, cast a long shadow over the politics of identity and identification of European Roma after World War II. However, the relatively small number of histories of Roma in postwar Europe have centred on Germany and Austria, neglecting the experience of the much larger Romani communities in Eastern Europe. Claiming that socialism provided the ideology and mobilising power to reform society’s most oppressed groups, the Eastern European people’s democracies saw themselves at the vanguard of just policies to emancipate ‘citizens of Gypsy origin’ from their history of discrimination, a problem that prewar regimes had failed to address and one that continues to trouble liberal democracy in Europe today. Elena Lacková, who was twenty-seven at the time of the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, seemed to embody this promise of emancipation. Born in a Romani-speaking village in north-eastern Slovakia just after World War I, as a young woman she witnessed the persecution of Roma under the Slovak fascist state established during World War II. After creating a voluntary Roma theatre group that performed a play about Gypsies under the Tiso regime, she was feted by Communist officials as a model

2

3

The figure of 10–12 million Roma in Europe is cited by the European Commission and in Jean-Pierre Liégeois, The Council of Europe and Roma: 40 Years of Action (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2012). On the politics of statistics, see Mihai Surdu, Those Who Count: Expert Practices of Roma Classification (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2016). Estimates of the death toll vary greatly, from 96,000 to 500,000. See Anton WeissWendt (ed.), The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration (New York: Berghahn, 2013); Michael Zimmermann, Rassenutopie und Genozid: Die nationalsozialistische “Lösung der Zigeunerfrage” (Hamburg: Christians, 1996).

Introduction

3

‘citizen of gypsy origin’ who could help train other Roma as good socialist citizens. She worked as a cultural activist for the socialist government in Prešov and later in her life gained a degree from the prestigious Charles University in Prague. After 1989, however, the ideals that Lacková seemed to represent were discredited, redolent only of the paternalism and lack of freedom that had accompanied the socialist dream of liberation from oppression on the basis of class, race, or sex. Lacková’s life story is known mainly among scholars of Romani studies who have read her memoir, originally published in Czech and translated into English as A False Dawn: My Life as a Gypsy Woman in Slovakia.4 This moving book was based on interviews with Lacková conducted and edited by another woman who is a central character in this book: Milena Hübschmannová. Although not ‘ethnically’ Roma, Hübschmannová was fluent in Romani and became the leading expert on Romani language and culture in the former Czechoslovakia; after 1989 she founded a Romani Studies department at Charles University in Prague, one of the very few such departments anywhere in Europe. Hübschmannová was ten years younger than Lacková and grew up in a middle-class family in Prague. Her father was interned as a political prisoner during the Nazi occupation of Bohemia and Moravia. As a young woman, Hübschmannová threw herself into studying Indian languages at Charles University. Since her father’s background marked her out as politically unreliable, Hübschmannová was unable to pursue her dream of travelling and working in India and instead embraced Romani culture within the borders of Czechoslovakia as her life’s passion. Against the assimilationist policies of the socialist state – which Roma activists of Lacková’s generation often supported – Hübschmannová remained deeply committed to an ethnonationalist belief that Roma were a nation originating from an Indian homeland and unified by language, customs, and even physical characteristics. By the 1970s, a new generation of Romani activists with no personal memories of the war or prewar years began to take a more critical view of the socialist state’s assimilationist approach to the so-called Gypsy Question. Anna Klempárová was a young journalist working for a regional party newspaper in eastern Slovakia when she managed to circumvent the official restrictions on foreign travel to attend the World Romani Congress in Geneva in 1979. There she witnessed the high point of efforts by a new international Romani movement – largely led by Eastern European Roma – to gain collective rights as a nation. After the collapse 4

Elena Lacková, A False Dawn: My Life as a Gypsy Woman in Slovakia (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2000); Elena was known to friends and family as Ilona.

4

Introduction

of socialism, Klempárová (now Koptová) became the first Slovak MP who publicly self-identified as Roma. In subsequent years she petitioned the United Nations to recognise Slovakia’s institutionalised discrimination against Romani citizens and founded a private Roma secondary school in Košice. The lives and activism of these three women connect the social history of Roma in socialist Eastern Europe to larger histories of human rights, showing how Roma have actively sought to redefine the meaning of citizenship and minority rights over the course of the twentieth century. Why Roma Rights Matter to the Human Rights Story The story of Roma rights is a crucial chapter in the larger history of human rights that scholars such as Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Samuel Moyn, and Jan Eckel have begun to write over the past decade. Challenging our assumption that human rights exist as the unquestioned doxa of our times, these histories argue instead that our contemporary notions of universal rights emerged as a result of ‘concrete political struggles among social actors in particular times and places’.5 Human rights are not simply legal or moral abstractions but are fundamentally historical. Samuel Moyn has argued in The Last Utopia that human rights in their current form – understood as individual rights granted to every person beyond the nation state – have existed only since the 1970s. The loss of faith in revolutionary socialism among Western intellectuals, Moyn argues, was one of the factors that resulted in the breakthrough of human rights as a utopian politics of morality in that decade.6 In a recent essay, Stefan Hoffmann pushes this historical revisionism even further and suggests that we cannot speak of human rights as a ‘basic concept’ in global politics until the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War. Coinciding with a historiographical shift towards memory and genocide studies, Hoffmann writes, ‘“trauma”, “victimhood” and “witnessing” became the key words used to create a way of coming to terms with the past, oriented especially around the Holocaust as the event from which human rights had supposedly emerged’.7

5

6 7

Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ‘Introduction: Genealogies of Human Rights’, in Hoffmann (ed.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ‘Human Rights and History’, Past and Present, 232:1 (2016), 279–310.

Why Roma Rights Matter

5

At first glance, the history of ‘the East European Roma’ seems to fit neatly into the moral narratives about the crimes of Nazism and Stalinism, genocide, and ethnic cleansing that legitimated the emergence of human rights after the Cold War. Moreover, the perception that Roma epitomise the suffering victims of human rights violations in Europe today illuminates another crucial aspect of this story: human rights since the 1990s have gained moral traction not only by appealing to past suffering but also through their connection to the ‘new humanitarianism’ that centres on the suffering of individual victims and displays of physical and psychological proof of persecution and trauma.8 This observation is amply borne out by the rhetoric and images about Roma deployed by the numerous non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and advocacy organisations that have sprung up to campaign on their behalf since the 1990s. Studies by legal scholars and political scientists have also documented the failure of international law and neo-liberal economic policies to protect the rights of Roma in post-socialist Europe.9 However, they tend not to ask why or how the supposed ‘problem’ of Roma ended up being framed in the language of human rights. Against these images of Roma as victims, this book reinstates activists such as Elena Lacková as political subjects rather than objects of humanitarian empathy. This story also matters for another reason. It sheds light on the crucial – but often forgotten – role of socialist regimes in developing their own vision of human rights in national and international politics during the Cold War. The reasons for this neglect are not hard to fathom. During the Cold War, legal scholars of human rights in the United States or Western Europe positioned Soviet ideology in opposition to Western freedom and democracy when writing about the rise of human rights after 1945.10 Many of the founding legal conventions of the postwar human rights order, from the European Convention on Human Rights to the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees, were aimed at containing Communism as well as fascism in Western Europe after World War II.11 8 9

10 11

Hoffmann, ibid. Helen O’Nions, Minority Rights Protection in International Law: The Roma of Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2007); Huub van Baar, The European Roma: Minority Representation, Memory and the Limits of Transnational Governmentality (PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 2011); Nidhi Trehan and Nando Sigona (eds.), Romani Politics in Europe: Poverty, Ethnic Marginalization and the Neoliberal Order (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009). Louis Henkin, The Rights of Man Today (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1978); Louis Henkin, The Age of Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). For a more complex interpretation, see Marco Duranti, The Conservative Human Rights Revolution: European Identity, Transnational Politics, and the Origins of the European Convention (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); on the Geneva convention, see

6

Introduction

Totalitarianism, a term used by political scientists during the 1950s to describe the total domination of society by the state in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, was contested by a wave of self-described ‘revisionist’ historians in the 1970s who sought to write a social history of the Soviet Union from below. But the term was revived again after 1989, this time by historians in East Central Europe seeking to draw a thick line around the periods of both German occupation and Communist rule. It was institutionalised in the government-funded institutes that were set up across the post-socialist countries to document, prosecute, and commemorate the crimes of Communism and Nazism and thus to separate the post-socialist present from the not-so-distant socialist past.12 By showing how activists, government officials, dissidents, and ordinary citizens – both Romani and non-Romani – struggled to define citizenship rights for Roma in postwar Czechoslovakia, this book refocuses attention on the history of social citizenship under socialism after 1945. Conceptions of rights in socialist regimes were embedded in a Marxist philosophy that emphasised the materiality of rights as entitlements guaranteed by the socialist state. Rather than legal or moral abstractions protecting individual citizens from the state, rights under socialism provided access to goods and services – such as health care, education, food, or housing – provided by the state in return for citizens fulfilling their collective duty to work. Against Cold War narratives that viewed human rights as a symbol of Western freedom and democracy in the ideological clash against totalitarianism, historians such as Benjamin Nathans, Mark Smith, Paul Betts, and Ned Richardson-Little have shown that the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic developed discourses of rights that aligned with Marxist values.13 With a focus on postwar Czechoslovakia, this book demonstrates that discourses of rights were not the monopoly of states in the Eastern bloc, and that ordinary people also struggled to claim rights of social citizenship under socialism.

12

13

Gerard Daniel Cohen, In War’s Wake: Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). More broadly, see Michal Pullmann, Konec experimentu: Prˇestavba a pád komunismu v Československu (Prague: Scriptorium, 2011); Michal Kopeček and Piotr Wciślik (eds.), Thinking Through Transition: Liberal Democracy, Authoritarian Pasts and Intellectual History in East Central Europe after 1989 (Budapest: CEU Press, 2015). Benjamin Nathans, ‘Soviet Rights Talk in the Post-Stalin Era’, in Hoffmann (ed.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 166–190; Mark B. Smith, ‘Social Rights in the Soviet Dictatorship: The Constitutional Right to Welfare from Stalin to Brezhnev’, Humanity, 3:3 (2012), 385–406; Paul Betts, ‘Socialism, Social Rights, Human Rights: The Case of East Germany’, Humanity, 3:3 (2012), 407–426; Ned Richardson-Little, ‘Dictatorship and Dissent: Human Rights in East Germany in the 1970s’, in Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn (eds.), The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).

Why Roma Rights Matter

7

Czechoslovakia has frequently appeared as a victim in narratives about human rights and dictatorship in twentieth-century Europe. One of the multi-ethnic but notionally ‘national’ states created out of the ruins of the continental empires of the Habsburgs, the Ottomans, the Hohenzollerns, and the Romanovs after World War I, Czechoslovakia was known as the ‘island of democracy’ in interwar East Central Europe – an image carefully crafted by Czech politicians of the First Republic.14 Following the dismemberment and occupation of the country by Nazi Germany after the Munich Agreement of 1938, the 1948 Communist coup in Czechoslovakia was a watershed in Western states’ treatment of displaced persons, as attention swiftly turned from protecting survivors of the Nazi camps to providing sanctuary for escapees from political repression in the totalitarian East. Western perceptions of ‘dissidence’ were subsequently cemented by the 1968 Prague Spring, the Charter 77 movement led by Václav Havel, and the non-violent Velvet Revolution of 1989. But a recent wave of scholarship by social historians has challenged these narratives.15 Tara Zahra, for example, has demonstrated that the revered First Czechoslovak Republic of the interwar era was far more indebted to collectivist notions of democracy, in which citizens accessed their rights through membership in a national community, than to liberal individualism.16 The continuities between the interwar, wartime, and postwar periods are much starker when viewed through the prism of ethnic and social cleansing, as Eagle Glassheim and Matěj Spurný have shown; the ‘liquidation’ of class enemies under socialism rested on a longer tradition of ‘liquidating’ enemies of the nation, including the expulsion of three million German-speakers by presidential decree in 1945–1946.17 During the Cold War, émigrés in the West constructed an image of Czechoslovakia as a victim of Communism that was at odds with the relative satisfaction of many Czechoslovak citizens with the quiet lives they enjoyed under socialist rule.18

14 15 16 17

18

Andrea Orzoff, Battle for the Castle: The Myth of Czechoslovakia in Europe, 1914–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Mary Heimann, Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls. National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). Eagle Glassheim, ‘Ethnic Cleansing, Communism and Environmental Devastation in Czechoslovakia’s Borderlands, 1948–1989,’ The Journal of Modern History 78 (March 2006), 65–92; Matěj Spurný, Nejsou jako my. Česká společnost a menšiny v pohraničí (1945–1960) (Prague: Antikomplex, 2011). Muriel Blaive, Une déstalinisation manquée: Tchécoslovaquie 1956 (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 2004); Paulina Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010).

8

Introduction

Socialism, Social Rights, National Rights Socialist attempts to extend citizenship rights to Roma were replete with contradictions, as discourses of equal rights jostled with deeply paternalist notions about Roma as ‘citizens-in-training’. Assimilationist notions of citizenship promoted by the socialist state existed in tension with Romani activists’ nationalist ideals of collective rights to language and culture. This mingling of paternalism and a commitment to equality was evident in the way official agents of the state viewed Roma citizens, as illustrated by the remarks of a Czech civil servant responsible for educational work with national minorities at the height of Stalinism in 1953. Travelling to remote Slovakia, she was shocked to find communities of Slovak Roma who were still living in remote settlements, the legacy of eviction and ghettoisation in the wartime Slovak Republic. She saw emaciated children covered with ulcers and sores who were terrified when ‘white men’ approached. Local officials, she reported, would only allow her to visit the local Gypsy settlement with an armed guard, who fired off a couple of shots as they approached. Speaking to these people in Romani, however, elicited joyful responses of Buťake bacht! Česť práci!’ [Honour to work, a Communist greeting, in Romani and Slovak]. Many of them have worked in Bohemia, in the towns, or in the war. They have already known another life, they know their rights, they were conscious that their situation is unjust. They want to live among the others, to build, to move, to work; they want a new life. ‘We don’t want to live like gypsies, but like white people. Give us that chance!’ We heard the same words from all of them, in them all we saw the same eager desire for a new life.19

Socialist legality, as a means of guaranteeing rights to welfare and disciplining social deviance, was crucial for maintaining stability in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere in the Eastern bloc after the political violence and extrajudicial repression of Stalinism. In the Soviet Union, socialist legality had been invoked by Vyshinski during the Terror of the 1930s and was revived by Khrushchev after the death of Stalin. Socialist states did not have the rule of law, writes Hoffmann, but they did have laws, and these became increasingly important as a means of maintaining stability and social order. This was the context in which alternative and oppositional social movements emerged during the last decades of socialist rule, such as the Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia.20 Mistakenly interpreted at the time by Western observers as a revival of a post-national ‘civil society’, as Michal Kopeček and Jonathan Bolton 19 20

Národní Archiv (NA) Praha, f. Ministerstvo kultury, kart. 231, inv. č. 352. Peter Bugge, ‘Normalization and the Limits of the Law: The Case of the Czech Jazz Section’, East European Politics and Societies, 22:2 (2008), 282–318.

Socialism, Social Rights, National Rights

9

have observed, Czech dissidents such as Václav Havel were influenced more by ideals of authenticity and community drawn from existentialism and phenomenology – as well as older discourses of national identity – than the liberal notion of ‘human dignity’ mentioned in the 1975 Helsinki Final Act as the legitimating principle of individual human rights.21 The story of Romani activism challenges the ‘Helsinki narrative’ that has been so influential in studies of human rights activism in late socialist Eastern Europe.22 During the 1970s, Eastern European Roma were at the head of a new international movement battling for minority rights for the Romani nation. With the turn to individual human rights at the United Nations after World War II, following the catastrophic failure of the collective minority rights regime, Stalinist conceptions of national cultural rights – underpinned by social and economic rights backed up by material guarantees from the socialist state – represented a possible alternative for Romani activists in postwar Europe. Roma had been largely excluded from the first system of minority rights protection in Europe, established after 1919 to secure the peace in Eastern Europe under the oversight of the League of Nations. Socialist and post-colonial states achieved recognition for the right to national self-determination at the United Nations in 1960 as Article I of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. Decolonisation played a crucial role in establishing the universality of human rights, Steven Jensen has argued, by providing opportunities for states from the global South to redefine the human rights project around race and religion.23 For the countries of the South – as for the Soviet bloc – collective social and economic rights remained at the forefront of the human rights idea between the 1940s and the 1970s. Collective recognition as a nation as a means of gaining citizenship rights for Roma around the world was the ideal that motivated the Yugoslav and Czechoslovak activists who were among the leaders of the international Romani movement during the 1970s.

21

22 23

The life world of Czech dissidents has been explored by Jonathan Bolton, Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, the Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), while the broader context of Czech culture during normalisation is brilliantly dissected in Paulina Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010). On the revival of national discourses by Czech dissidents, see Michal Kopeček, ‘Human Rights Facing a National Past: Dissident “Civic Patriotism” and the Return of History in East Central Europe, 1968–1989’ , Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 38:4 (2012), 573–602. See Sarah Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of The Helsinki Network (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Steven Jensen, The Making of International Human Rights: The 1960s, Decolonization, and the Reconstruction of Global Values (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

10

Introduction

In this book I draw on a wide range of archival sources, memoirs, propaganda, press reports, photographs and films, interviews, and contemporary social science texts to trace the evolution of state and social responses to the so-called Gypsy Question in Czechoslovakia from 1919 until the late 1990s. At the heart of this story is a network of activists, some of whom were Roma, who saw the Gypsy Question as a social, political, and moral challenge for the socialist state and its citizens. Studies by Czech and Slovak historians, ethnographers, linguists, and anthropologists have focused on the history of Roma as a minority group; this book is indebted to such scholarship – conducted both during and after the socialist era – as well as to the important collection of documents from Slovak archives compiled by Anna Jurová.24 Archival research and fieldwork conducted by the British sociologist Will Guy in Czechoslovakia in the early 1970s was invaluable for understanding the implementation of policies on the ground.25 This book complements these studies by placing the history of Roma in both the Czech and Slovak republics within a broader social, political, and international history, combining a narrative about the evolution of state policy with an exploration of the effects of policy on everyday life, as well as on broader international debates about human rights. An excellent study of the history of Czechoslovak Roma under socialism by Věra Sokolová has argued that the state’s official ideology of equality provided space for racist ideas about Gypsies to be reconfigured as ‘cultural deviance’ by local agents of the state, such as doctors, social workers, and teachers.26 Drawing on an extensive analysis of the shifting social policies targeting Roma in areas such as child welfare, education, and health care, especially from the 1960s, my argument in this book is somewhat different. I suggest instead that the official ideology of the socialist state was itself changing in the post-Stalin era. This interpretation chimes with recent scholarship on the social and cultural history of Czechoslovak socialism by historians such as Pavel Kolárˇ, Michal Pullmann, and Matěj Spurný.27 This book also places the history of Roma in socialist Czechoslovakia in a broader transnational perspective, 24

25 26 27

Nina Pavelčíková, Romové v českých zemích v letech 1945–1989 (Prague: Úrˇad dokumentace a vyšetrˇování zločinů komunismu, 2004); Anna Jurová, Vývoj rómskej problematiky na Slovensku po roku 1945 (Bratislava: Goldpress Publishers, 1993); Anna Jurová, Rómska Problematika, 1946–1967: Dokumenty (Prague: Ústav pro soudobé dějiny, 1996). Will Guy, ‘The Attempt of Socialist Czechoslovakia to Assimilate Its Gypsy Population’ (Bristol: PhD dissertation, University of Bristol, 1977). Věra Sokolová, Cultural Politics of Ethnicity: Discourses on Roma in Communist Czechoslovakia (Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2008). Michal Pullmann, ‘Sociální dějiny a totalitněhistorické vyprávění’, Soudobé dějiny, 15:3–4 (2008), 703–717; Michal Pullmann, Konec experimentu: Prˇestavba a pád komunismu v

Socialism, Social Rights, National Rights

11

emphasising the circulation of policies and practices between East and West but also between the pre-socialist, socialist, and post-socialist eras.28 Seen in this light, the period of socialist rule appears as an episode in a much longer history of Romani struggles over citizenship, dating back to the formation of nation states in East Central Europe after 1918.29 Even in the most liberal of modern societies citizenship is not ‘a fixed and unitary term’, the historian Elizabeth Wood has argued in a study of the gendered dimension of citizenship in the early Soviet Union, and is best viewed in both political and social terms, not only ‘who can vote, but also who can receive social services from the state and on what terms, who is required to serve the state and in what capacities’. Thus citizens do not simply ‘belong’ to their states, but states also make certain promises to their citizens.30 Not only the Soviet Union but also authoritarian regimes throughout the twentieth century created versions of citizenship that were ‘stronger on obligations than on rights from the citizen’s perspective’.31 Within a centrally planned economy managed by a Communist Party dictatorship, struggles for ‘citizenship’ were not based on a liberal understanding of the rights-bearing individual. The Romani activists who form the core of this book did, however, attempt to lobby regional councils or central party organisations to secure a more equitable allocation of social goods for the Roma, such as housing, within the planned economy. In addition, activists petitioned the party for permission to establish collective organisations that would support Romani culture and language, not in the name of a Romani ‘identity’ but to promote social welfare among the poorest Roma and so that the Czechoslovak Roma should become ‘full citizens of our socialist homeland’. When such attempts failed, the principle of self-help [svépomoc] was increasingly invoked. During the Velvet Revolution, when popular mobilisation toppled the Communist regime in November 1989, Romani

28

29

30 31

Československu (Prague: Scriptorium, 2011); Matěj Spurný, Nejsou jako my: Česká společnost a menšiny v pohraničí (1945–1960) (Prague: Antikomplex, 2011). The approach taken in this book is therefore different from the explicitly comparative approach to ‘regime types’ in Zoltan D. Barany, The East European Gypsies: Regime Change, Marginality and Ethnopolitics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). More broadly, see Dieter Gosewinkel and Matěj Spurný, ‘Citoyenneté et expropriation en Tchécoslovaquie au lendemain des deux guerres mondiales’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 61:1 (2014), 26–61; Natali Stegmann, Kriegsdeutungen, Staatsgründungen, Sozialpolitik: Der Helden- und Opferdiskurs in der Tschechoslowakei 1918–1948 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2010); Martin Dean, Constantin Goschler, and Philipp Ther, Robbery and Restitution: The Conflict over Jewish Property in Europe (New York: Berghahn, 2007). Elizabeth Wood, ‘The Trial of the New Woman: Citizens-in-Training in the New Soviet Republic’, Gender and History, 13:3 (November 2001), 527–528. Charles Tilly, Identities, Boundaries and Social Ties (Boulder and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2005), especially chapter 12 – ‘Why worry about citizenship?’ (187–198).

12

Introduction

activists stood side by side with Civic Forum and Public Against Violence to call for a revival of the civic principle that had been crushed by bureaucracy and ‘inhumanness’ during late socialism.32 It was the collapse of this vision, as the civic reform movements split into more narrowly focused political parties rallying around slogans of ethnic nationalism, that resulted in the reinvention of the Gypsy Question as a European human rights issue during the 1990s. Chapter Synopsis The first chapter of this book argues that it is impossible to understand the politics of Roma rights under state socialism without looking back to the much longer history of attempts to ‘solve the Gypsy Question’ in Eastern Europe. Wartime persecution and postwar policies towards Roma were shaped by legislation, policies, and social attitudes dating back to the nineteenth century but exacerbated by the state-building projects of nationalising states in East Central Europe after 1919. The second chapter argues that the ‘Gypsy’, paradoxically, became the ideal Stalinist citizen in postwar Eastern Europe, ripe for emancipation from the class and racial oppression of the past. Given that Stalinist visions for the Gypsy population were based on industrial labour as central to refashioning links between the state and worker-citizens, Chapter 3 asks how such policies were translated in the countryside, where the vast majority of Eastern European Roma lived. Government-sponsored police campaigns to crack down on ‘nomadism’ spread widely across socialist Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1950s. As a result, almost all traditionally itinerant Roma were forced to settle. Chapter 4 demonstrates that post-Stalinist socialist regimes attempted to legitimise these often violent campaigns under the rubric of socialist legality. Moving into the 1960s, Chapter 5 charts a surprising shift to a politics of ‘care’ for Romani citizens and the regressive impact of de-Stalinisation for Roma rights, parallel to the impact of de-Stalinisation for women. This chapter uses a range of archival sources to explore the genesis of a semi-official policy of coercive sterilisation of Romani women in debates about social policy during the 1960s. The Prague Spring is one of the most celebrated moments of Czechoslovak history and central to the standard narratives of ‘1968’ in both Eastern and Western Europe, but what did it mean for the Roma? 32

James Krapfl, Revolution with a Human Face: Politics, Culture and Community in Czechoslovakia, 1989–1992 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013).

Chapter Synopsis

13

Chapter 6 shows how Czech and Slovak Roma seized the moment by founding their own collective union and calling for constitutionally guaranteed citizenship rights. Roma politics took an unprecedented turn in the 1970s when Roma activists in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Western Europe discovered human rights. Chapter 7 seeks to dispel the myth that only dissidents such as Václav Havel were championing human rights in 1970s Eastern Europe, emphasising instead that a range of social actors were latching onto human rights without necessarily embracing the liberal nationalist concept of ‘civil society’ or challenging the socialist system. The closing chapter again broadens the perspective and provides a comparative overview of the apparent explosion of Roma rights – and wrongs – in post-socialist Eastern Europe. The backdrop is not the victorious street scenes of 1989, where crowds cheer for democracy, but rather the slow unravelling of the socialist state and its way of life throughout the 1990s, bringing in its wake a host of tantalising civil and political rights and freedoms but also the collapse of the universal guarantees of minimum standards of living and, especially for the Roma, a spiral of populism, racism, and violence that the welfare dictatorships had been seeking, increasingly ineffectually, to repress.

1

Legacies of 1919

Just a few years after the end of World War II a young Slovak woman saw her first play performed in Prešov, a provincial town in north-eastern Czechoslovakia. The Burning Gypsy Camp dramatised the persecution of Gypsies by the fascist Hlinka Guard in wartime Slovakia. Born in 1921, Elena Lacková had grown up in a Romani-speaking village in Šariš, a hilly, multilingual region dotted with spa towns, castles, and picturesque wooden churches. The small town of Veľký Šariš, where Lacková grew up, had a significant Romani community since at least the eighteenth century; on the eve of World War II, a large number of Romani men were genteel, well-regarded, professional musicians (lavutari) who performed at weddings, sports events, and community festivals.1 During the wartime Slovak Republic, the Roma of Veľký Šariš were expelled from their homes to a remote settlement in the forest. In common with the majority of Slovak Roma, they largely escaped deportation to concentration camps outside Slovakia; some were assigned to domestic labour camps, while others were protected by municipal authorities who were used to relying on Roma workers as a valuable source of labour in the Slovak countryside. After the war, Elena Lacková set up a theatre group for Roma, which attracted the attention of Slovak Communist activists. She was offered a position as a cultural activist in Prešov after the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia established a new socialist republic in February 1948. Photographs of the time show a modern, emancipated young woman in a neat shift dress, who bore no resemblance to the wild, sexualised images of Gypsy women that have been so central to European popular culture since the nineteenth century. In every respect, Lacková seemed to embody the ideal of the new socialist citizen. Elena Lacková was one of hundreds of thousands of Eastern European Roma who experienced the persecution and violence directed at ‘Gypsies’ in Nazi-dominated Europe. In the aftermath of World War II 1

David Scheffel, ‘Belonging and domesticated ethnicity in Veľký Šariš, Slovakia’, Romani Studies 5, 25:2 (2015), 115–149.

14

Legacies of 1919

15

and the mass deportations and population movements of the postwar years, Roma were perhaps more visible than ever before in the ethnically cleansed societies of East Central Europe. Some of the largest Romani communities in Europe were living in the territories that fell into the Soviet zone of influence after the war. But the history of Roma under socialist rule can be understood only in a much longer perspective. This approach also challenges conventional narratives of state socialism in Czechoslovakia, which conventionally began in February 1948, when the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia established a dictatorship in the country once known as an ‘island of democracy’ in interwar East Central Europe.2 For communists, the Gypsy paradoxically represented the ideal socialist citizen, ripe for emancipation from the capitalist class oppression of the past. In 1956, the Czechoslovak Ministry for Education and Culture published a textbook called the History of Our Gypsies, which represented the history of Czechoslovak Roma as a story of exploitation and discrimination, culminating with fascism and suddenly ending when the People’s Democracy declared Gypsies to be ‘citizens with equal rights’.3 Against Cold War accounts that dismissed Stalinist rhetoric about citizenship as mere window dressing for totalitarian regimes, the story of Elena Lacková shows that Roma actively shaped notions of socialist citizenship, not only in law but through practices of cultural activism and social mobilisation. Citizenship was understood not so much as an end point but rather a process of becoming socialist. Understanding the complex relationship between socialist regimes and Roma citizens is impossible, however, without appreciating the extent to which the persecution of Gypsies under fascist rule was rooted in a much longer history of attempts by states and societies to solve the Gypsy Question in Europe since the late nineteenth century. Policies targeting Gypsies in Germany from the 1930s drew on varied traditions of excluding these ‘ordinary’ strangers by police, medical, and labour agencies that long predated the Third Reich.4 The absence of a central plan for the 2

3 4

This is particularly the case for histories of Communist Czechoslovakia written during the Cold War, often by Czech émigré or exile historians but was revived during the 1990s / 2000s by the creation of state-sponsored research institutes on the ‘crimes of Communism’ and ‘totalitarianism’. The Czech Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (ÚSTR) was established by a 2007 Act of Parliament to study the periods of Communist and Nazi rule, ‘which between 1938–1945 and 1948–1989 suppressed human rights and rejected the principles of democratic states’. (Zákon 181/2007 Sb. o Ústavu pro studium totalitních režimů a o Archivu bezpečnostních složek a o změně některých zákonů.) Zdenˇka Jamnická-Šmerglová, Dějiny našich Cikánů (Prague: Orbis, 1955). Eve Rosenhaft, ‘Blacks and Gypsies in Nazi Germany: The Limits of the “Racial State”’, History Workshop Journal, 72 (Autumn 2011), 161–70.

16

Legacies of 1919

extermination of all Gypsies in Nazi-occupied Europe, as well as the systematic persecution in countries that remained neutral, raises questions about the role of local states and societies in the Roma Holocaust that historians have only recently begun to explore. New research is also revealing the extent of the violence against Gypsies on the eastern front.5 For decades after the war, however, the assumption that Gypsies were persecuted as criminals and ‘asocials’ rather than as victims of racial discrimination continued to influence claims for compensation and commemoration, as well as the experiences of Roma across Europe in everyday life.6

Illiberal Internationalism: Solving the Gypsy Question in Eastern Europe Before 1938 Long before the advent of the Third Reich, states across Europe had developed their own methods of solving the Gypsy Question, characterised above all by attempts to control the ‘wandering Gypsy’. Regulating the movement of vagrants (a category into which Gypsies were typically – though inaccurately – subsumed) was viewed as a crucial function of the early modern state. During the eighteenth century, the reforming Habsburg monarchs Maria Theresa and Joseph II introduced laws to settle Gypsies and turn them into citizens, prohibiting the use of Romani in public and threatening those who disobeyed with the removal of their children into orphanages. Partly as a result of these coercive assimilation campaigns, the vast majority of Gypsies in the Kingdom of Hungary gave up their itinerant lifestyles and settled in small hamlets, often on the outskirts of the main village. In the Romanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, meanwhile, Gypsies were subject to a particular form of chattel slavery until the mid-nineteenth century, when the practice was abolished.7 From the 1860s, a wave of ‘Gypsy’ migration from the Romanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, as well as neighbouring regions such as Transylvania, Bessarabia, and Banat, provoked intolerant responses from police forces and regional state authorities in Austria-Hungary, Germany, and France. Gypsies in nationalising states such as Germany and Italy, as Jennifer Illuzzi has argued, were increasingly categorised 5

6 7

Anton Weiss-Wendt (ed.), The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013); Martin Holler, Der Nationalsozialistische Völkermord an den Roma in der Besetzten Sowjetunion (1941–1944) (Heidelberg: Dokumentations- und Kulturzentrum Deutscher Sinti und Roma, 2009). Julia von dem Knesebeck, The Roma Struggle for Compensation in Postwar Germany (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2011). Viorel Achim, The Roma in Romanian History (Budapest: CEU Press, 1998).

Illiberal Internationalism

17

as ‘foreign’ and stripped of citizenship rights, which placed them in an amorphous grey area outside the law.8 Whether the targets of these measures were professionally itinerant families of Kalderash Roma or simply economic migrants, the easiest crime for the authorities to prosecute was usually vagabondage. Arrests and prosecution were typically followed by expulsion or internment in a workhouse. Vagrancy and begging were criminalised in the Habsburg Empire, while expulsion across municipal borders was widely used as a means of getting rid of unwanted paupers. Poor relief was tied to legal residency in a particular municipality and was given only to those unable to work. Thus the eighteenth-century techniques of sedentarisation and expulsion across municipal boundaries were increasingly overtaken by a tendency to criminalise ‘Gypsy’ lifestyles.9 At the same time, the professionalisation of the police and the emergence of scientific disciplines such as criminology and anthropology resulted in a corpus of knowledge that created ‘the Gypsy’ as a category. In 1893, officials at the Royal Statistical Office in Budapest carried out a census of all Gypsies in Hungary, although other groups than Roma were included in the category of ‘Gypsy’. As Roma from Austria-Hungary and the Romanian principalities joined the great wave of European emigration to the United States from the 1860s, this uncertainty about the ethnic categorisation of Gypsies was translated on the other side of the Atlantic in U.S. immigration officials’ attitudes towards families of Kalderash and Vlach Roma who arrived at Ellis Island in the early twentieth century wearing colourful clothing and gold jewellery. Although Roma were not included in the racial categories used by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to classify immigrants, Adèle Sutre has noted that officials’ most frequent question to these new arrivals was, ‘Are you a Gypsy?’10 Already by the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘Gypsies’ were subject to the most stringent surveillance regimes in Europe; their association 8

9

10

Jennifer Illuzzi, Gypsies in Germany and Italy, 1861–1914: Lives Outside the Law (New York: Palgrave, 2014); Shannon Fogg, The Politics of Everyday Life in Vichy France: Foreigners, Undesirables, and Strangers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Volker Zimmermann, ‘“Zigeuner” als “Landplage”: Diskriminierung und Kriminalisierung von Sinti und Roma in Bayern und den böhmischen Ländern (Ende 19. Jahrhundert bis 1939)’, in Milan Hlavačka, Robert Luft, and Ulrike Lunow (eds.), Tschechien und Bayern: Gegenüberstellungen und Vergleiche vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: Verlag Collegium Carolinum, 2016), 207–223. Adèle Sutre, ‘“Are you a Gypsy?” L’identification des Tsiganes à la frontière américaine au tournant du XXe siècle’, Migrations Société, 26:152 (March–April 2014), 57–73; Adèle Sutre, ‘“They give a history of wandering over the world”: A Romani clan’s transnational movement in the early 20th century’, Quaderni storici, 2/2014, 471–498.

18

Legacies of 1919

with rootlessness and mobility excluded them from citizenship rights that were tied to residence in a particular locality.11 The criminalisation of ‘Gypsies’ on the basis of sociological and racial criteria attained greater force in an era when citizenship was defined in terms of membership of a particular nation.12 In 1899, a special unit for Combating the Gypsy Menace was set up at the police headquarters in Munich, maintaining a register of more than 3,000 names and detailed genealogical information on ‘Gypsy’ families.13 A 1912 French law on ‘nomades’ introduced anthropometric passports for itinerants. In the years leading up to World War I, Gypsies in Austria-Hungary were increasingly criminalised and targeted by legislation against vagrancy and the ‘work-shy’. The war provided a new opportunity for Habsburg officials to solve the ‘Gypsy Question’ through internment.14 In France, a concentration camp for Romanichal Gypsies from Alsace-Lorraine was established near the town of Crest from 1915 to 1919. Gypsies with German nationality who were arrested in the front-line zones were placed in internment camps for enemy civilians; those with French nationality were also arrested, however, on allegations of espionage, vagabondage, and doubts about their national identity.15 The peace settlement of 1919 marked an important caesura in the history of Eastern European Roma, as new states based on the principle of popular sovereignty and national self-determination were founded on the ruins of the multi-ethnic, dynastic empires of the Habsburgs, the Ottomans, the Hohenzollerns, and the Romanovs. The creation of new state borders, legal restrictions on migration, and the reintroduction of passport controls led to the emergence of statelessness as a mass phenomenon and sharply increased surveillance of people on the move.16

11

12 13 14

15 16

Henriette Asséo, ‘L’invention des “Nomades” en Europe au XXe siècle et la nationalisation impossible des Tsiganes’, in Gérard Noiriel (ed.), L’identification: Genèse d’un travail d’État (Paris: Bélin, 2007), 161–180. Leo Lucassen, ‘Zigeuner’: Die Geschichte eines polizeilichen Ordnungsbegriffes in Deutschland (1700–1945) (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau-Verlag, 1996). Lucassen, ‘Zigeuner’; Wim Willems, In Search of the True Gypsy: From Enlightenment to Final Solution (London: Frank Cass, 1997). Tara Zahra, ‘“Condemned to Rootlessness and Unable to Budge”: Roma, Migration Panics, and Internment in the Habsburg Empire’, American Historical Review, 122:3 (June 2017), 702–726. Emmanuel Filhol, Un camp de concentration français: Les Tsiganes alsaciens-lorrains à Crest, 1915–1919 (Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 2004). The history of statelessness and international legal orders in interwar Central Europe is a burgeoning research field; see also Matthew Frank and Jessica Reinisch, ‘Refugees and the Nation State in Europe, 1919–1959’, Journal of Contemporary History (Special Issue), 49:3 (2014), 477–490; Tara Zahra, ‘Travel Agents on Trial: Policing Mobility in Late Imperial Austria’, Past and Present, 223 (May 2014), 161–193. On practices of

Illiberal Internationalism

19

The ‘wandering Gypsy’ – romanticised as a symbol of freedom and institutionalised as a legal, administrative, and scientific category with the support of disciplines such as criminology, anthropology, and eugenics – was progressively excluded from citizenship rights in states across Europe.17 In reality, only a minority of Roma in East Central Europe travelled as a way of life in this period. However, by the 1930s, a radicalisation of policies towards Gypsies in democratic as well as authoritarian regimes laid the foundations for mass persecution and genocide during World War II.18 The language of ethnically defined majorities and minorities introduced by the Minority Rights Treaties that formed part of the peace settlement in Eastern Europe after 1919 bore little connection to the wide variety of Romani groups that were subsumed under the label of ‘the Gypsy’. In interwar Czechoslovakia, for example, the term ‘Gypsy’ (cikán) might refer to German-speaking Sinti in the Bohemian borderlands, settled Moravian Roma, Slovak- or Hungarian-speaking Roma, or peripatetic Vlach Roma. Most were speakers of Romani, in its many dialects, as well as the various languages of everyday use – Czech, German, Slovak, Ruthenian, or Hungarian – in their localities.19 Social relations between Romani groups – not only between Vlachs and settled Roma, for example, but within local communities – were complex, and shaped by internal hierarchies, affiliations, and distances. All constituted historically formed communities who had maintained their cultural identity in the interstices of modern society.20 Like Jews, Roma in interwar Europe were not so much nationally indifferent as caught between overlapping national loyalties and ethnic affiliations.21 Thus although only 8,728 people claimed Gypsy nationality

17

18 19

20 21

surveillance, see John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Michael Zimmermann (ed.), Zwischen Erziehung und Vernichtung. Zigeunerpolitik und Zigeunerforschung im Europe des 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007). Michael Zimmermann, Rassenutopie und Genozid: Die nationalsozialistische ‘Lösung der Zigeunerfrage’ (Hamburg: Christians, 1996). The history and status of Romanes as a language is central to past and present debates about Romani identity. See Yaron Matras, Romani: A Linguistic Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), especially chapters 2–3. This formulation is from Michael Stewart, The Time of the Gypsies (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997). On the complex national loyalties of Jews in interwar Czechoslovakia, see Rebekah Klein-Pejšová, Mapping Jewish Loyalties in Interwar Slovakia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015); Ines Koeltzsch, Geteilte Kulturen: Eine Geschichte der tschechisch-jüdisch-deutschen Beziehungen in Prag (1918–1938) (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2012); Katerˇina Čapková, Czechs, Germans, Jews? National Identity and the Jews of Bohemia (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012).

20

Legacies of 1919

in the 1921 Czechoslovak census, the numbers of people who identified as Roma in everyday life were much higher, especially in Slovakia. In some municipalities of eastern Slovakia and Transcarpathian Ruthenia, one in ten inhabitants was Roma, and in certain places, such as Ruskovce at the foot of the Vihorlat Mountains, Roma made up one-third of the local population.22 Unlike the Jews, however, Roma were left out of the diplomatic equation that balanced the territorial rights of majority nations against supranational guarantees of human rights for ‘minorities’ cut off from their kin-states by new political borders. The Roma had no territory and thus no kin-state to look after their interests. There were apparently no vocal lobby groups in New York, London, or Paris championing the rights of the Roma while the peacemakers negotiated the Minority Rights Treaties that were imposed on the successor states to the Habsburg Empire in East Central Europe and the Balkans. Even in Romania, home to the largest Romani population in the region, ‘Gypsies’ were seen as ‘powerless and easier to ignore than the Jews’.23 Only the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) actively supported Gypsies’ collective rights as a national minority in interwar Europe, although it is crucial to note that Roma in countries such as Romania were far from passive and in the late 1920s founded two nationwide civic unions demanding full citizenship rights for Roma, including recognition of the legacy of Gypsy slavery in the Romanian principalities until the nineteenth century.24 However, the Stalinist ‘affirmative action’ of the 1920s enabled Soviet Gypsies to establish a Romani theatre in Moscow, promote the study of Romanes, and attempt to balance the limits of Stalinist nationality policy with their public role as Soviet citizens.25 Based on the Leninist notion of self-determination, the Soviet model would later become a source of inspiration for Romani activists in socialist Czechoslovakia.26 22

23 24

25

26

A. Boháč, Národnostní mapa republiky československé (Prague: Nákladem Národopisné společnosti českoslovanské, 1926), 162–65, cited in René Petráš, Menšiny v meziválečném Československu: Právní postavení národnostních menšin v první Československé republice a jejich mezinárodněprávní ochrana (Prague: Karolinum, 2009), 277. Zara Steiner, The Lights That Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 269. Lucian N
astas
a and Andrea Varga (eds.), Minoritǎƫi etnoculturale, mǎrturii documentare: ƫiganii din România (1919–44) (Cluj-Napoca: Editura Centrul de Resurse pentru Diversitate Etnocultural
a, 2001). Brigid O’Keeffe, New Soviet Gypsies: Nationality, Performance, and Selfhood in the Early Soviet Union (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013); Alain Lemon, Between Two Fires: Gypsy Performance and Romani Memory from Pushkin to Post-Socialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). On the history of ‘self-determination’, see Jörg Fisch, The Right of Self-Determination of Peoples: The Domestication of an Illusion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

The ‘International Gypsy’ and Illiberal Internationalism

21

The ‘International Gypsy’ and Illiberal Internationalism in Interwar Europe A sensational criminal trial of Gypsies accused of cannibalism in the eastern Czechoslovak borderlands during the late 1920s exemplifies many of the factors that influenced perceptions of the Gypsy Question between the wars.27 In 1927, a spate of unexplained murders in the rural Slovak-Hungarian borderlands led to the arrest of a number of Gypsies from the small town of Moldava nad Bodvou. During the subsequent interrogation some of the men confessed to having not only killed but also eaten their victims. As well as recalling the blood libel against the Jews, the association of Gypsies with cannibalism had specific historical resonances: in the late eighteenth century, almost identical charges were brought against forty Hungarian Gypsies, who were then executed. But the fact that such a grisly crime had apparently taken place in the modern democratic state of Czechoslovakia was a particular shock for the civil servants and police officials dealing with the case. It aroused the attention of the international press, and the trial of the Moldava Cannibals was widely reported in newspapers around the world. During the court hearing, which dragged on for months, evidence emerged to suggest that the confessions had been extracted by force, and the references to cannibalism were quietly dropped. Smuggling and petty economic crime across a new state border in a contested, multi-ethnic border zone lay at the root of the case and not man-eating. The scandal surrounding the Moldava Trial influenced debates about a new Law on Nomadic Gypsies in the Czechoslovak parliament in the early summer of 1927, although pressure from the public – including calls for Gypsies to be interned in ‘concentration camps’ in the aftermath of World War I – had already pushed Czechoslovak officials and legislators to consider new methods of solving the Gypsy Question during the 1920s. The Ministry for the Unification of Legislation was particularly anxious that any new regulation should not be based only on previous Austrian legislation, which officials viewed as unenlightened and purely repressive. Czechoslovak diplomats abroad were therefore requested to send copies of foreign laws dealing with vagrancy, nomadism, the workshy, and Gypsies to the relevant ministries in Prague. ‘While we

27

Celia Donert, ‘Der “internationale Zigeuner” in der Tschechoslowakei: Eine transnationale Geschichte der Grenzkontrolle, 1918–1938’, in Christoph Duhamelle, Andreas Kossert, and Bernhard Struck (eds.), Grenzregionen: Ein europäischer Vergleich vom 18. bis 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2007), 295–314.

22

Legacies of 1919

recognise the validity of complaints about the crimes committed by gypsies we cannot only rely on the opinions held in the former monarchy,’ explained officials, ‘but we should rather proceed directly from the most recent legal norms and principles, which govern our state in a democratic way, and are surely of a higher cultural value from a social and progressive perspective.’28 Meanwhile, local authorities were advised to use the old ‘unenlightened’ Austrian techniques: police expulsions of Gypsies across municipal borders, labour camps, and surveillance of vagrants, as well as reviving the concept of Heimatrecht (Czech: domovské právo) or legal domicile in a municipality as the proof establishing an individual’s claim to national citizenship.29 Czechoslovakia inherited from imperial Austria an emphasis on legal domicile as the precondition for access to rights administered by municipal governments, such as participation in local elections, welfare entitlement, and protection against eviction.30 The right to domicile was gained through birth or by owning property and paying municipal taxes in a given community; many Roma who did not fulfil these criteria were left vulnerable to government edicts ordering local authorities to evict them.31 A Law on Wandering Gypsies, adopted by the Czechoslovak parliament in July 1927, sought to replace these older regulations.32 Proudly described by Czech Interior Ministry officials as ‘one of the first of its kind in Europe’, it was modelled largely on a Bavarian law of 1926, though legislators were also influenced by the French 1912 law on ‘nomades’. (A similar law was debated in Austria but rejected on the grounds that it would contravene constitutional principles of anti-discrimination.) It was included in a package of laws designed to increase state security through labour camps, expanded powers for the gendarmerie, and registration of citizens and foreigners, and the Ministry for the

28

29

30

31 32

NA Praha, Prˇedsednictvo ministerské rady (PMR), f. 1082, kart. 2514, sg. 404/33. Ministerstvo pro sjednocení zákonův a organizace správy to Ministerstvo vnitra: Omezení tuláctví a kočovného života lidí práce se štítících, zvláště cikánů, 16 January 1923. For the wider context, see Sigrid Wadauer, ‘The Usual Suspects: Begging and Law Enforcement in Interwar Austria’, in Andreas Gestrich and Jens Gründler (eds.), The Welfare State and the ‘Deviant Poor’ in Europe, 1870–1933 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 126–149. Scheffel, ‘Belonging and domesticated ethnicity’, 122; for a fuller discussion of Heimatrecht in Austria, see Waltraud Heindl and Edith Saurer (eds.), Grenze und Staat: Passwesen, Staatsbürgerschaft, Heimatrecht und Fremdengesetzgebung in der österreichischen Monarchie, 1780–1867 (Vienna: Böhlau, 2008). Scheffel, ‘Belonging and domesticated ethnicity’. Zákon ze 14.VII.1927 č. 117 Sb. o potulných cikánech.

The ‘International Gypsy’ and Illiberal Internationalism

23

Unification of Laws advised the Interior Ministry in 1927 that the Gypsy Law would have no effect if these other measures were not also adopted.33 Establishing the identity of ‘wandering Gypsies’ was seen as the key to controlling their movements and therefore reducing their ability to endanger public security. The gendarmerie was therefore given the power to detain Gypsies until their identity had been ascertained, using both anthropometry (favoured in France) and fingerprinting (a technique preferred in Germany), as well as the investigation of ‘special marks (scars, wounds, tattoos)’.34 The law defined ‘wandering Gypsies’ as ‘gypsies roaming from place to place and other vagrants avoiding work, who live in the gypsy way, and in both cases also those who have a permanent residence for part of the year – mainly in winter’. As an Interior Ministry report explained, this definition was only partly based on ‘race’; ‘a more precise definition of the concept of a gypsy and the gypsy life is not possible in the law, as it is partly a matter of science – ethnography – and partly of practice.’35 The law exemplified the tensions between biological-racial and socioethnographic criteria for distinguishing Gypsies, or persons living like Gypsies, from ‘honest travellers’. These tensions had remained unreconciled in many European states from the end of the nineteenth century, when the ‘Gypsy’ had become an increasingly important motif in the emerging discipline of criminal anthropology. While the biological or racial definition of a Gypsy gradually prevailed among politicians and scientists, police registration techniques continued to differentiate between travellers based on their lifestyle.36 The law aimed to enable the gendarmerie to identify ‘nomadic Gypsies’ and control their movements, partly based on ‘preventive’ measures (a Gypsy register, education) and partly on ‘repression’ (prohibition of nomadism without special permission, prohibition of travelling in groups larger than immediate family members). Persons defined as ‘Gypsies’ by the gendarmerie were obliged to carry a ‘Gypsy passport’, including the

33 34

35 36

NA Praha, PMR, f. 1082, kart. 1997, sg. 401/852, Ministry for the Unification of Laws to the Interior Ministry, 13 May 1927. On anthropometry in France, see Martine Kalusynski, ‘Republican Identity: Bertillonage as Government Technique’, in Jane Caplan and John Torpey (eds.), Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univeristy Press, 2001). NA Praha, Ministerstvo Spravedlnosti (MS), f. 832, kart. 562, Ministerstvo vnitra: Zákon o potulných cikánech a podobných tulácích. Důvodová zpráva. Leo Lucassen, Zigeuner: die Geschichte eines polizeilichen Ordnungsbegriffes in Deutschland (Weimar: Böhlau, 1996); on legislation in German states, see also Zimmermann, Rassenutopie, and Lewy, The Nazi Persecution.

24

Legacies of 1919

photograph, fingerprints, and detailed physical description of the bearer. Holders of ‘Gypsy passports’ were obliged to apply for a ‘travellers’ licence’ for themselves, their immediate family, animals, and wagons. The gendarmerie had the right to stipulate in the licence which routes the family could use, and municipalities could specify where travellers were able to camp, prohibit them from entering certain areas, and carry out health inspections whenever deemed appropriate. ‘Nomadic Gypsies’ were prohibited from carrying weapons. Penalties for breaking these rules ranged from placing travellers’ children in state institutions to imprisonment of up to three months. Children younger than fourteen were included on the passport until they were old enough to be issued their own, with the result that an administrative decision to classify a family as ‘Gypsy’ was transmitted through the generations.37 Newspaper reports about Gypsy cannibalism spread panic in neighbouring states. In Austria, a report in Der Montag on 16 May 1927 suggested police raids on Gypsies in Czechoslovakia might lead to a Gypsy ‘invasion’ of Austria.38 Sensationalist press coverage brought the Moldava Trial to the attention of Dr Bruno Schulz, the Austrian police chief and vice-president of the International Criminal Police Commission (ICPC, the forerunner of Interpol) in Vienna. It also caught the eye of the police chief in Berlin. Both asked the Czechoslovak police for more accurate information.39 The ICPC was founded in Vienna in 1923 to provide mutual assistance among national police institutions within the framework of national legal systems on violations of criminal law. It focused on improving police communications through modern technology, such as the telegraph and the telephone. Whereas international police cooperation in the nineteenth century had focused on crimes of a political nature, after World War I police officials claimed that cooperation should be extended, not only because of a wave of crime in the unsettled postwar years but due to the emergence of a ‘new class of criminals appearing in all countries undergoing rapid social change and technological progress, including particularly mobile criminals transcending nation state borders . . . the money swindlers, the passport, 37

38 39

The stigmatisation of families was common across Western Europe; see Ilsen About, ‘Unwanted “Gypsies”: The Restriction of Cross-Border Mobility and the Stigmatisation of Romani Families in Interwar Western Europe’, Quaderni Storici (Special Issue, ed. Henriette Asseo, Zingari: Una storia sociale), 2 (2014), 499–532. Der Montag, 16 May 1927, cited in Florian Freund, ‘Genocidal Trajectory’, 52. NA Praha, Presidium Ministerstva Vnitra (PMV), f. 1075/1, kart. 355, sg. XC/4/1: Mezinárodní kriminalně policejní komise. Dotaz člena pol. rˇed. Dr. Schultze ohledně procesu proti moldavským cikánům, 1 June 1929.

The ‘International Gypsy’ and Illiberal Internationalism

25

check and currency forgers, the hotel and railway thieves, the white slave traders and the drug traffickers’.40 The ICPC debated the Gypsy Question at its conferences in Paris in September 1931 and Rome in October 1932. In a circular dated 30 July 1931 the ICPC Secretariat informed its members that the Austrian chancellor’s office was analysing the Czechoslovak and Bavarian laws on nomadic Gypsies with a view to tightening up Austrian legislation. At the 1931 Paris conference, Dr Schulz suggested that an international office was needed to deal with the ‘Gypsy plague’. The Czechoslovak delegate suggested that nomadic Gypsies in other states should also be obliged to carry ‘Gypsy passports’ and that an international office should act as a clearing house for information on so-called international Gypsies provided by the national Gypsy offices. Reports about prosecutions of ‘our Gypsies’ abroad should also be sent to the national centres for verification of their identity, in case the accused had been travelling under a false name.41 At a time of political and economic crisis, the Moldava Trial contributed to the racialisation of anthropological knowledge about Roma in Czechoslovakia. The first ethnographic-anthropological monograph on the subject discussed the trial and included photographs of the leader of the Moldava Gypsies, taken in police custody, as well as samples of ‘typical’ Gypsy finger- and palm-prints and physical characteristics.42 In conjunction with the 1927 law and the introduction of ‘Gypsy passports’ the trial contributed to a racialisation of debates about Gypsies in articles by police officers, ethnographers, and criminologists. In 1936 one of three themes in an essay competition run by the Masaryk Fund for Support and Education of the Police Force was ‘The Biology of the Gypsies in the Czechoslovak Republic’ (the other two concerned the use of fingerprinting and the role of police dogs).43 The winning essay was written by the head of the unit in the criminal investigation service that kept records on nomadic Gypsies as required by the 1927 law. Such debates were strongly influenced by discourses about hygiene and 40 41 42 43

Mathieu Deflem, ‘Bureaucratization and Social Control: Historical Foundations of International Police Cooperation’, Law and Society, 34:3 (2000), 601–640. NA Praha, Ministerstvo Spravedlnosti (MS), f. 832, kart. 562, Ministerstvo vnitra: Zákon o potulných cikánech a podobných tulácích. Důvodová zpráva. František Štampach, Cikáni v Československé Republice (Prague: Nákladem České akademie věd a umění, 1929). ‘Soutěž’ (no author listed), Bezpečnostní služba: Časopis pro úrˇady, sbory a orgány bezpečnostní v Československé republice, roč. VI, č. 2, 1 February 1936. p. 41. The winning entry was Oldrˇich Pinkas, Biologie cikánů v Československé republice (První cena II. kategorie Masarykova četnického vzdělávacího a podpůr. fondu v r. 1936), Bezpečnostní služba (1936), č. 7, pp. 103–108, 130–135.

26

Legacies of 1919

eugenics, which played a crucial role in state-building in Central and South-Eastern Europe after World War I as a tool for creating healthy, productive, and reproductive nations.44 In 1932 the ICPC discussed a proposal from the Yugoslav delegate stating that ‘the problem of nomadic gypsies’ no longer concerned individual states but had become a ‘general international question’. To prevent states simply deporting Gypsies across their borders, it was suggested that a new international convention should oblige every state to ‘take care of the nomadic gypsies who originated on their territory’ and to ensure that their journeys were carried out under specific medical and police supervision.45 The ICPC asked its legal committee to analyse this proposal. It was agreed that an international bureau to coordinate the ‘battle against Gypsies’ would be set up along the same lines as the information bureau for international criminals. However, with the rise of National Socialism in Germany the need for such an international body was swept away. The ICPC was eventually brought under Nazi control, with Reinhard Heydrich becoming its president in August 1940. However, a historian of the ICPC argues that the investigative files of the ICPC would have been less use to the Nazis than ‘the extensive collections of the national police systems in the Nazi-occupied countries’.46 In Czechoslovakia, the police unit responsible for maintaining the register of ‘nomadic Gypsies’ remained in operation during the Nazi occupation. Whereas the political police (built on the prewar StB) were responsible for identifying and arresting Jews in the Protectorate, the criminal investigation service of the Czech gendarmerie continued to use its prewar records to implement Nazi laws on the surveillance and internment of Gypsies in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Roma, Genocide, and the ‘Racial State’ More than two hundred thousand Roma and Sinti lost their lives as a result of policies pursued by the Third Reich and its allies from 1933 to 44

45 46

Marius Turda and Paul Weindling (eds.), ‘Blood and Homeland’: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeastern Europe, 1900–1940 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007); Marius Turda, Christian Promitzer, and Sevasti Trubeta (eds.), Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe to 1945 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011). NA Praha, f. MS, kart. 562: Ministerstvo spravedlnosti, Mezinárodní-kriminální-policejní komise. Zpráva vlád. rady Vanˇáska o otázce cikánské, 11 May 1933. Mathieu Deflem, ‘The Logic of Nazification: The Case of the International Criminal Police Commission (Interpol)’, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 43:1 (2000), 21–44; Mathieu Deflem, Policing World Society: Historical Foundations of International Police Cooperation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

Roma, Genocide, and the ‘Racial State’

27

Figure 1.1. Gypsy identity card for Juraj Bogdan, issued 30 April 1929. From the collections of the Museum of Romani Culture, Brno, Czech Republic.

28

Legacies of 1919

1945. Some historians and activists claim as many as five hundred thousand deaths.47 After years of legal discrimination against Gypsies in Nazi Germany and other European countries, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was the trigger for a radical solution of the Gypsy Question.48 The Einsatzgruppen of the German SS carried out mass shootings of tens of thousands of itinerant and settled Roma in the occupied Soviet territories.49 In late 1941, five thousand Austrian Roma were deported to the Jewish ghetto in Łódz. Many died of typhus, and the remainder were gassed at the nearby death camp at Chełmno.50 Then, at the end of 1942, Himmler decreed the deportation of all ‘mixed-blood Gypsies and Balkan Gypsies’ to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where all but a few died. Amidst a welter of conflicting decrees and regulations across wartime Europe, local civil, police, or military authorities played a crucial role in the genocide of the Roma. As an ‘apolitical, stateless minority’, Anton Weiss-Wendt has written, ‘the Roma were rarely a priority on the list of potential enemies anywhere in Nazi-dominated Europe’.51 Recent archival research on the persecution of Roma during World War II in France, Austria, Romania, Croatia, Bosnia, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia has confirmed the intent on the part of the Nazi regime to destroy the Roma as a group while also demonstrating that the lack of centralised decision making allowed local agents to act arbitrarily against Gypsies as a potential security threat. Deportation, resettlement, internment, and slave labour later escalated in many cases to indiscriminate shootings, mass murder, and genocide.52 Making Gypsies visible and identifiable through law, bureaucracy, and science was a precondition for discrimination and later exclusion. Population registers, as Jane Caplan and John Torpey have shown, came to serve nightmarish uses in the Third Reich as precursors to arrests, round-ups, internment, and deportation.53 47

48 49

50 51 52 53

Other estimates put the figure at two hundred thousand to five hundred thousand of a prewar population of between seven hundred thousand and one million. For the lower figure, see Zimmermann, Rassenutopie, and compare Sybil H. Milton, ‘“Gypsies” as Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany’, in Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus (eds.), Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 212–232. Weiss-Wendt, The Nazi Genocide of the Roma; Zimmermann, Rassenutopie. Anton Weiss-Wendt, ‘Introduction’; Martin Holler, Der nationalsozialistische Völkermord an den Roma in der besetzten Sowjetunion (1941–1944) (Heidelberg: Dokumentationsund Kulturzentrum Deutscher Sinti und Roma, 2008). Weiss-Wendt, ‘Introduction’; Zimmermann, Rassenutopie. Weiss-Wendt, The Nazi Genocide of the Roma Weiss-Wendt, The Nazi Genocide of the Roma. Jane Caplan and John Torpey, Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Ilsen About,

Roma, Genocide, and the ‘Racial State’

29

Vagrancy laws and the associated techniques that police and criminologists designed to track down and monitor mobile populations, such as fingerprinting, anthropometric measurements, and genealogical tables, also contributed to this process of making Gypsies visible. Throughout the 1930s, special camps were erected for Gypsies outside large German cities such as Cologne, Berlin, Frankfurt, and Düsseldorf.54 Often these were places where travelling families had traditionally settled over the winter months. But unlike earlier sites, the camps were now supervised, sometimes fenced with barbed wire, and guarded. Gypsies were among the groups marked as ‘asocial’ and targeted by early Nazi measures to reform the public health system so as to promote positive and negative eugenic measures. Some Gypsies were sterilised after the 1933 Law to Prevent Genetically Deficient Offspring.55 In November 1935 the Nuremberg marriage and citizenship laws were extended to cover Gypsies. By 1938 the criminal biologist Robert Ritter, who headed the Research Institute for Racial Hygiene – established within the section for Hereditary Medicine at the Reich Health Office – decisively shifted National Socialist policy towards Gypsies in the direction of racial ideology.56 Ritter argued that genetic factors were the crucial element in determining the racial character of Gypsies, which was why previous attempts by police and social welfare agencies to ‘solve’ the Gypsy problem had failed. Ritter’s team carried out genealogical research on Gypsies in the Reich, classifying them according to racial criteria – pure Gypsies, mixed-blood Gypsies, or Gypsy-like itinerants – and sending their ‘expert assessments’ to the Reich Criminal Police Department and its regional offices. Extended kinship networks had troubled police authorities since at least the late nineteenth century, who as a result had begun to compile voluminous records of Gypsy families, such as the notorious Zigeunerbuch maintained by the Munich police.57 Ritter and his team obsessively pursued the bloodline of the ‘Gypsy race’ through the 1930s in a project to map the genealogy of all Gypsies in the Reich.58 The assessments formed part of the police registration files of Gypsies, as well as the local registries of inhabitants.

54 55 56 58

James Brown, and Gayle Lonegran (eds.), Identification and Registration Practices in Transnational Perspective: People, Papers, and Practices (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). On the camps, see Frank Sparing and Karola Fings, Rassismus, Lager, Volkermord: Die nationalsozialistische Zigeunerverfolgung in Köln (Cologne: Emons, 2005). Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986). 57 Zimmermann, Rassenutopie. About, ‘Unwanted “Gypsies”’. Rosenhaft, ‘The Limits’.

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In 1938, SS-Chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the registration of all Gypsies in the Reich – and their categorisation as ‘pure Gypsy’ or ‘mixed blood’ – on the basis of his decision to ‘solve the Gypsy question on the basis of their character as a race’. In consultation with Ritter, the criminal police formulated a decree On Combating the Gypsy Nuisance that was signed by Himmler in late 1938. This decree merged a biological view of the Gypsy race with older police practices that had focused on migrant lifestyles.59 Roma and Sinti were persecuted for being ‘Gypsies’ in all states occupied by Nazi Germany or its allies after 1939. Survival rates were lowest in the territories directly annexed by the Reich. In Austria, where the fanatical Gauleiter of Burgenland Tobias Portschy called for a violent solution to ‘Die Zigeunerfrage’, older traditions of anti-Gypsyism became entangled with regional conflicts over territory in the context of German expansionism.60 Already in late spring 1938, as Mark Pittaway has argued, Austrian Nazis ‘mixed “anti-Gypsy” racism with their rhetoric of Burgenland as a “German borderland” to justify measures to exclude them from the “national community”’.61 In the Burgenland – where politicians, police, and mayors had been demanding the withdrawal of Gypsies’ civil rights since at least 1933 – Himmler’s decree on Fighting the Gypsy Plague was implemented in a far more radical manner than Berlin intended.62 More than one thousand men and women were arrested in late 1939 and dispatched to concentration camps, and after a number of failed attempts, some five thousand Burgenland Gypsies were deported from the Ostmark to the Litzmannstadt ghetto in November 1941, of whom none survived. Approximately four thousand Austrian Gypsies were later deported to concentration camps, including Auschwitz. The archives of the Czechoslovak government and security services likewise demonstrate a radicalisation of policies towards Roma during the 1930s. Nazi persecution of Gypsies led to an influx of Roma across the state border – part of a broader wave of refugees during this period. Contrary to its self-image as a haven for refugees, however,

59 60

61

62

Zimmermann, Rassenutopie. More broadly on nationalism and conflicts over territory in East Central / South-East Europe during World War II, see Holly Case, Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during World War Two (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). Mark Pittaway, ‘National Socialism and the Production of German-Hungarian Borderland Space on the Eve of the Second World War’, Past and Present, 216:1 (August 2012), 143–180. Barbara Rieger, Roma und Sinti in Österreich: Die Ausgrenzung einer Minderheit als gesellschaftlicher Prozeß (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2003), 38.

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31

Czechoslovakia introduced legal restrictions on the registration and residence of foreigners from the mid-1930s.63 After the creation of the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939, Czech gendarmes were left to implement the orders of the German criminal police regarding Gypsies. This contrasted with policies towards the Jews, which were implemented by the political police. When Heydrich announced 2 August 1942 as the Tag der Erfassung der Zigeuner, Czech gendarmes were responsible for identifying and registering ‘Gypsies’ in the Protectorate, which they did based on their own techniques and registers. Around one-third of the 6,500 people registered as Gypsies were immediately interned in concentration camps.64 Two concentration camps in the Protectorate were converted into special camps for Gypsies in August 1942: one near the village of Lety in Bohemia and the other at Hodonín in Moravia. Within two weeks the wooden barracks at the Lety camp were swamped by a huge influx of inmates; more than 1,200 men, women, and children were packed into a camp designed to hold 300 people. As well as people registered as ‘Gypsies or Gypsies of mixed race’, the camp registers listed ‘persons leading a Gypsy way of life’, including musicians or carnival workers, as well as a handful of tailors and seamstresses from the workhouses in the Ruzyně district of Prague, or Pardubice. The commanding officer, Josef Janovský, was a Czech gendarme who apparently did nothing to alleviate the extreme overcrowding or prevent the spread of infectious diseases. After a typhus epidemic broke out in the camp, he was removed from his post in January 1943. Czech gendarmes armed with pistols and rubber truncheons guarded the Lety camp. A former inmate, who was twelve when imprisoned in Lety, later told historian Ctibor Nečas that the guards ‘were all mean bastards. There were no Germans there, only these Czech bastards.’65 The Czech guards were joined by three Sinti from the Sudetenland. On the orders of the German Kripo, the Prague Police Directorate dispatched two mass transports of Lety inmates: the first on the basis of the government decree on crime prevention and the second in response to Himmler’s Gypsy decree of December 1942. A transport of 853 Bohemian and Moravian Roma arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1943, including 420 Lety inmates (half 63 64

65

Michal Frankl and Katerˇina Čapková, Unsichere Zuflucht: Die Tschechoslowakei und ihre Flüchtlinge aus NS-Deutschland und Österreich 1933–1938 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2012). Ctibor Nečas, Českoslovenští Romové v letech 1938–45 (Brno: Masarykova univerzita, 1995); Ctibor Nečas, Andr’oda taboris: Tragédie cikánských táborů v Letech a v Hodoníně (Brno: Masarykova univerzita, 1995); Ctibor Nečas, Holocaust českých Romů (Prague: Prostor, 1999). Cited in Nečas, Holocaust, 56.

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men and boys, half women and girls). A quarter of all internees died in the Lety camp, and approximately one-half were subsequently deported to the Gypsy camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Only one-quarter survived. With a very few exceptions, the deportees from Lety were recorded in the Auschwitz camp records not as ‘stateless Gypsies’ but rather as citizens of the Protectorate. In the neighbouring Slovak Republic, established as a Nazi satellite in the spring of 1939 under Catholic priest and Slovak nationalist Jozef Tiso, discrimination against Gypsies paralleled the state-sponsored exclusion of Jews as a ‘solution’ to social problems in the fascist state. Expropriation of Jewish property was central to Tiso’s efforts to push through land reform, solve housing problems, and build a middle class in Slovakia. As James Mace Ward writes, Jozef Tiso’s ‘main impact on social policy came via the radical solution of the Jewish Question’.66 Slovak Roma were also stripped of their legal rights as citizens, exploited as forced labour, and herded into camps and ghettos, although – unlike Slovak Jews or Czech Roma in the Protectorate – they largely escaped mass deportation to extermination camps.67 Roma were used as slave labour in wartime projects to industrialise and modernise Slovakia, such as the railway line linking Prešov with Stražske or a hydroelectric power station adjacent to the armaments factory at Dubnica nad Váhom. A labour camp at Dubnica was converted into a special camp for Gypsies until a typhus outbreak forced its closure in early 1945. Violence against Gypsies intensified during the German military occupation of Slovakia, with mass shootings of Roma by SS units in the last months of the war. As in wartime Slovakia, the client states of Vichy France, Croatia, and Romania had significant autonomy in their policies towards Roma, since the Nazi authorities viewed the Gypsy Question as being of secondary importance. Domestic policies were sometimes more radical than the German schemes and demonstrated how resettlement schemes and the exploitation of forced labour could shift into incarceration and physical extermination. In Vichy France, Gypsies were incarcerated in camps on the basis of prewar legislation and stereotypes.68 Ethnic cleansing in fascist Croatia took on its own logic, with violence initially directed 66 67 68

James Mace Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 221. Karol Janas, Perzekúcie Rómov v Slovenskej republike (1939–1945) (Bratislava: Ústav pamäti národa, 2010). Emmanuel Filhol and Sandra Jayat, La mémoire et l’oubli: L’internement des Tsiganes en France, 1940–1946 (Paris: Centre de recherches tsiganes, Harmattan, 2004); Shannon Fogg, The Politics of Everyday Life in Vichy France: Foreigners, Undesirables and Strangers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

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33

against Serbs expanding to include Jews and Roma, who were not included in the German-Croatian agreement on the expulsion of Serbs. Ustaša racial laws, writes Alexander Korb, were more radical than the German Nuremberg laws and defined Gypsies as a non-Aryan minority.69 Between May and June 1942 the Ustaša regime in Croatia sent at least ten thousand Roma to the Jasenovac camp, where most were killed.70 In Romania, mass deportations of some twenty-five thousand Romanian Roma to Transnistria, a desolate territory seized from Ukraine, began under the Antonescu dictatorship between June and September 1942 (with small numbers still deported the following year).71 Almost all of the twenty-five thousand deportees were selected on the basis of a census of ‘problem’ Roma conducted by the gendarmerie and police on 25 May 1942, on Antonescu’s orders. Some forty thousand people were included on the census, which was supposed to identify ‘nomadic Gypsies (calda
ra
ri, linguri) and those ‘settled Gypsies’ judged to be criminal or asocial, with the ‘aim of ensuring internal order and eliminating heterogeneous or parasitic elements’.72 Petitions to Marshal Antonescu begged for release from the ‘Gypsy lists’, such as a war veteran from Hârl
au listed for deportation with his daughter, although he claimed to own two houses in the town, to be Orthodox Christian, and to ‘have a good reputation in society’.73 After a long journey, Gypsies were settled in ‘colonies’ along the Bug; an estimated eleven thousand perished in Transnistria.74 The Nazi persecution of Gypsies calls attention to the limitations of the category of the racial state, Eve Rosenhaft has pointed out, as a neat shorthand assuming some coherence amongst the varied histories of ‘internment, labour exploitation, sterilization and murder-or-lettingdie’.75 Even in the notorious Gypsy camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the site of the largest number of deaths, the majority of the inmates were not killed in the gas chambers. Most of the roughly seventeen thousand men,

69 70

71 72 73 74 75

Alexander Korb, Im Schatten des Weltkriegs: Massengewalt der Ustaša gegen Serben, Juden und Roma in Kroatien 1941–1945 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2013). Alexander Korb, ‘Nation-building and mass violence: The Independent State of Croatia, 1941–1945’, in Jonathan Friedland (ed.), The Routledge History of the Holocaust (New York: Routledge, 2011), 291–302, here 298. N
astas
a and Varga (eds.), Minoritǎƫi etnoculturale, mǎrturii documentare: ƫiganii din România (1919–44). Lucian Nastas
a, T¸iganii din România. Document 150: Copie de pe ordinul Preşedinƫei Consiliului de Miniştri nr. 70-S/1942 ca
tre Ministerul Afacerilor Interne. Cited in Lucian Nastas
a, T¸iganii din România. Document 260. Viorel Achim, Dokumente privind deportarea ƫiganilor în Transnistria (Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedic
a, 2004). Rosenhaft, ‘The Limits’.

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women, and children who died in the eighteen months during which the compound operated were victims of disease, exhaustion, medical experiments, or the violence of the guards.76 Only when the camp was liquidated in August 1944 were the last remaining inmates gassed. Genocidal intent was clear, nonetheless, in the practices of legal, medical, and welfare agencies towards Gypsies in the Third Reich after 1933.77 Recent research on the mechanics of persecution and genocide of Gypsies outside the borders of the Reich, furthermore, demonstrates that the Nazi authorities did not exert pressure on the satellite states to ‘solve the Gypsy Question’ once and for all and that states such as Vichy France, Croatia, and Romania had significant autonomy to act in accordance with laws and stereotypes dating back to the interwar years.78

Liberation When the war was over, Roma survivors who made the arduous journey home, weakened by incarceration, hard labour, disease, and malnutrition, often found their families scattered and their property stolen. Many remained in camps for displaced persons in Germany and elsewhere, seeking to migrate West.79 Challenging narratives of unbroken continuity between wartime and postwar persecution of European Roma, Ari Joskowicz has recently argued that International Refugee Organization officers privileged ‘Gypsies’ over other applicants for support from the organisation until 1950, when national refugee administrations replaced the postwar international refugee regimes.80 But Roma swiftly became an exception once again, when governments accepting asylum-seekers from Eastern Europe in the context of Cold War propaganda battles ‘reverted to earlier definitions of Gypsies as nomads who were, by definition, not refugees’.81 Thus with the onset of the Cold War, the link between citizenship and national identity once again became the most salient for the majority of Roma survivors in East Central Europe. 76 77 78 79

80 81

Guenter Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 166. Rosenhaft, ‘The Limits’; Zimmermann, Rassenutopie. Weiss-Wendt, The Nazi Genocide of the Roma. The history of Roma in displaced persons camps remains under-researched. See the brief reference by Gilad Margalit, Germany and Its Gypsies: A Post-Auschwitz Ordeal (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996). Ari Joskowicz, ‘Romani Refugees and the Postwar Order’, Journal of Contemporary History (2015), 1–28. Joskowicz, ‘Romani Refugees’, 1; and more broadly on changing definitions of the refugee in postwar / Cold War politics, see Daniel Cohen, In War’s Wake: Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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Roma who returned to their communities experienced feelings of guilt and shame comparable to those of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.82 Tomáš Holomek, who became a prominent Romani activist in socialist Czechoslovakia, survived by escaping across the border to Slovakia, where he spent the war in hiding. Most of his family, who were integrated Moravian Roma from Svatoborˇice, had been killed. He recalled in a 1985 interview: ‘When I found out that my parents and brothers died in Auschwitz, well, it was terrible! I never talk about it, but I always feel that I am alone. You can’t imagine it.’ Holomek joined the KSČ after the war and was appointed komisarˇ in Milotice, near his native village. He recalled stopping a mob from lynching a schoolteacher who had ‘gone over to the Germans’ during the Occupation. ‘The teacher said, “You saved me.” “Mistake,” I said. “I have not saved you. The law should deal with you, not some self-appointed judges.” They hauled him before the People’s Court in Kyjov and he was executed.’83 Social justice for Czechs and Slovaks in postwar politics was discursively inseparable from the ‘national cleansing’ (národní očista) that sought, in Norman Naimark’s words, to purge the native community of ‘foreign bodies’ as well as ‘alien elements’ within the nation itself.84 The 1945 Košice Declaration reversed the racial hierarchy that had assigned Czechs to second-class status as ‘Protectorate citizens’ during the Nazi occupation. Adopted by the provisional government as a blueprint for the postwar state, the Declaration envisioned a state that would deny citizenship rights to nationally unreliable elements but provide a vastly expanded range of social and economic rights to those who could prove their loyalty.85 Citizens could now claim a right to employment, vacations, health care, and pensions.86 At the same time, the national and social revolution proclaimed by President Edvard Beneš after the liberation resulted in violent campaigns against members of nations tainted with ‘collective guilt’, as well as retribution against perceived collaborators and traitors to the Czechoslovak nation. ‘Certificates of national reliability’ were introduced in 1945 as a means of guaranteeing 82

83 84 85 86

Michael Stewart, ‘Remembering without Commemoration: The Mnemonics and Politics of Holocaust Memories Among European Roma’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 10:3 (September 2004), 561–582. Interview with Tomáš Holomek in Milena Hübschmannová (ed.), ‘Po Židoch Cigáni’: Svědectví slovenských Romů 1939–1945 (Prague: Triáda, 2005), 649. Norman Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Melissa Feinberg, Elusive Equality: Gender, Citizenship and the Limits of Democracy in Czechoslovakia, 1918–1950 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006). Jakub Rákosník, Sovětizace sociálního státu: Lidově demokratický režim a sociální práva občanů v Československu 1945–1960 (Prague: Univerzita Karlova v Praze, 2010).

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citizenship rights only to those who could prove to national committee administrators they had committed no ‘crimes against the national honour’.87 In 1945 Czechoslovak Germans were stripped of their citizenship and property rights by presidential decree. By the end of the year some seven hundred thousand citizens with German nationality had been kicked out of their homes and expelled from the country.88 Thousands died after being attacked, rounded up in camps, and forced on death marches.89 The following year saw the ‘organised transfer’ of Germans, approved by the Allies at Potsdam. The Czechoslovak government failed to get permission from the international community to do the same with the half million Hungarians living in southern Slovakia, but some ninety thousand Slovaks and seventy thousand Hungarians were exchanged across the state border, while the remaining five hundred thousand Magyars in Slovakia were subjected to a programme of ‘re-Slovakisation’ (on the grounds that Magyars in Slovakia were ‘originally’ Slovaks).90 Elsewhere even larger numbers of people were on the move: 1.5 million Poles were deported west across the Soviet-Polish border, five hundred thousand Ukrainians deported east to the Soviet Union, and nearly two million people, including Czech-speakers from Volhynia or Romania, moved west to settle in the lands left empty by the Germans. The expulsion of

87 88

89

90

Benjamin Frommer, National Cleansing: Retribution against Nazi Collaborators in Postwar Czechoslovakia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). On the expulsion of the Germans, see the speeches by Beneš in Karel Novotný (ed.), Odsun Němců z Československa: Výbor z Pamětí, projevů a dokumentů 1940–1947 (Prague, Dita, 2002); Tomáš Staněk, Odsun Němců z Československa 1945–1947 (Prague: Academia, Naše vojsko, 1991); Tomáš Staněk, Poválečné ‘excesy’v českých zemích v roce 1945 a jejich vyšetrˇování (Prague: Ústav pro soudobé dějiny Akademie věd České republiky, 2005); Detlef Brandes, Der Weg zur Vertreibung 1938–1945: Pläne und Entscheidungen zum ‘Transfer’der Deutschen aus der Tschechoslowakei und aus Polen (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2001); Radomír Luža, The Transfer of the Sudeten Germans: A Study of Czech-German Relations 1933–1962 (New York: University Press, 1962). For a comparative approach to the expulsions, see Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak (eds.), Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe 1945–1948 (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). Tomáš Stáněk and Adrian von Arburg, ‘Organizované divoké odsuny? Úloha ústrˇedních státních orgánů prˇi provádění “evakuace” německého obyvatelstva (květen až zarˇí 1945)’, Soudobé dějiny, č. 3–4 (2005), c. 1–2, 3–4 (2006). On the role of rhetoric and national mythologies in the ‘wild transfer’ of 1945, see Eagle Glassheim, ‘National Mythologies and Ethnic Cleansing: The Expulsion of Czechoslovak Germans in 1945’, Central European History, 33:4, 463–486. Katalin Vadkerty, Maďarská otázka v Československu 1945–1948: trilógia o dejinách maďarskej menšiny (Bratislava: Kalligram, 2002); Štefan Šutaj, ‘Akcia Juh’: Odsun Maďarov zo Slovenska do Čiech v roku 1949 (Prague, ÚSD AV ČR, 1993); Štefan Šutaj, Nútené presídľovanie Maďarov do Čiech (Prešov: Universum, 2005); Štefan Šutaj, Maďarská menšina na Slovensku v rokoch 1945–1948 (Bratislava: Veda, 1993).

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the Czechoslovak Germans theoretically completed the process which Jeremy King has termed the nationalisation of politics and law, finally realising Czech nationalist dreams of an ideal congruence between nation and state.91 Popular violence against Roma continued into the postwar period, motivated by persistent stereotypes about Gypsies being ‘asocial’, ‘work-shy’, and ‘criminal’. Between 1945 and 1947 tens of thousands of Roma – mostly from Slovakia – flooded into the borderlands, joining the millions of new settlers – Czechs, Slovaks, Volhynians, and others – who moved west to the regions previously inhabited by Germans in the hope of securing a better life.92 Yet in the ‘Wild West’ atmosphere that prevailed in the borderlands, life was chaotic and dangerous. There is overwhelming evidence that Gypsies were seen as a threat by state authorities and settlers alike. In 1946 police in a Czech borderland town reported that the local people detested the ‘bad work ethic of the Slovaks and gypsies, who live off the black market, drag the standards here down to the level of conditions in Slovakia, and spread unrest’.93 In the same year the Prague criminal police directorate angrily accused its Slovak counterpart of encouraging ‘ragged, barefoot, dirty, lice-infested’ Gypsies to travel to the wealthier Czech lands in search of work, clothing, and food.94 Gypsies were expelled from border zones and tourist areas, such as the Bohemian spa town of Karlovy Vary. Meanwhile, the Prague city council complained that Gypsy demolition workers living ‘in the cellars of ruined houses and on building sites’ were ‘spoiling the aesthetic appearance of the city’.95 Most frustrated of all were the labour exchange officials pleading for the expulsion of Gypsies from Prague, who claimed, ‘Almost all the Gypsies claim to be Slovaks, and as they have no documents, it is impossible to find out if they are really Gypsies or Slovaks.’96 Ethnic violence against Roma continued in Slovakia, too, during the postwar years. In March 1945, for example, local militias attacked Roma

91 92 93

94 95 96

Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). Matěj Spurný, Nejsou jako my: Česká společnost a menšiny v pohraničí (1945–1960) (Prague: Antikomplex, 2011). NA, Ministerstvo práce a sociálních péče (MPSP) 1945–1951, f. 1028, kart. 400, sg. 2249: Ministerstvo ochrany práce a sociální péče, ‘Zaměstnávání cikánů ze Slovenska – stížnosti’, 1 November 1946. NA, MPSP 1949–1951, f. 1028, kart. 400, sg. 2249: Ministerstvo vnitra, Kriminální ústrˇedna, 12 November 1946. NA, MPSP 1949–1951, kart. 400, sg. 2249: Magistrát hlavního města Prahy. Referát pro vnitrˇní národní bezpečnost, ‘Zarˇazení cikánů do pracovních útvarů,’ 7 February 1947. NA, MPSP, kart. 400, sg. 2249: Okresní úrˇad ochrany práce v Praze: Cikáni v Praze – zamýšlený odsun, 13 February 1947.

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villagers in Veľká Ida, whom they accused of stealing military uniforms from Soviet troops. Another flashpoint was Kraľovský Chlumec on the Slovak-Hungarian-Soviet border, where a ‘Gypsy’ band was prosecuted for smuggling stolen goods across the Hungarian border and selling them in local pubs.97 Meanwhile, Slovak officials called for harsher measures against Gypsies, women, children, and invalids who were begging in front of churches, cafes, and shops in Bratislava; children selling flowers and black-market goods on the streets; the work-shy; and black marketeers.98 The Interior Ministry stressed the need for ‘medical tests on this human material; registers of all such persons on the level of central government, regional, district and local; put any unused labour force to work. The Presidential Decree [on the universal obligation to work] of 1945 should be used in a radical way against nomadic Gypsies . . . Whatever remains of this human material after the rest have been put to work will only be a drain upon the state, especially as these asocial elements never stop multiplying.’99 Voices appealing against wartime racism do emerge occasionally from the archives. In June 1945 Slovak communists in Modrý Kamenˇ wrote to the Interior Ministry in Bratislava, asking for greater consideration of the ‘human rights’ of Gypsies, who had fought in the partisan struggle and suffered persecution under the Tiso regime.100 But ‘human rights’ were understood in the context of national retribution. Thus in spring 1945 Východoslovenská Pravda, the regional newspaper of the Communist Party of Slovakia (KSS), reported approvingly that the Kremnica National Committee had imposed special ‘health, social and hygienic measures’ on Gypsies who had been resettled in the ‘abandoned German village’ of Kunešov. ‘Human rights apply to everyone in our country’, claimed the newspaper, but were conditional on the obligation to work.101 Meanwhile, institutionalised discrimination by government agencies compounded popular violence. In April 1945 the Košice branch of the Slovak Interior Ministry reissued the 1941 Gypsy Decree originally issued by the fascist government. In Slovakia, the wartime practice of 97 98 99 100

101

Anna Jurová, ‘Slovenskí Romóvia v Československu v rokoch 1945–1947 (Regulácia pohybu a kontinuita perzekúcie)’, Človek a spoločnosť, 12:1 (2009), 18. SOKA Prešov, f. Obvodny úrad MNV Velký šariš (1945–50) kart. 1, sp. 24113/46, Povereníctvo vnútra, Bratislava. Jurová, ‘Slovenskí Romóvia’. Text rezolúcie z konferencie KSS Modrý Kamenˇ zaslaný Povereníctvu pre veci vnútorné, 4 June 1945, f. Povereníctvo vnútra – bezpečnostný odbor (1945–1950/ 1960), kart. 444, sp. 7341, in Anna Jurová, Rómska problematika: Dokumenty 1945–1967, vol. 1 (Prague: ÚSD, 1996). ‘Okres Kremnica kolonizuje Cigánov’, Východoslovenská Pravda, 12 May 1946, in Jurová, Rómska problematika.

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expelling Roma from their homes apparently continued after 1945, with expulsions recorded in the municipalities of Richnava, Trstené nad Hornádom, Rybník, Batizovce, Spišské Bystré, Holomnica, Toporec, Rakúsy, Kecerovské Pekľany, Kechnec, Turnˇa, Nižný Medzev, Moldava nad Bodvou, Slanec, and Trebišov.102 Local archives contain scattered and often fragmentary evidence of Roma citizens appealing to the newly established People’s Democracy for protection against continuing discrimination. In early July 1945, for example, Ján and Juraj Pompa appealed on behalf of ‘thirteen hardworking families’ to the National Committee in Kežmarok for a decent plot of land on which they could build new houses.103 Living conditions in the hilly, heavily forested region of Spiš (Zips) were chaotic in the months after liberation. The effects of mass population displacement were felt in every village. Tens of thousands of German-speaking Slovaks (Volksdeutsche) had been evacuated in the last few months of the war, many against their will, by the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle in Berlin.104 Thousands of Jews had already been deported by the wartime Slovak government, and when a few survivors returned after the war to reclaim their homes and property, anti-Semitic violence flared up. The Pompas claimed in their letter that retreating German troops had ‘blown a bridge sky-high only ten metres from our homes. The strong blast destroyed all our houses.’ Sixty-seven people were left homeless in bitterly cold January weather. The Roma families were allowed to take shelter temporarily in five houses abandoned only days earlier by the last remaining Germans to be forcibly evacuated from Toporec, but soon they were forced to move again, this time to a remote site along the municipal boundary. They complained the land was marshy and became inaccessible in rainy weather. The water supply was contaminated, and they feared the spread of typhus and other infectious diseases. In their letter they claimed, ‘We do not want to be a burden on the Slovak public, but as healthy, able-bodied people we want to work and to serve our state.’105 Across Europe, police forces continued to use the old techniques to identify Gypsies. Two years after the war in Czechoslovakia, police implemented a nationwide register of more than one hundred thousand people as ‘Gypsies and persons living like Gypsies’, using the prewar 102 103 104 105

Jurová, ‘Slovenskí Romóvia’. Petition from Roma in Toporec to ONV Kežmarok, 3 July 1945, f. ONV Kežmarok (1945–1948), k. 91, sp. 1815, ŠOkA Poprad, in Jurová, Rómska problematika. Dušan Kováč, ‘Evakuácia a vysídlenie Nemcov zo Slovenska’, in Michal Barnovský, (ed.), Od diktatúry k diktatúre (Bratislava: Veda, 1995). Petition from Roma in Toporec to ONV Kežmarok, 3 July 1945, f. ONV Kežmarok, k. 91, ŠOkA Poprad, in Jurová, Rómska problematika.

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Czechoslovak Law on Nomadic Gypsies of 1927 to justify their actions. Similar continuities in police practice prevailed elsewhere: the Bavarian criminal police maintained its card files on Gypsies until the late 1950s, and the French law on ‘nomades’ was not changed until 1969. Czech Interior Ministry officials saw the Gypsy register as a public order measure but also as a way of ensuring that all Roma were mobilised as a labour force for the Two Year Plan. Meanwhile, popular appeals for a radical solution to crime and disorder had become so strong that the Ministry for Labour and Social Affairs proposed interning Gypsies in labour camps, arguing that a legislative solution to this most ‘pressing problem’ was necessary. Ministry of Justice officials supported the idea but noted that the cancellation of the 1939 law on forced labour removed ‘the legal basis for concentrating gypsies in labour camps’.106 Several months later the Interior Ministry produced a file note, confirming that ‘there is no legal basis for concentrating Gypsies in any kind of centres under surveillance, and discriminating against Gypsies on the basis of race would also be impossible for constitutional reasons. Law no. 117/1927 Sb. only concerns nomadic Gypsies, and even in this case, concentrating them in camps with the aim of using them for labour is not permitted.’ Defending the legality of the 1947 police register of Gypsies, the Interior Ministry stated that vagrant lifestyles rather than race had been the criterion for including not only ‘nomadic Gypsies’ but anyone plying an itinerant trade, such as knife-grinders, peddlars, and fairground operators, on the register.107 Government officials continued to debate the pros and cons of separate labour camps for Gypsies until 1949, a year after the Communist regime was established. Fear was surely intensified among Roma survivors when the Czechoslovak police announced the national register of ‘nomadic Gypsies’ during the baking hot summer of 1947. Only two years after liberation, memories of Nazi population registers as the prelude to round-ups, internment, and deportation were still raw.108 The police report on Terezie H., who tried to get rid of her Gypsy passport in October 1947, demonstrated the circular logic that made the Gypsy label so hard to escape. The České Budějovice police reported that the woman was ‘of gypsy origin and for this reason was still the holder of a gypsy passport in 1938. Terezie H. was living “like a gypsy” at the time of the first register

106 107 108

NA Praha, f. ÚPV (1945–1959), kart. 1163, sp. 18880: Ministerstvo spravedlnosti v Praze, Zarˇazení cikánů do pracovních táborů – návrh vládního usnesení, 3 April 1947. NA Praha, Ministerstvo pracovních sil (MPS), f. 992, inv. č. 831, sg. 2313: Soustrˇedění cikánů – stanovisko min. vnitra, 30 May 1947. Caplan and Torpey, Documenting Individual Identity.

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in 1927 and was thus entered on the register as a gypsy according to Law 117 on 14 July 1947.’ In response, Terezie claimed she had been living in Ledenice for fourteen years until she was arrested and imprisoned in the Lety concentration camp for one year. In 1945 she moved with her six children onto a farm that used to belong to Germans but after a short time was forced to move on again. The police report confirmed her story, explaining she was now making a living by selling homemade wares in her neighbourhood and corroborating her claim that her eldest daughter, Milada (also included on the Gypsy register), was employed in a nearby factory. A note on her file suggested that ‘she is probably staying in Ledenice simply because she has lots of children (six) and it would be difficult to travel’, thus demonstrating how stereotypes about nomadism and uncontrolled fertility shaped official perceptions of Roma women. The Prague criminal police decided that her appeal should be granted, ‘for the sake of her daughter, who should integrate into stable employment’, but in a humiliating twist, the removal of the family from the Gypsy register was granted only provisionally, as an ‘educational’ measure which was conditional on a two-year period of good behaviour.109 Thirty-four-year-old Josef Š. fled into the woods when police swooped in on the small town of Sedlec in August 1947.110 He had been on the ‘nomad register’ since he was fourteen years old and had already tried to get rid of his Gypsy passport several times (he was issued a replacement three times, in 1934, 1937, and 1941). A knife-grinder and market trader who had been prosecuted for petty theft, burglary, and possession of a firearm, he was described in police records as Roman Catholic, living in an unmarried partnership, Czech by nationality, and indigent; further, he did not speak Romanes. Josef Š. had escaped the deportations of Bohemian Roma and Sinti to Auschwitz, but he had been sentenced to six years hard labour for theft by the district court in Tábor in 1942. He immediately petitioned the District National Committee to be removed from the register, terrified he would lose his Czechoslovak citizenship if identified as a Gypsy: I am not of gypsy origin. I am domiciled in Kvasejovice, where I have permanent residence. I live by the honest labour of my own hands, and now I am employed as a labourer by Kroft builders of Herˇmaničky on the construction of the school in Sedlec. I will also continue to live by the honest labour of my own hands. I am not engaged in any itinerant trade and I do not have any licence or itinerant

109 110

NA Praha, Zemský Úrˇad Praha (ZÚ), f. 753, sp 8173: TH, Odvolání proti pojetí do soupisu cikánů, 14 November 1947. NA Praha, ZÚ , f. 753, sp 8173: JŠ z Kvasejovic, nedostavení se k soupisu cikánů, 29 August 1947.

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trader’s certificate. Through my work I will try to help the drive to reconstruct the state as well as remaining a decent member of human society and worthy of Czechoslovak state citizenship.

The Police Directorate in Prague decided in his favour in July 1948, though local police were instructed not to issue the man any itinerant traders’ licences in the future and to ‘remind him of his civic responsibilities, for educational reasons’.111

Genocide, Retribution, and Postwar National Cleansing Gypsies, as well as Jews and Slavs, were recognised among the victims of the new crime of genocide in the indictment of the International Military Tribunal, established in Nuremberg after World War II. Rafael Lemkin, who fought for the recogition of the crime of genocide, claimed in speeches and broadcasts in the early 1950s that ‘almost all the Gypsies in Europe were destroyed by the Nazis.’112 Specific crimes against Roma – such as medical experiments and sterilisation of Romani children in concentration camps such as Ravensbrück – were acknowledged at the Nuremberg Medical Trial.113 However, efforts by Romani survivors in West Germany to claim compensation for racial persecution were dogged for years by a refusal on the part of the state authorities to acknowledge that race – rather than a presumed tendency to criminality – was the basis for persecution of Gypsies in the Reich. In postwar Czechoslovakia, meanwhile, the prosecution of crimes against Roma during the German occupation took place in the context of a huge wave of postwar legal retribution, which accompanied the drive for national cleansing through physical expulsion of enemy nations. In the years after the liberation from Nazi rule, more than one hundred thousand people were prosecuted for war crimes and collaboration in the Czech lands alone, as Extraordinary People’s Courts around the country put collaborators and traitors against the Czech and Slovak nations on trial.114 At the same time, as after World War I, the revived Czechoslovak Republic sought political legitimacy by honouring war veterans and 111 112 113 114

NA Praha, f. ZÚ, sp. 8173, Kriminální ústrˇedna, Zemský národní výbor v Praze, J.Š., vynětí z evidence cikánů, 8 July 1948. Cited in Weiss-Wendt, The Nazi Genocide of the Roma. Paul Weindling, Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials: From Medical War Crimes to Informed Consent (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). For the broader context, see Benjamin Frommer, National Cleansing: Retribution against Nazi Collaborators in Postwar Czechoslovakia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); István Deák, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt, The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

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victims of fascism with material benefits.115 Court records demonstrate that the Czechoslovak authorities were aware of the fate suffered by Czech Roma during the war. Unlike Jews, Roma had no organisations representing their collective interests in Czechoslovakia after the war. By contrast, Jewish organisations were established in 1945 to provide humanitarian and legal assistance to survivors. In Slovakia, there were an estimated thirty-three thousand Jewish survivors after the war, including around eleven thousand who had remained in Slovakia, nine thousand who returned or were repatriated from Hungary and Germany, and around ten thousand who had survived in the Hungarian-occupied territories that were returned to Slovakia after the war.116 Slovak Jews established two organisations which campaigned for restitution and provided humanitarian assistance: the Central Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Slovakia and the Organisation of Victims of Racial Persecution at the Hands of the Fascist Regime. As early as 1946, the trend towards nationalisation of private enterprise rendered these organisations’ campaigns for restitution of Jewish property increasingly irrelevant, even though they continued to believe in helping Slovak Jews ‘reclaim their roles in post-war society’.117 Although the Slovak Interior Ministry archives contain a petition from Roma in Bratislava, asking for permission to establish a Union of Slovak Gypsies, no such organisation was established.118 In 1947, a report compiled by the Interior Ministry and Czech police estimated that 4,701 Czech gypsies died as a result of the Nazi occupation, of whom 2,017 were children younger than sixteen. That same year, the Extraordinary People’s Court in Prague heard the case against Friedrich Sowa, the former chief of the German criminal police and chief of staff of the Protectorate police in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.119 Sowa was charged with ‘the death of several thousand gypsies’ for having implemented the 1942 Reich regulation on ‘the gypsy 115 116

117

118

119

Natali Stegmann, Kriegsdeutungen – Staatsgründungen – Sozialpolitik: Der Helden- und Opferdiskurs in der Tschechoslowakei, 1918–1948 (Munich: Oldenbourg-Verlag, 2010). Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, ‘Limits to “Jewish power”: How Slovak Jewish Leaders Negotiated Restitution of Jewish Property after the Second World War’, East European Jewish Affairs, 44:1 (2014), 51–69. Cichopek-Gajraj, ‘Limits to “Jewish Power”’; further, see Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, Beyond Violence: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). SNA Bratislava, f. Policajné riaditeľstvo (1920–1945/1950), kart. 31, sp. 8/133: Prípravný výbor “Sdruženie slovenských Cigánov” v Bratislave, memorandum a pracovný plan’, 13 November 1948, in Anna Jurová, Dokumenty, 60. SOA Praha, f. Mimorˇádný lidový soud Praha, sign. LSp 90/47: Ministerstvo vnitra, Kriminální ústrˇedna: Report on the trial of B. Sowa according to Decree 16/45 Sb, 24 February 1947.

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nuisance’ (o potírání cikánského zlorˇádu) in the Protectorate. The court was told that 4,831 Gypsies were transported to concentration camps in the Reich by order of the German criminal police. Five hundred seventy Gypsies died in the Protectorate Gypsy camps at Lety and Hodonín, and only 700 of the Gypsies transported to Auschwitz survived. The Interior Ministry report on the case stated: ‘That the gypsies in Auschwitz were inhumanely put to death en masse was confirmed by the examination of individual gypsies who returned from the concentration camps after the liberation.’120 Sowa was sentenced to life imprisonment, although the sentence was later reduced. Josef Janovský, commanding officer of the Gypsy camp at Lety, was detained under the Great Decree until December 1945, but legal proceedings were stopped the following year and only reopened in early 1948. In September 1949 the Extraordinary People’s Court in Prague acquitted Janovský of a number of charges, including the deprivation of freedom, damage to health, coercion to work for the Reich war effort, conspiracy to commit theft and fraud, and personal enrichment through the persecution of others on ethnic or racial grounds. Gendarmerie sergeants Josef Hejduk and Josef Lunˇáček were charged by the High Commission for Exoneration of Public Servants in 1947 with cruelty and mistreatment of prisoners, but under the Lesser Decree on Retribution, the first was let off with a reprimand and the other acquitted. Ironically, the only Czech citizen who was actually convicted of crimes against Gypsies by the People’s Courts was himself a Rom.121 Blažej Dydy was a camp guard at the Hodonín concentration camp in the Protectorate and later a room orderly or Stubendienst, at the Auschwitz Gypsy camp.122 A labourer with no formal education, Dydy was interned at Hodonín on 5 August 1942, three days after the Tag der Erfassung der Zigeuner, along with his pregnant wife and one-year-old son Václav, who died a year later of typhus. After a failed escape attempt, Dydy was deported with his wife and second baby son to Auschwitz in August 1943, where he swiftly entered into the camp administration. When the Gypsy camp was liquidated, Dydy’s wife Jirˇina and baby son were gassed, while he was transferred to Buchenwald. After the liberation Dydy returned to Czechoslovakia, first to his native district and then to Vítkov, 120

121 122

SOA Praha, f. Mimorˇádný lidový soud Praha, sign. LSp 90/47: Ministerstvo vnitra, Kriminální ústrˇedna: Report on the trial of B. Sowa according to Decree 16/45 Sb, 24 February 1947. Michal Schuster, ‘Proces s Blažejem Dydym na základě materiálů Mimorˇádného lidového soudu v Brně roku 1947’, Romano džaniben, 20:1 (2013), 73-101. The records of the trial against Dydy have been preserved in the MZA archive in Brno: MZA Brno, C 141 Mimorˇádný lidový soud v Brně, sig. Lsp 341/47.

Conclusion

45

where he worked as a construction worker. Dydy was taken into custody in August 1946 in Vítkov, possibly after a jilted lover informed on his past collaboration in the Nazi camps to the police. The trial records contain sixty-one testimonies from Roma survivors of the camps at Hodonín and Auschwitz. In April 1947 Dydy was found guilty on three counts: supporting Nazism, causing bodily harm to ‘his fellow prisoners, above all Gypsies of Czech nationality’, and killing twelve persons as well as a further number of unidentified victims, including a ‘three-year old gypsy child, an unknown gypsy, the gypsy Bohuš and the gypsy Reiminius’. Dydy was sentenced to life imprisonment and was released only in July 1961.123

Conclusion The history of state attempts to solve the Gypsy Question in Europe since the late eighteenth century – implemented by municipal governments, gendarmes, or medical and welfare agencies – would fundamentally influence the relationship of Roma citizens to states and societies across postwar Europe, whether in the democratic West or the Communist East. Policies towards Gypsies in interwar Czechoslovakia, for example, evolved in the contexts of efforts to build a modern democratic nation state after World War I.124 After 1919, governments in East Central Europe saw the creation of welfare states as crucial for ensuring social stability and political legitimacy in their quest for national independence.125 But the new systems of social protection, in the form of insurance against old age, sickness, disability, or unemployment, were highly unequal across regions and occupations. Moreover, democracy in the First Czechoslovak Republic was based on a collectivist understanding of rights, in which citizens accessed their rights to welfare and education through membership in national communities. The creation of nationally segregated schools and welfare institutions, as Tara Zahra has shown, was the result of nationalist struggles between citizens as much as a statedriven project from above.126 The creation of the ‘wandering Gypsy’ as a legal category and the development of identification techniques drawing on nineteenth-century 123 124

125 126

Ibid. On conscious efforts by interwar politicians to craft Czechoslovakia’s identity as a modern democratic state, see Andrea Orzoff, Battle for the Castle: The Myth of Czechoslovakia in Europe, 1914–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Tomasz Inglot, 55. Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls. National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).

46

Legacies of 1919

anthropology and criminology marked out Gypsies as second-class citizens who were progressively excluded from accessing their collective rights within the national community. At the same time, the economic crisis of the late 1920s, combined with huge and unprecedented flows of refugees, the emergence of statelessness on a mass scale, and the rise of fascist movements across Europe, resulted in the rise of illiberal forms of internationalism – in the form of international networks of police, eugenics, or race ‘scientists’ – that combined to recast the ‘Gypsy’, traditionally seen as a social outcast, in increasingly racialised terms as a threat to national security. Until recently, historical scholarship on the racial persecution of Gypsies during World War II focused on Germany and Austria, and historians debated whether Nazi policies towards Gypsies could be defined as ‘genocide’. The debate largely turned on the absence of a central plan for the elimination of all Gypsies in the Reich, unlike the ‘final solution’ of the Jewish Question. Guenther Lewy argued that the deportations of Gypsies from Germany and Austria to the East did not constitute acts of genocide since the motivation was ‘to expel larger numbers of this widely despised minority from Germany’ and not to destroy the Gypsies as such.127 The question continues to provoke debate between historians and policymakers.128 This also helps us to understand why the history of Roma has not typically been central to histories of human rights. The specific nature of the Roma Holocaust and its legacies in Eastern Europe challenge the argument that universal human rights emerged as a moral response to the Nazi genocide of the Jews. In the 1990s, the rallying cry of ‘Never again!’ was invoked to cement the association between Holocaust memory and a revived optimism about the power of human rights to prevent genocide in the aftermath of the Cold War. Such narratives often tended to rely on the notion of Jews as traumatised victims or survivors of the murderous Nazi ‘racial state’. Yet as Marco Duranti has argued, debates at the United Nations were remarkably silent about the ‘final solution’ during the late 1940s, while anticommunism and fear of retribution for wartime collaboration were far more important motives for the conservatives and federalists involved in drafting the European Convention on Human Rights at the fledgling

127 128

Lewy, The Nazi Persecution. The European Parliament adopted a resolution on 15 April 2015 on ‘anti-Gypsyism in Europe and EU recognition of the memorial day of the Roma genocide during World War II’; the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers remains divided on the definition of the persecution of Roma as genocide.

Conclusion

47

Council of Europe.129 Scholarship on other aspects of the human rights regime established in postwar Europe – such as international refugee law or the emergence of the genocide concept – has likewise focused on the contradictions of a commitment to ‘universal’ rights in the late 1940s that was not only Eurocentric and strongly committed to the preservation of imperial interests but also increasingly centred on protecting Western democracy against Communism in the early Cold War. New research on the history of law and legality, on practices of social citizenship under state socialism, as well as on the history of Roma as subjects rather than simply victims of Communism can open up avenues that help us to see why Romani claims to citizenship rights under state socialism are so important for understanding the broader history of human rights during the twentieth century.

129

Marco Duranti, ‘The Holocaust, the legacy of 1789 and the birth of international human rights law: revisiting the foundation myth,’ Journal of Genocide Research 14:2, 2012, 159–186.

2

Stalinist Gypsy Workers

In the late summer of 1952, Elena Lacková was invited by the Ministry of Information to speak at a summer school for Gypsy workers at Horˇín castle, about thirty kilometres north of Prague.1 A small group of students, activists, workers, and government officials spent a few days reading Marxist-Leninist texts and attending lectures about Stalinist nationality policy and the history of the Gypsies. The baroque summer residence at Horˇín had been expropriated by the Communist government in 1948 from one of the leading noble families of Bohemia. ‘The former lords of Lobkowicz probably did not expect that Gypsies, once not even seen as human beings, would one day be sleeping and studying in the chambers of their beautiful residence,’ wrote a young ethnography student afterwards.2 As the communists set about building a socialist state in Czechoslovakia, Roma activists such as Lacková were sent out to villages and factories across the country with the aim of ‘re-educating’ Gypsies as ‘proper citizens of our homeland, who understand that only diligent work in building socialism will deliver higher living standards and a joyful future free from persecution, poverty, and hunger’.3 At first glance it might seem far-fetched to suggest that the ideal citizen in Czechoslovakia after the 1948 Communist coup was a Stalinist Gypsy worker. But not only was the goal of creating a new socialist man exemplified in policies aimed at turning the Romani communities of East Central Europe into ‘citizens of gypsy origin’, the surprisingly diverse ways in which Roma, Sinti, and other citizens responded to these plans shed light on practices of citizenship in a Stalinist regime. The People’s Democracies in Eastern Europe denied citizenship rights to political enemies of the regime – who fell into the ambivalent category of ‘former 1 2 3

NA, f. 861, Ministerstvo informací – dodatky (MI-D) 1945–1953, kart. 135, inv. č. 477: Correspondence between Elena Lacková and Ministry of Information, 27 August 1952. Eva Davidová, ‘Kultura i k cikánům’, Osvětová práce (30 June 1954), 204. NA, f. 1075/6, Ministerstvo Vnitra – Dodatky (MV I -D), sg. 215, kart. 1283: Ministerstvo vnitra, Úprava poměrů osob cikánského původu, 3 March 1952 (Sbírka oběžníků pro KNV, roč. IV, č. 13, 1952).

48

Stalinist Gypsy Workers

49

people’ – but promised a long list of expanded social rights to those who could prove their loyalty. In Czechoslovakia, this principle was already laid down in the 1945 Košice Declaration adopted by a coalition of political parties as a blueprint for the postwar government. Thus even before the communists established a one-party state, as Melissa Feinberg has written, there was a marked shift towards the idea of the state guaranteeing social and economic equality to citizens on the basis of their work, rather a liberal ideal of protecting citizens’ right to freedom based on their humanity.4 Roma were a significant presence in all Eastern bloc states and became an increasingly political issue in the early Cold War as minorities became a litmus test of tolerant societies on both sides of the East-West divide. Official figures in Czechoslovakia referred to just more than one hundred thousand Gypsies in the country, of whom some eighty-five thousand were registered in Slovakia, although these figures were collected by police using the definition of ‘nomadic Gypsies’ laid down in the 1927 law and thus must be treated with caution. An example of the changing rhetoric about ‘Gypsies’ can be seen in a speech given by the minister of labour, Evžen Erban, at a private meeting with a select group of ‘Gypsy workers and intellectuals’ in his office in June 1950. Formerly a Social Democrat and functionary in the Protectorate-era National Union of Employees (Národní Odborová Ústrˇedna Zaměstnanecká, NOÚZ), an organisation that Reinhard Heydrich used to incentivise Czech workers along the lines of the German Labour Front, Erban nonetheless advanced rapidly after the war as a supporter of the communists within the trade unions.5 Announcing that the elimination of capitalism had solved the Gypsy Question in Czechoslovakia, Erban compared the situation of Roma under socialism with the ‘raciallydivided Protectorate’ and the continuing exploitation of colonial peoples by Britain and France. Given Erban’s previous involvement with NOÚZ at a time when Czech Roma were being rounded up and deported to Auschwitz, his audience may have doubted his sincerity when he declared, ‘Every person in our country, whatever his origin, whatever prejudices dogged him in the past, should have equal rights and be valued equally, so long as he wants to work.’6

4 5 6

Melissa Feinberg, Elusive Equality: Gender, Citizenship and the Limits of Democracy in Czechoslovakia, 1918–1950 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 190–96. On the ambivalent approach of the KSČ to collaboration within NOÚZ, notably in the case of Social Democrat Arno Hais, see Frommer, National Cleansing, 301–5. NA, f. 992, Ministerstvo pracovních sil (MPS), kart. 47, sg. 100, inv. č. 70: Záznam o poradě konané u s. ministra Erbana ve věci rˇešení otázky cikánské, 9 June 1950.

50

Stalinist Gypsy Workers

Reconstructing the responses of Roma to the overtures of the Stalinist state requires a careful reading of the sources, as illustrated by the response of Tomáš Holomek at the meeting with Minister Erban. A Communist Party member and military prosecutor, Holomek had lost almost his entire family to the Zigeunerlager at Auschwitz. The transcript of the meeting records the guarded tone in which he replied to Erban: ‘Our people’s democracy is making amends for the injuries committed against dark-skinned people, and is eliminating the differences between the human society of whites and gypsies.’ Painfully aware of the dangers of disloyalty, Holomek stressed, ‘The gypsy, who is utterly politically and culturally unconscious, can only belong among the labouring people . . . Today, when a trial of anti-state subversives is proceeding at the state court in Prague, it occurred to me that a gypsy would never be capable of such crimes. Only those whose economic position is threatened would commit crimes like this.’7 This chapter explores the responses of Roma to Stalinism in a surprising variety of settings: women’s activism, worker’s militancy, cultural enlightenment. Personal papers, letters, and memoirs reveal that activists tried to use Stalinist discourse to make their voices heard in the public sphere, while privately preserving culturally distinct identities that did not conform to the ideological image of the Gypsy citizen-worker.

Stalinist Citizens? In February 1948, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) mobilised workers’ organisations and militias on the streets of Prague, forcing President Beneš to resign and enabling the communists to seize control of the government. The communists swiftly distanced themselves from the organic nationalism the KSČ had embraced in the postwar years and redirected their energies towards the destruction of the ‘class enemy’. In May 1949 Slovak party functionaries actively sought out Lacková, urging her to write to the party about her Roma theatre group: ‘You should tell us what inspired you to write “The Burning Gypsy Camp,” when and how you started to write it . . . and how the play was received by Gypsies and non-Gypsies.’8 She was praised by government officials as a ‘conscientious comrade gypsy woman [who] might be able

7 8

Ibid. Museum of Romani Culture, Brno, f. E. Lackové, MRK 123/96, MRK 122/96/1: Letter from Komunistická strana Slovenska (KSS), Sekretariát Ústredného Výboru, Kultúrne a propagačne oddelenie, to Elena Lacková, 27 May 1949.

Stalinist Citizens?

51

to help us solve the Gypsy question’.9 An Interior Ministry decree of March 1952 laid out instructions for National Committees and mass organisations under the National Front in their dealings with ‘persons of gypsy origin’. Roma were supposed to be given jobs and housing, preferably scattered in small groups to aid assimilation. Local authorities were advised to establish temporary schools or classes only for Roma pupils under Education Ministry regulations on remedial schools. They were also instructed to educate the general public about Stalinist nationality policy and to ‘eliminate the vestiges of racial discrimination’ in public life, including in theatres, cinemas, and other places of culture and leisure. Finally, the decree proclaimed, ‘conscientious Gypsies’ would be recruited to help other Roma integrate.10 These policies were embedded in a broader shift in ideas about citizenship in postwar Europe. Perhaps most famously, British sociologist T. H. Marshall’s 1949 essay on ‘Citizenship and Social Class’ defined citizenship as full membership in a community and as a principle of equality in conflict with the fundamental inequalities of the class system in modern societies. The Beveridge Plan inspired Czech planners to imagine a postwar welfare state based on universal national insurance, and the Czechoslovak National Insurance Act of 1948 was perhaps the only example of a ‘genuine domestic social policy “revolution”’ in the Soviet bloc, accelerating the expansion of the welfare state and creating an upgraded system of cash benefits that covered – at least in theory – almost all working people and their families in the country.11 Almost immediately, however, leading communists signalled the need for further changes. As Antonín Zápotocký announced in a 1950 speech, national insurance ‘should become a tool supporting production and labour productivity, in other words, to take on an economic as well as a social function’.12 Over the subsequent seven years, the civic principle underpinning the Act – along with remnants of the corporatist model of social insurance from the First Republic such as perks for state employees – was overtaken by the principle of class (trˇídnost).13

9

10 11 12 13

Jirˇí Ruml, ‘První cikánské divadlo’, Kulturní politika (30 September 1949), 4. See also NA, f. Ministerstvo Práce a Sociálních Péče, kart. 400: Correspondence between Jirˇí Ruml and Ministry officials about Elena Lacková, 5 October 1949. Ministerstvo vnitra, Úprava poměrů osob cikánského původu, 3 March 1952 (Sbírka oběžníků pro KNV, roč. IV, č. 13, 1952). Tomasz Inglot, Welfare States in East Central Europe, 1919–2004 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 72. Cited in Jakub Rákosník, Sovětizace sociálního státu: Lidově demokratický režim a sociální práva občanů v Československu 1945–1960 (Prague: FF UK, 2010), 259. Rákosník, Sovětizace sociálního státu, 273–306.

52

Stalinist Gypsy Workers

Social policy was used as a tool to reshape Czechoslovak society along class lines during the first Five Year Plan (1948–1953). By 1950 the KSČ was pushing through massive campaigns to remake Czechoslovak society from a ‘class perspective’, and Czechoslovakia was shaken by a summer of show trials against the enemies of socialism, campaigns against ‘cosmopolitanism’, and the nationalisation or closure of voluntary and private associations. Thousands of ‘bourgeois’ families were sent into provincial exile or labour camps for having incorrect class origins, and the students expelled from higher education were permanently disadvantaged.14 Violent campaigns were waged against the so-called kulaks (an imported Soviet term that did not correspond to the social realities of rural society in Czechoslovakia or indeed anywhere in east-central Europe) and other groups of ‘former people’ (bývalí lidé). Pensions for the former middle classes were dramatically reduced, and internal reports were explicit about the fact that ‘the system of social security must respect the class principle and also contribute to crushing the remnants of the capitalist sector.’15 Unlike elsewhere in East Central Europe, the socio-economic structure of the Czech lands meant that the communists had few ‘natural constituencies for social advancement’.16 There was no pressing economic need to create a highly skilled workforce, since it already existed, so instead thousands of technical, administrative, and managerial elites were transferred to unskilled work, while thousands of workers and their children were promoted. Up to three hundred thousand workers moved into non-manual jobs, while some six hundred thousand ‘new’ workers from non-proletarian backgrounds were transferred to unskilled work.17 The creation of a new socialist intelligentsia from the ranks of the working people formed the sixth point of Gottwald’s programme for the building of socialism at the Ninth Party Congress in early 1949. State courses for preparing workers for higher education were introduced in December 1948 for workers or peasants under the age of thirty who had been members of the KSČ for at least two years, although these 14

15 16 17

John Connelly, Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945–56 (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Rákosník, Sovětizace sociálního státu. John Connelly, ‘Students, Workers, and Social Change: The Limits of Czech Stalinism’, Slavic Review, 56:2 (Summer 1997), 307–355. Kevin McDermott, ‘Popular Resistance in Communist Czechoslovakia: The Plzenˇ Uprising, June 1953’, Contemporary European History, 19:4 (November 2010), 287–307; see also Lenka Kalinová, Společenské proměny v čase socialistického experimentu (Prague, Academia, 2007); Karel Kaplan, Proměny české společnosti 1948–1960. Část první (Prague: ÚSD AV ČR, 2007).

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53

requirements were subsequently reduced, and new institutions were set up to provide crash courses for working-class cadres.18 Egalitarian wage structures were the main tool for advancing workers and peasants, however, and by 1960 Czechoslovakia had the lowest income inequality of any country in the world. During the harsh years of the first Five Year Plan, Czechoslovak society experienced austerity, rising prices, and falling real wages, as well as the stringencies of the ‘labour discipline’ imposed on the workforce to meet ever-increasing production targets. At the same time, however, the People’s Democracy offered workers a vision of upward social mobility, security of employment, egalitarian wage structures, and access to education and culture. Work was central to efforts to refashion the link between state and citizen under socialism; but as Mark Pittaway and others have argued, the rapid inclusion of groups other than the male working class also threatened to destabilise the fragile bond of legitimacy on which the workers’ state depended.19 Attempts to impose gender equality from above for economic or ideological reasons, for example, met with popular resistance.20 Particularly in industrialised Eastern bloc countries with strong labour movement traditions, such as Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic, the idea of creating socialist citizens as cultured ‘new men’ drew on Social Democratic traditions of mass education as well as Communist radicalism.21 Moreover, long-standing nationalist and collectivist understandings of democracy ultimately influenced the creation of ‘citizens of Gypsy origin’ under socialism as much as the egalitarian ideals of humanitarian socialism.22 Communists recognised that overt discrimination against Germans or Roma was a political liability in the emerging Cold War.23 The notorious Certificates of National Reliability – required of individuals seeking to regain citizenship and property rights and issued with a significant degree of subjective judgement by local officials – were abolished in the early 18

19 20 21 22

23

Jirˇí Manˇák, ‘Orientace KSČ na vytvorˇení socialistické inteligence’, in Zdeněk Karník and Michal Kopeček (eds), Bolševismus, komunismus a radikální socialismus v Československu (Prague: Dokorˇán, 2000), sv. 2, 141–146. Mark Pittaway, The Workers’ State: Industrial Labor and the Making of Socialist Hungary, 1944–1958 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012). Malgorzata Fidelis, Women, Communism and Industrialization in Postwar Poland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Jirˇí Knapík and Martin Franc, Volný čas v českých zemích 1957–1967 (Prague: Academia, 2013), 16. On nationalist and collectivist understandings of democracy in the Czech lands until 1950, see Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1950 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007). Matěj Spurný, Nejsou jako my. Česká společnost a menšiny v pohraničí (1945–1960) (Prague: Antikomplex, 2011).

54

Stalinist Gypsy Workers

1950s. The few hundred thousand German-speakers still living in the country were offered the opportunity to regain Czechoslovak citizenship – and when many of them preferred to hold on to their status as Stateless Persons (fearing citizenship would confer more obligations than benefits), the state simply reinstated their citizenship by decree.24 For Roma, the biggest change was the cancellation of the 1927 Law on Nomadic Gypsies and Persons Living in the Gypsy Way during a major revision of the Criminal Code. An Interior Ministry memorandum explained that the law was tainted by racial discrimination that conflicted ‘with our constitution and our People’s Democracy’. On ‘constitutional grounds’, it was no longer acceptable to propose a ‘legislative solution to the gypsy question . . . insofar as such a question can be said to exist at all’.25 With the law went the Gypsy passports that had been issued to families on the police Gypsy register since the late 1920s. Internal reports strongly suggest, however, that police continued to monitor persons loosely defined as ‘nomadic Gypsies’ throughout the following decade. The Interior Ministry noted that ‘fluctuation’ or other misdemeanours (presented here – with no basis in fact – as a typically ‘Gypsy’ problem) would have to be dealt with by administrative rather than legislative means.26 And as early as October 1948 officials in the Slovak interior ministry noted that the universal obligation to work and tighter controls on identity cards for all citizens meant that Gypsy passports had become an anachronism.27

In the Spirit of Internationalism Racial discrimination against Roma threatened to tarnish Czechoslovakia’s international reputation, as the emerging Cold War and the pressures of decolonisation raised the stakes of the Gypsy Question in East Central Europe. Race and sex equality became the main trump cards for the Soviet Union in negotiations over the drafting of human rights declarations in the early years of the United Nations.28 In debates dominated by the lack of political freedom, nationalisation of property, state 24 25 26 27 28

Matěj Spurný, ‘Political Authority and Public Opinion: Germans in Czechoslovakia, 1945–1960’, Social History, 37:4 (November 2012), 452–476. NA Praha, f. Ministerstvo Vnitra – Nová registratura, díl II, f. 850/3, 1075, sg. 215, inv. č. 6972: Cikánská otázka v ČSR: Zpráva, 10 October 1951. Ibid. ŠOkA Poprad f. MNV v Spišskej Belej (1945–48) kart. 21, sp. 6442: Povereníctvo vnútra: Potulní cigáni: opatrenie, 4 October 1948, in Jurová, Dokumenty. Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting and Intent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Jennifer Amos, ‘Embracing and Contesting: The Soviet Union and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948–1958’, in Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (ed.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 147–165.

In the Spirit of Internationalism

55

repression of political opponents, and widespread use of forced labour in the Soviet bloc, socialist regimes seized upon racial segregation and discrimination in the United States as a propaganda weapon.29 East European press and propaganda lambasted racial discrimination against African Americans in the United States, as well as colonial rule in Africa and Asia. By contrast, the Soviet bloc promoted its ideology of socialist internationalism as one of mutually beneficial exchange in terms of both economic and cultural integration within the Eastern bloc and relations with states abroad.30 In practice, as a blossoming literature on the social history of socialist internationalism has shown, the ideology of proletarian solidarity across borders was always shaped by inequalities of ethnicity, gender, and geography.31 Civil rights struggles for African Americans in the United States, meanwhile, were overshadowed by anticommunism in the larger context of the early Cold War.32 Recent research by historians has revealed how deeply human rights provisions in international law were shaped by anticommunism, including the European Convention on Human Rights, the 1950 Refugee Convention, and the International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention on Forced Labour.33 Conflicts over the race, sex, and material security of a nation’s citizens were transformed in international politics into an apparently zero-sum battle over definitions of freedom and democracy.34 29

30

31

32

33

34

On the influence of the Cold War on human rights debates at the United Nations and its specialised agencies, see Sandrine Kott, ‘The Forced Labor Issue Between Human and Social Rights, 1947–1957’, Humanity, 3:3 (Winter 2012), 321–335. Rachel Applebaum, ‘The Friendship Project: Socialist Internationalism in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and 1960s’, Slavic Review, 74:3 (Fall 2015), 484–507. Quinn Slobodian (ed.), Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2015); Anne Gorsuch and Diane Koenker (eds.), The Socialist Sixties: Crossing Borders in the Second World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Carol Anderson, Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Marco Duranti, ‘Curbing Labour’s Totalitarian Temptation: European Human Rights Law and British Postwar Politics’, Humanity, 3:3 (2012), 361–383; Marco Duranti, ‘The Holocaust, the legacy of 1789 and the birth of international human rights law: revisiting the foundation myth’, Journal of Genocide Research, 14:2 (2012), 159–186; Gerard Daniel Cohen, In War’s Wake: Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). On the reconstruction of democracy in postwar Western Europe, see Martin Conway, ‘The Rise and Fall of Western Europe’s Democratic Age, 1945–1973’, Contemporary European History, 13:1 (2004), 67–88; Jan-Werner Mueller, Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth Century Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011);

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Stalinist Gypsy Workers

The Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry was certainly involved in sharing information with the Ministries of Interior and Culture about policies affecting Roma in the Soviet Union and neighbouring People’s Democracies during the 1950s. A speech drafted by the Interior Ministry and designed to educate Czech officials in the provinces about the political significance of the Gypsy Question in late 1952 stated: In our people’s democracy, Czechoslovakia, all citizens are equal, regardless of nationality, origin or religion. During the last war, during the occupation, we discovered what life was like under the official state ideology of the Herrenvolk, according to which only one nation in the world was born to rule and the others, especially the Slavic nations, were to be the servants and slaves of the Germans. Still more repellant is the official revival of that principle in the ‘theory’ of AngloSaxon superiority, the ‘theory of the American superman’ who dominates the blacks . . . The persecution of the blacks in America, the lynchings and their awful life under ‘American democracy and freedom’ is now awakening resistance and indignation among all the just and peace-loving peoples of the world.35

Party secretaries were urged to consider racial discrimination against the Roma as a pressing political question: ‘We only have to look at these nomadic groups of black-haired, black-eyed people with their shabby wagons and compare their behaviour with our own people. Yes, we are talking about gypsies, our fellow-citizens with equal rights. The current state of affairs does not testify to their supposed equality.’36 Speeches of this type were partly infused by the political atmosphere in Eastern bloc states after the Korean War amidst the threat of nuclear war, spies, and sabotage. But a closer analysis of an attempt by filmmaker Jirˇí Weiss (a Communist of Jewish descent who spent the war years in Britain) to make a showpiece movie about Stalinist Gypsy workers suggests a far more complex entanglement of propaganda, politics, and everyday life. Conflicts over Weiss’s motion picture dramatising the re-education of a Gypsy worker illustrated the tensions surrounding the representation of racial discrimination. My Friend Fabián (Můj prˇítel Fabián) told the story of a Roma migrant worker and his son at the Klement Gottwald Steelworks in Ostrava after the war, in the style of a socialist-realist Bildungsroman.37 The film opens with the scene of a crowded railway station. Gejza Fabián and his small son stand bewildered in the crowd, destitute and illiterate. His Hungarian name alludes to the millions of economic migrants pouring into the Czech borderlands in search of jobs and

35 36

on the American idea of freedom, see Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998). NA, Ministerstvo Vnitra-Dodatky (MV-D), f. 850/3, kart. 1284, sg. 215: Nástin prˇednášky pro prˇednášející doškolovacích kursů pro tajemníky MNV o cikánské otázce. 37 Ibid. Můj prˇítel Fabián (dir. Jirˇí Weiss, ČSSR, 1953).

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Figure 2.1. The main characters in the film My Friend Fabián, played by Otto Lackovič and a young Dušan Klein. National Film Archives, Czech Republic.

homes. Befriended by a muscular blond welder and the earnest redlipsticked teacher at the factory school, Fabián is coached in the ways of factory life, while his son becomes a model pupil and joins the Pioneers. Under the patronage of engineer Trojan, Fabián appears more childlike than his son; the two men are presented as equals only once, when the camera focuses for a long moment on the prisoner numbers tattooed in blue ink on their outstretched forearms. Fabián’s attempts to join the factory collective are stymied by numerous difficulties along the way. When a jealous rival accuses Fabián of starting a fire – after which he is assigned to unskilled work as a punishment – he returns to his old habits, hitting the bottle at insalubrious pubs until the sight of a ‘backwards’ Gypsy family cooking over a fire outside their dilapidated caravan recalls him to his senses. Collective morale is restored when the saboteur is unmasked, Fabián is vindicated, and the whole team works over the Christmas holidays to smash their production targets. Blacked-up to accentuate their ‘Gypsiness’, the characters of Fabián and his son never escape the taint of caricature. Although Weiss’s

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Figure 2.2. Poster for the feature film My Friend Fabián, directed by Jirˇí Weiss, 1953. National Film Archives, Czech Republic.

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correspondence suggests he sought Roma actors with a ‘sympathetic and intelligent’ appearance – because the film was supposed to ‘create sympathy for gypsy workers’ – neither of the main actors was Roma: Fabián was played by Otto Lackovič and his son by Dušan Klein, a Jewish boy from Michalovce in eastern Slovakia who had been interned in the Terezín ghetto during the war (and later became a well-known director of comedy films). Both Weiss and screenwriter Ludvík Aškenazy were of Jewish descent, and years later, in his memoirs, Weiss claimed that they conceived the film as a ‘socialist fairytale’ with a ‘subtext about racism and anti-Semitism, which we had both experienced’.38 Weiss was a prominent young director when he made My Friend Fabián, best known for films such as The Stolen Frontier (1947), which dramatised the escalating tensions between Czechs and Germans in a border village. He had made his debut in documentary film during the 1930s, then emigrating to Britain where he worked for the Crown Film Unit on films such as The Rape of Czechoslovakia. Returning to Prague, Weiss was attracted by Communist calls for a reinvention of national culture, later recalling ‘the huge wave of enthusiasm in which we all felt like creators of a new world’.39 While researching the film in November 1952, Weiss wrote to the headmaster of a recently established school for Roma children that the script ‘was a stylized literary work and not reportage. It is not a documentary about a Gypsy school but a film about our journey towards socialism, which touches upon the Gypsy Question. But we are doing everything we can to make sure the film approaches reality as much as possible.’40 In early 1952 Weiss and Aškenazy researched the film by travelling through the Czech borderlands, visiting Gypsy workers in overcrowded dormitories or talking to voluntary activists and teachers. One woman, a journalist at Czechoslovak Radio, allowed Weiss to read her diary about working with Roma children at a summer camp in Melč and then, inspired by the interest he showed in her work, wrote to President Gottwald exclaiming that ‘the education of the gypsy nation’ was as important as ‘the construction of Ostrava and fulfilling the Five Year Plan . . . It is necessary to believe in people – and they are also people! How much would our republic benefit from the education of these marginalised but essentially honourable souls!’41 Not all of Weiss’s interlocutors were so romantic. The female warden of a barracks for

38 40 41

39 Jirˇí Weiss, Bílý Mercedes (Prague: Victoria, 1995), 91. Weiss, Bílý Mercedes. Museum Romské Kultury, Archive of Miroslav Dědič: Letter from Jirˇí Weiss to Miroslav Dědič, 4 November 1952. NA, MV-D, f. 1075/6, sg. 215, kart. 1283: Correspondence and notes relating to Weiss’s research.

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Figure 2.3. Photograph from the set of My Friend Fabián, showing director Jirˇí Weiss in conversation with Romani actors, c. 1952. National Film Archives, Czech Republic.

Roma workers in Pardubice reported in an offhand manner that Weiss had visited ‘to choose a couple of gypsies for his new film’.42 Evidently Weiss was also shocked by what they saw and in January 1952 personally gave Interior Ministry officials a handwritten letter from a worker living in a dormitory at the Klement Gottwald Steelworks who complained of overcrowding and unsanitary conditions: ‘Two hundred souls – including women and children – are living in a building intended for 70 people.’43 The Ministry replied by letter after a few weeks, promising to discuss the problem of housing ‘Slovak brigade workers, especially gypsy families’, and cut off further discussion by stating, ‘The great task 42 43

NA, MV-D, f. 1075/6, sg. 215, kart. 1283: Správa Ubytovacího tábora stavebních dělníků (cik. původu), Pardubice, 5 February 1953. NA, MV-D, f. 1075/6, sg. 215, kart. 1283: Interior Ministry note on meeting with Weiss and Aškenazy, 23 January 1952.

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of building the kombinát in Ostrava will create difficulties that cannot be solved completely all at once.’44 With spectacularly bad timing, the Czechoslovak Film Council approved the script of My Friend Fabián in October 1952, just one month before the opening of the largest show trial in Eastern Europe – during which ‘anti-Zionism’ played a major role. Seeking a scapegoat for the failings of the economy and the breakdown in party discipline – and partly influenced by Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaigns – the Czech authorities and Soviet advisers engineered an elaborate plot against the hardline former general secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Rudolf Slánský, who was accused of heading an anti-state conspiracy involving thirteen other prominent party and government officials, eleven of whom were Jewish. The trial culminated with Slánský and a number of other prominent Jewish communists being sentenced to death. Found guilty of espionage, treason, and high treason, eleven of the group were hung on 3 December 1952 and ‘their ashes unceremoniously scattered on an icy road near Prague’.45 Recent research in government and state security archives by Kevin McDermott provides evidence that the trial was also accompanied by widespread manifestations of anti-Semitism in Czech society among party members and non-members, workers, peasants, and intellectuals. The ‘race question’ was an explosive political question out in the streets just at the moment when censors and film directors at Barrandov Studios were discussing the script of My Friend Fabián. Reports preserved in the archives of the Interior Ministry suggest that a number of scenes were cut or edited because of the way ‘race’ was represented.46 Although the film was finished on time by the end of 1953, its release was delayed for at least a year because of disagreements between Weiss and the Film Board. In November 1952, just as the Slánský Trial opened, an internal Interior Ministry note tersely recorded that Weiss and Aškenazy were warned about certain scenes being ‘unsuitable’, notably a shot of Fabián demolishing a classroom in a fit of drunken rage.47 Another scene in which Fabián was honoured as a shock worker was also cut, apparently for fear this would be badly received by the general public.48 Director Otakar Vávra made some 44 45 46 47 48

NA, MV-D, f. 1075/6, sg. 215, kart. 1283: Letter from the Interior Ministry regarding the complaint to President Gottwald, 30 January 1952. Kevin McDermott, ‘A “Polyphony of Voices”? Czech Popular Opinion and the Slánský Affair’, Slavic Review, 67:4 (Winter 2008), 840–865. National Film Archive, Prague, TS (sg. S-2632). NA, MVI-D, f. 1075/6, kart. 1283, sg. 215: File note about the film Můj prˇítel Fabián. Barrandov Studio, a.s., sbírka scénárˇe k filmu Můj Prˇítel Fabián, dokumentace, nedatováno.

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critical remarks about the character of the teacher, Krásová, whom he described as sounding like Rudé právo, the KSČ newspaper. While the film was in production, news reports and interviews with Weiss continually stressed the film was ‘not about the race question’ but rather the larger problem of building a socialist society, ‘comradely relations between people and the re-education of backward workers, their integration into the conscientious collective, and enthusiasm for building socialism in the spirit of the new socialist patriotism’.49 When Weiss’s film hit Czechoslavak cinema screens in January 1955, its moment had already passed. The bombastic declarations about building socialism had given way to the (slightly) more persuasive New Course, and film critics were unconvinced. ‘One feels how the original idea shrivelled to a lifeless schema on film,’ wrote one leading critic.50 The new journal Host do domu was more positive, describing it as the first Czech film to take ‘a progressive, really democratic approach to the gypsy question’ with resemblances to Italian neorealist cinema in its ‘style and humanism’.51 The comparison, however, was strained. A review in Film a Doba noted that the film had a ‘complicated’ history and was delayed by certain ‘dilemmas’, about which the reviewer did not elaborate. ‘In many places the film does not make a good impression on us, and probably not on the Gypsies either. The feelings aroused in the viewer are not to the benefit of the film, and understandably caused discomfort among the responsible bodies, which led to some amendments being made. However, these changes accentuated rather than eliminated the film’s flaws. From this perspective it does not fulfil its educational function as well as it could.’52 Behind the scenes, meanwhile, party and government officials worried about reconciling humanitarian socialist ideals with the realities of more than one hundred thousand Roma, whom both state and society persisted in defining as a ‘problem’. Between 1948 and 1954, when the Ideological Committee of the KSČ took control of the official line on the Gypsy Question, competing government agencies pursued conflicting goals. Officials in Prague saw two regions as especially problematic: the Czech borderlands and eastern Slovakia. Popular resentment and racism against Roma were widespread and particularly acute in the turbulent social conditions of the Czech borderlands. Some fifteen thousand to

49 50 51 52

‘Prˇípravy k natačení filmu “Můj prˇítel Fabián”’, Filmové informace 4, 1953, c. 7, 19 February 1953, 15. Jan Zalman [Antonín Novák], ‘Můj prˇítel Fabián’, Kino, 10 (10 February 1955), 62–63. Vojtěch Jestrab, ‘Film se diva nové na cikány’, Host do domu, 2 (1955), 91–92. Jirˇí Hrbas, Film a doba, 1 (1955), 3–4, 156–161.

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twenty thousand Roma (mostly Slovak) had arrived in Czech cities and the former Sudetenland by 1947, seeking employment and a better life, along with the millions of other new settlers. In an ethnically cleansed society, during a period of massive social and political upheaval, ‘Gypsies’ were a visible reminder that the socialist dictatorship was failing to deliver on its promise of a bountiful future for the whole of society. At a time of severe shortages and the rationing of basic goods, angry citizens frequently accused Gypsies of destroying the economy by speculation and profiteering. Pressure from below was a key factor in determining official policy. In April 1949 the Mladá Boleslav District National Committee (ONV) petitioned the government not to allow concern about racial discrimination to prevent them from taking radical action against ‘nomadic gypsies and vagrants of all sorts’ who were ‘parasites’ with no respect for the ‘most vital law of the people’s democracy: the right to work’.53 Faced with petitions from enraged citizens in the borderlands, regions feted in contemporary propaganda as laboratories for building a new socialist society, government officials were compelled to act. Yet the shift in the terms of the debate is demonstrated by a long-running inter-ministerial discussion about interning Gypsies in special labour camps – which was marked by clear continuities with Protectorate-era language and policies – in late 1949. In November, a Labour Ministry official circulated a proposal that used the Nazi-era classification of Gypsies into three categories and suggested ‘special labour camps’ for ‘nomadic and workshy people from category (c)’, where nomadic persons and their families could be housed under strict surveillance while they were ‘re-educated as proper citizens’.54 If necessary they were to be sent to forced labour camps (Tábor Nucené Práce, TNP) and their children placed in state care. Integrated Gypsies should be kept in the ‘various centres for Gypsies in the Czech lands and Slovakia’ that already existed, with the aim of ‘turning these centres into model settlements’. Meanwhile, notorious job-hoppers were reminded that fluktuace was punishable by forced labour and the removal of children into state care.55

53

54

55

NA, Ministerstvo vnitra II – Noskův archiv (MVII-N), f. 850/2, kart. 64, inv. č. 883: Okresní národní výbor v Mladé Boleslavi: Memorandum okresního národního výboru v Mladé Boleslavi vládě lidově-demokratické republiky Československé o cikánské otázce, 12 April 1949. NA, MPS, 1951–1957, f. 992, kart. 47, sg. 100, inv. č. 70: Zápis o meziministerské poradě konané dne 3. listopadu 1949 v MPSP ve věci rˇešení cikánské otázky (osob po jejich způsobu žijících) po stránce sociální a pracovní v ČSR. NA, MPS, 1951–1957, f. 992, kart. 47, sg. 100, inv. č. 70: Zápis o poradě užší meziministerské komise konané dne 11. listopadu 1949 v ministerstvu práce a sociální péče ve

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Discussion about the Labour Ministry proposal for Gypsy labour camps had received broad approval from other ministries when the debate was cut short by a furious memorandum from the communistdominated Central Council of Trade Unions (Ústrˇední Rada Odborů, ÚRO), which criticised these proposals for approaching the Gypsy Question from not one but two incorrect perspectives, being ‘authoritarian on one hand (surveillance, control, allocation of work, setting up labour camps etc) and idealistic on the other (eradicating backwardness and illiteracy, education in becoming civilised)’.56 Instead, the ÚRO memorandum argued: Thousands of Gypsies who have arrived in the Czech lands from Slovakia since 1945 and attained better material living conditions here, have rapidly transformed their former way of life and quickly integrated among the rest of the population. When they display faults, this is much more often the result of insufficient material conditions, racial discrimination etc, than the consequence of old ways of thinking, which itself cannot of course be changed quickly among any section of the population, the Gypsies included, but only gradually.

Indeed, the ÚRO argued, Gypsies had displayed ‘better adaptability [prˇizpůsobivost] to the new conditions and the improvement in material position than many other classes’. Thus the People’s Democracy should first of all ‘take care of improving the Gypsies’ material conditions and only then expect a change in their behaviour’.57 Any visitor could see that workers’ conditions were not changing as quickly as the ÚRO claimed. By 1951 the express train from Košice to Prague had been nicknamed the ‘Gypsy’ train for its association with Roma migrant workers travelling back and forth between eastern Slovakia and the Czech lands.58 To the dismay of government officials, this internal migration was irregular and often illegal. Companies sent recruitment teams directly to Slovakia, while the government organised so-called inter-regional exchanges to procure workers for labour-hungry industry and construction in Czech cities.59 Some of the travellers were ‘gypsies and their family members already employed in our industry’, while others were ‘newcomers, who leave [for Bohemia] without the permission of the Slovak ONV and prefer various occasional jobs to permanent

56 57 58 59

věci vypracování pracovního plan postupu prˇi rˇešení cikánské osob po jejich způsobu žijících, a to po stránce pracovní a sociální v ČSR. NA, MPS, 1951–1957, f. 992, kart. 47, sg. 100, inv. č. 70: Ústrˇední rada odborů oznámilo nám ve věci rˇešení cikánké otázky, 30 November 1949. Ibid. NA, MPS, 1951–1957, kart. 400, sp. 2123: KNV Praha: Podychení cikánů ze Slovenska. Nina Pavelčíková, Romové v českých zemích v letech 1945–1989 (Prague: Úrˇad dokumentace a vyšetrˇování zločinů komunismu, 2004), 41.

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employment’. Employers in need of short-term labourers to fulfil their production quotas also used Roma to fill temporary gaps in their workforces. Construction companies and state farms were bypassing official recruitment procedures and secretly recruiting migrant Gypsies as shortterm labourers directly onboard the Prague-bound train from eastern Slovakia.60 In Ústí nad Labem, an official reported that many Gypsies came to find ‘easier work’ than they could get in Slovakia, where they were selected for compulsory labour in mines or foundries or where salaries on construction sites were often low and ‘calculated arbitrarily’.61 Because many Roma were hired as short-term brigade workers, employers did not provide proper housing, assigning them temporary barracks or dilapidated accommodation in former workers’ colonies. Given that many Roma labourers arrived with their extended families, barracks soon became overcrowded, while the migrants sought out alternatives in housing intended for demolition, cellars, or other spaces.62 But when local officials in Prague contemplated expelling Gypsy workers who were allegedly disturbing the ‘aesthetic’ sensibilities of Prague’s citizens, they hit an immediate obstacle: ‘Almost all Gypsies claim to be Slovaks, and since they have no papers, it is impossible to prove whether they really are Gypsies or Slovaks.’63 Roma from eastern Slovakia tended to migrate with extended families, such as the Roma families from Michalovce who sought work in Bohemia after the collapse of the café music trade and wartime persecution, establishing a tight-knit community in Kladno.64 Elena Lacková remembered the postwar years as the time when Bohemia ‘opened up’ to Roma, offering opportunities for employment and equal treatment. A Roma female migrant told the British sociologist Will Guy in the early 1970s, ‘During the war and before the doctor would only come if you had money for him – so my brothers and sisters died. We were sixteen children in our family but only six are alive today. Now it’s much better – we have equal rights and everyone who wants to work has the chance.’65 Yet recent histories of the resettlement of the borderlands provide evidence of the widespread violence and discrimination against Gypsies that

60 61 62 63 64 65

NA, MPS, kart. 400, sp. 2123: KNV Praha: Podychení cikánů ze Slovenska. NA, MVI-D, f. 1075/6, kart 1282, zn 215, Záznam ze služební cesty. Pavelčíková, Romové v českých zemích, 37. NA, Ministerstvo práce a sociální péče, f. 1028, kart. 400, sg. 2249: Okresní úrˇad ochrany práce v Praze: Cikáni v Praze – zamýšlený odsun, 13 February 1947. Tomáš Haišman, ‘K počátkům územních pohybů michalovských Romů do Kladna,’ in Cikáni v průmyslovém městě 1–3, Zpravodaj KSVIEF č. 1/1988, p. 10–88. Will Guy, The Attempt of Socialist Czechoslovakia to Assimilate Its Gypsy Population (Bristol: PhD dissertation, University of Bristol, 1977), 448.

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characterised the chaotic postwar years in these frontier regions. By the turn of the 1950s, writes Matěj Spurný, Roma in the borderlands were often accused of plundering the houses of ethnic Germans, stealing, spreading disease, and avoiding work.66 Provincial officials struggling to maintain order in the chaotic Czech borderlands continued to call for the ‘toughest measures’ against what they termed – echoing the Nazi term used during the Protectorate – the ‘state-wide Gypsy menace’ (zlorˇád). In early 1951 Ústí nad Labem officials recounted an ‘especially regrettable’ case: a Soviet delegation dining in the Golden Angel restaurant in Žatec had been harassed by a large group of ‘citizens of gypsy nationality’, including ‘a gypsy woman who was publicly breastfeeding her small child and, when reprimanded, took the child off her breast and deliberately aimed her mother’s milk at the members of the delegation’.67 Further complaints alleged that ‘Gypsies’ were causing ‘respectable citizens’ to move out of borderland towns to escape their brawling and antisocial behaviour. Reliable figures on Roma employment are hard to find, but in December 1950 the Labour Ministry compiled a report based on figures from local labour exchanges which claimed that 96 per cent of all Gypsies over the age of fourteen in the Czech lands were employed, mostly as auxiliary labourers for construction companies, brickworks, quarries, and farms, where they ‘carry out physical work because they are illiterate. The literate ones prefer metal-works and textile factories, where they become qualified workers.’ In rural Slovakia an estimated 83 per cent of adult Gypsies were registered as employed, reportedly because ‘reactionary citizens and the District National Committees under their influence’ did not allow Roma to leave their ‘Gypsy colonies’ which were usually quite far from villages or towns. The report claimed – reflecting reality – that Roma women were working alongside men as labourers in construction, agriculture, brickworks, and quarries, though only unmarried women were likely to be in permanent employment, while ‘women with children only work occasionally.’68 In some cases, the socialist state stepped in to ensure that conflicts over the distribution of scarce goods did not flare up as ethnic conflict. Thus, when some one hundred Roma workers from Slovenská Ves near Kežmarok complained in May 1949 that they had not received their

66 67 68

Spurný, Nejsou jako my, 272. NA, Ministerstvo vnitra – nova registratura (MVI-NR), f. 1075/3, kart. 11 139, sg. 257: Ministerstvo vnitra: Výpis ze situační zprávy KNV Ústí n. L., January 1951. NA, MPS, f. 992, kart. 47, sg. 100, inv. č. 70: Zpráva o životě cikánů v ČSR, 20 December 1950.

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rations of meat and eggs, the police (SNB) investigated. Reporting that ‘the gypsy-inhabitants are showing great dissatisfaction and annoyance’, investigating officers found no evidence to support the local supply commission’s claim that Roma had lost their right to these rationed goods ‘because gypsy-citizens speculate with their ration cards on the black market’.69 At the same time, however, state authorities were not averse to manipulating anti-Gypsy sentiments to deflect attention from more fundamental problems with the supply and distribution of basic goods. Allegations about ‘“black market” trade with ration cards for clothing and food, which persons of gypsy origin exchange for money or food’ had become so common that the Košice KNV internal-affairs department issued special regulations to local National Committees to make ‘random controls among gypsies’ to find clothing coupons and then to prosecute ‘the sellers, but also the buyers – normally peasants’.70. A large trial of Vlach Roma ‘speculators’ in the Slovak-Hungarian border city of Kománo demonstrated the ambivalent ways in which state authorities chose to emphasise the ethnic dimension of economic crime.71 The Komárno Trial saw eighty-one people thrown into prison, while still others escaped across the border into Hungary and was one of the most spectacular responses to what a 1951 government order termed ‘crimes against provisioning committed by gypsy bands’, especially theft of ration cards for food and clothing.72 In December 1950 the Ostrava police reported to the Labour Ministry that ‘fraudulent claims for clothing and food from persons of gypsy origin were severely damaging our national economy’ in the run-up to Christmas. Police informers claimed that Gypsies were illegally procuring ration cards in Slovakia and selling them in the Czech lands. Gypsies allegedly bribed officials or registered for brigade work (especially in the forestry service) under false names or with false identification papers and then disappeared overnight after collecting their ration cards. Police also reported that Roma women ‘usually got themselves pregnant’ simply to get hold of extra rations and children’s 69 70 71

72

Stanica SNB Slovenská Ves, okres Kežmarok: Zásobovanie obyvateľstva – nedostatky, Document 61 in Anna Jurová, Dokumenty. ŠObA Košice: f. KNV Košického kraja, 1949–1960, kart. 48, sp. 23: Úprava pomerov osôb cikánského pôvodu – zpráva, 26 February 1953, in Jurová, Dokumenty. Compare Jonathan Zatlin, ‘Scarcity and Resentment: Economic Sources of Xenophobia in the GDR, 1971–1989’, Central European History, 40:4 (December 2007), 1–38; Malgorzata Mazurek, ‘Morales de la consommation en Pologne, 1918–1989’, Annales: Histoire, Science Sociales, 2 (April–June 2013), 499–527. Tomáš Zapletal, ‘Prˇístup totalitního státu a jeho bezpečnostníck složek k romské menšině v Československu (1945–1989)’, Sborník Archivu bezpečnostních složek (Prague: ABS, 2012), 13–83.

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clothing.73 The accused were presented as typically capitalist profiteers who had driven around in fancy carriages, spending ‘thousands of crowns’ at cafés, buying large houses, and employing domestic servants. Reports on the trial claimed that one Gypsy, Jozef R., nicknamed Pepi, paid a fortune to rent the Hotel Central over two days for his wedding, inviting local officials and police. The prosecution accused the Gypsies of travelling to Bohemia and Moravia in their wagons, claiming to be looking for work or plying itinerant trades, such as selling scrap metal, as a cover for robbery and speculation.74 The Komárno Trial was just one part of a nationwide police action that resulted in the arrest of hundreds of Roma, as well as several officials working for local National Committees, who were accused of conspiring to supply ration cards illegally.75 Police reports frequently referred to this trial as evidence in support of reintroducing anti-vagrancy legislation aimed at Gypsies during the later 1950s. Responding to the alleged economic crimes committed by ‘Gypsies’, the Ministry of National Security (MNB) launched the euphemistically named Action Nomadic Persons (Akce Toulavé Osoby, ‘Action TO’) from August 1952 to April 1953.76 Action TO aimed to collect information on the ‘characteristic’ criminal activities of ‘large groups of nomadic persons’ that allegedly included the fraudulent procurement of ration cards or blank residence registration forms and rubber stamps, burglary, theft of agricultural produce, and illegal trading – in other words, petty crime of a capitalist nature.77 MNB instructions to local police, however, stated that the campaign targeted ‘nomadic gypsy groups’, and National Committees were instructed to issue no ration cards to nomadic persons until the action was completed.78 Concerned about domestic responses, the head of the nationalities department of the Interior Ministry warned that Action TO ‘should not be seen to target the gypsies as a whole, in case it is viewed as a case of racial discrimination’.79 Nonetheless, isolated protests against ethnic targeting

73

74

75 77 78 79

NA, MVI-NR, f. 1075/3, kart. 10987, sg. 215: Krajské velitelství NB Ostrava: Podvodné lákání šatenek a potravinových lístků osobami cikánského původu – vážné poškozování našeho rˇízeného hospodárˇství, 7 December 1950, in Jurová, Dokumenty, no. 71. Zpráva o poznátkoch a výsledkoch trestného konania v afére v potravinovými lístkami a inými trestnými činmi, ktorú prejednával Okresný súd v Komárne od 4. novembra 1952 do 1. decembra 1952, cited in Emília Horváthová, Cigáni na Slovensku: Historicko-etnografický náčrt (Bratislava: SAV, 1964), 225, n. 162. 76 Zapletal, ‘Prˇístup totalitního státu’, 27. Ibid., 27–28. ABS, f. A 6/2, inv. j. 381, fol. 1, 54, 55. ABS, Sbírka rozkazů a narˇízení E2, inv. č. 32: Krajské správa verˇejné bezpečnosti v Hradci Králové. Toulavé osoby – stihání akce ‘T.O.’ NA, f. MV-D, f. 1075/6, kart. 1283, Internal memorandum on Action T.O., 3 September 1952.

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of Roma did reach the Interior Ministry in Prague. Jan Kováč from Šahy in Hungarian-speaking southern Slovakia complained in October 1952 that local police ‘had registered all the local Gypsies, including their moveable and immoveable property’. In the name of his ‘fellow citizens of Gypsy nationality from this district’, Kováč asked for an explanation. ‘We are justifiably very disturbed . . . We want to know if some kind of national regulation was issued on this matter, or whether this campaign against us had another legal basis.’80 Activists and journalists complained that the poor living conditions of Roma workers were evidence of continuing racism. The volume of letters sent to the Labour Ministry from citizens and journalists complaining about the discrimination and poverty suffered by Roma was sufficient to prompt Minister Erban to write a warning note to Marie Švermová at the KSČ Secretariat in September 1950. Erban stressed that some of these complaints came from the most important party newspapers (Tvorba, Haló Nedělní noviny, Rudé právo).81 An editor at the cultural weekly Tvorba, who saw at first hand the living conditions for Roma migrant labourers while he was on a two-week brigade at the Vítkovice Steelworks in Ostrava, was shocked that some eighty Roma were still living in ‘overcrowded, flea-infested wooden shacks’ two years after their arrival from Kežmarok in eastern Slovakia, despite the fact that ‘most of them have been KSČ members since 1945 and took part in the partisan war in Slovakia.’ Comparing the ‘modern and hygienic dormitories’ provided for short-term brigade workers like himself, the journalist claimed ‘it should also be possible to house permanent labourers like people. The whole thing strikes us as racial discrimination.’82 At an Interior Ministry meeting in September 1951 officials clashed over the best way forward. Dr Kropáč of the ministry’s Nationalities Department – which monitored Germans and Gypsies from the perspective of state security – claimed that the key issue was the regulation of state citizenship, given the large numbers of Gypsies with missing – or multiple – identification papers: ‘Having lots of papers means, in practical terms, “no papers.”’ Kropáč argued that Gypsies who ‘settled and assimilated’ should automatically get state citizenship.83 This was a common complaint among local officials, as at the Prague National Committee in 1951, who were exasperated that Gypsies often ‘had no 80 81 82 83

NA, MV-D, f. 1075/6, kart. 1283, Kováč Jan – sťažnosť, 30 October 1952. NA, KSČ ÚV f. 100/4, sv. 19, a.j. 137: Ministr práce a sociální péče to Maria Švermová (Sekretariát KSČ), 25 September 1950. NA, MV-NR, f. 1075/3, kart. 10 987, sg. 215: Letter to Erban from Tvorba journalists. NA, MV-D, kart. 1284, sg. 215: Zápis o meziministerské poradě, konané dne 21. zárˇí 1951 v zasedací síni ministerstva vnitra v Praze-Letná.

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proof of citizenship or any personal identity documents, or else held different papers under various names’.84 The rest of the Interior Ministry meeting was taken up with crime, social unrest, and the public-health risks allegedly connected to the migration of Slovak Roma to the Czech borderlands. On a mildly optimistic note, one participant offered that ‘many gypsies already see the term “gypsy” as an insult and say that gypsies are the ones who don’t work and only roam around. In official contacts we must use the term “citizen of gypsy origin”, although only to a limited extent, in order not to support separatist tendencies among certain individuals.’85 In the main, however, the ethnic dimension of economic crime and threats to public security was top of the agenda, with reports of gangs of itinerant Gypsies stealing, speculating, fighting, avoiding work, drinking moonshine, spreading venereal disease, and refusing to send their children to school. Companies struggling to fulfil production targets for the Five Year Plan were hiring gypsy workers illegally from Slovakia in contravention of official recruitment quotas, and the general population was still racist and discriminatory in everyday interactions with Roma. The March 1952 Interior Ministry decree on ‘persons of gypsy origin’ seems to have been the result of a broader awareness among party and government officials in that year about the absence of a general policy on the nationality question. Interior Ministry reports began to note that the 1948 Constitution had neglected nationality problems and that a set of principles on the future direction of nationality policy should be circulated to all levels of the state administration: even at local levels, National Committees should be encouraged to ensure ‘that members of nationality groups . . . feel at home in our country, like citizens with equal rights, and join us fully in building socialism’.86

For the Future of the Nation Educating Roma children for the socialist future was central to plans for solving the Gypsy Question in the People’s Democracies. The segregation of Romani children in schools and classes for ‘special needs’ has become notorious as a legacy of socialism in Eastern Europe, but while recent scholarship and human-rights activism has focused in particular 84 85 86

NA, MV-D, kart 1282, sg. 215. NA, MV-D, kart. 1284, sg. 215: Zápis o meziministerské poradě, konané dne 21. zárˇí 1951 v zasedací síni ministerstva vnitra v Praze-Letná. Prohloubení práce národních výborů v národnostní politice, 1953, cited in Spurný, Nejsou jako my, 143.

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on the question of desegregation, there has been far less research on the origins of the practice.87 The extent to which the segregation of Romani children in separate classes was rooted in pre-socialist practices, particularly dating from the 1930s and 1940s, requires further research. Moreover, the degree to which ‘special schools’ for Roma were the result of initiatives from below – and not simply imposed from above by the state – has frequently been forgotten in debates about the segregation of Roma on the basis of their presumed ‘special needs’. In the early 1950s, social workers, teachers, and party activists helped set up schools for Gypsy children across Czechoslovakia. At an internal meeting in 1951, an Education Ministry official summed up the problem thus: ‘They [Roma children] don’t belong in special schools, but when we are dealing with several children, that is the best solution for a limited period of time. For larger numbers of gypsy children, it’s possible to set up schools for young people with behavioural problems. These are just temporary measures to help the children integrate into normal schools.’88 The March 1952 Interior Ministry decree on ‘persons of gypsy origin’ also included a provision for special schools and classes for Roma children under Education Ministry regulations on remedial schools for children requiring special care. The best known of these special Gypsy schools was the School of Peace, established by an enthusiastic young pedagogue, Miroslav Dědič, as a tiny boarding school for Roma children in a militarycontrolled zone in the Šumava Mountains during the early 1950s. The school took in Roma children from the surrounding area of Český Krumlov with the assistance of social workers, who helped identify suitable candidates, and soon began to accept children from as far afield as eastern Slovakia. Over the following years Dědič battled to get his school established as a permanent institution and garnered enthusiastic reports from the contemporary press and authorities. In August 1952 an Interior Ministry official visiting from Prague described the school as ‘the pride of the region’, brushing aside the fact that the school often ignored ‘protests from unwilling parents’ when taking children into care, justifying this on the grounds that the parents were mired in alcohol or prostitution.89 Children placed in the school were often denied contact with their anxious families, as illustrated by the case of a fifteen-year-old girl 87 88 89

Iulius Rostas, Ten Years After: A History of Roma School Desegregation in Central and Eastern Europe (Budapest and New York: CEU Press, 2012). NA, MV-D, f. 850/3, kart. 1284, sg. 215: Zápis o meziministerské poradě, konané dne 21. zárˇí 1951 v zasedací síni ministerstva vnitra v Praze-Letná. NA, MV-D, kart. 1284: Zpráva o průzkumu provádění národnostní politiky: České Budějovice, 5–8 November 1952.

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from Svidník – at least one day’s journey by train from the school – who was apparently sent to Květušín at the request of her stepfather and whose anguished mother had no news of her daughter for seven months.90 Escape attempts were apparently frequent, such as the case of the fourteen-year-old boy who disappeared one evening in late autumn. Dědič immediately sent a telegram to the railway police to ask them to watch out for the escapee trying to board the morning train to Český Krumlov: ‘Distinguishing features: shaven head, gypsy’.91 Forcibly separating children from the influence of their allegedly degenerate parents was justified, as Matěj Spurný writes, by a ‘sincere belief that this was in the best interests of the children and their future’.92 The School of Peace was lauded in the press as a shining example of humanitarian socialism, for example furnishing a story for a women’s radio programme on Christmas Eve 1952, when Dědič was asked to provide a ‘nice Christmas letter’ addressed to his pupils that could be read aloud on air.93 The Agriculture Ministry’s Institute for International Cooperation was also impressed by reports of his ‘pioneering, humane educational work with gypsy children, which is really in the spirit of socialism’, and asked for his insights into pedagogical practice, ‘especially if gypsy children show an inclination for agricultural labour, like looking after animals or growing vegetables’. A similar thirst for success stories seems to have prompted a request from journalist Jirˇí Bínek, who was writing a children’s novel about a Gypsy school and asked Dědič to share his ‘real-life experiences (especially the happy ones) such as setting up a Pioneer group, building bee-hives and rabbit-hutches . . . or anything about the children performing heroic feats of physical labour’.94 In his reply, Dědič claimed the ‘first joy was the creation of a collective. In contrast to the original wolfish conditions, a certain camaraderie emerged.’95 Citizens in the Making In August 1952 the Ministry for Information (Ministerstvo Informací a Osvěty, MIO) invited Elena Lacková to address a training course for 90

91 92 93 94 95

Museum of Romani Culture, Brno, f. Miroslav Dědič: Letter from ONV Michalovce to Dědič, 3 October 1953. See also Barbara Šebová, ‘“Škola Míru” v Květušíně 1950–1954 (a její pokračování na Dobré Vodě u Prachatic) – kritická reflexe v historickém kontextu 50. let’ (Prague: Diplomová práce, FF ÚK Praha, 2009). Museum of Romani Culture, Brno, f. Miroslav Dědič: Telegram from Dědič. Spurný, Nejsou jako my, 260. Museum of Romani Culture, Brno, f. Miroslav Dědič: Letter from Czechoslovak Radio to Dědič, 9 December 1952. MRK, f. Miroslav Dědič: Letter from Bínek to Dědič, 29 May 1952. MRK, f. Miroslav Dědič: Letter from Bínek to Dědič, 21 June 1952.

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Figure 2.4. The Květušín School of Peace and teacher Miroslav Dědič, 1950s. Private collection of Miroslav Dědič, Museum of Romani Culture, Brno.

Gypsy activists.96 In her letter to the MIO, Lacková dutifully promised to write a speech on ‘The Struggle for the Soul of the Gypsy Person’, which she hoped would accelerate the ‘rebirth’ (Slovak, prerod) of her kinsfolk. She also observed that Roma encountered ‘racist and damaging attitudes’ daily in Košice and Prešov.97 In April 1952 Lacková had given the keynote speech at a meeting in Prague for some one hundred cultural and educational activists working with Roma. Speaking alongside Lacková was the lawyer Tomáš Holomek, who stressed the need to ‘seek ways and means of making the gypsy into a useful member of our new society’.98 Holomek openly declared that he always spoke the ‘gypsy language’ in political meetings with Roma soldiers because ‘this is the 96

97 98

Parts of the following section appear in Celia Donert, ‘The Struggle for the Soul of the Gypsy: Marginality and Mass Mobilisation in Stalinist Czechoslovakia’, Social History (May 2008). NA, f. MI-D, f. 861, kart. 135: Letter from Elena Lacková to Eva Bacíková (MIO), 27 August 1952. ‘V duchu stalinské národnostní politiky: Z celostátní konference kulturně výchovných pracovníků mezi cikány konané ve dnech 5.-6. dubna 1952 v Praze’, Osvětová práce, VII:16, 246–253.

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language they understand best.’ Holomek stressed the ‘psychological’ factor in political work with Roma, arguing that Gypsies valued nothing more highly than their culture, which included their language. Elena Lacková meanwhile called for the recruitment of more ‘gypsy activists’ on the grounds that non-Roma activists would ‘find it hard to reach out to the soul of the Gypsy’.99 Such open references to Romani culture would become impossible several years later. Elena Lacková and Tomáš Holomek were themselves the beneficiaries of the culture of building socialism, which after 1948 focused increasingly on recreating the whole of Czechoslovak society, including the creation of a new socialist intelligentsia.100 Information and Propaganda Minister Václav Kopecký, a fervent Stalinist, took charge of mass education (osvěta) after 1948.101 The Communist regime inherited a rich tradition of civic education from the prewar republic but increasingly viewed osvěta as a tool of ‘civic (political) education in the broadest sense’.102 Institutional foundations for the mass organisation of leisure had also been laid during the Nazi occupation through organisations such as the Verˇejná osvětová služba or the Kuratorium, while the role of trade unions in coordinating leisure activities for workers increased greatly in comparison to the interwar period.103 Under socialism, as one theorist explained, every aspect of social life should fulfil an educational function, from ‘the organisation of the production process, state security, wage policy, the judiciary, the cadre system, the press, and the theatre.’104 In 1952 the MIO launched a campaign to transform Roma labourers into politically conscious Gypsy activists. Officials at the MIO nationalities department struggled to implement humanitarian pedagogical projects for Roma against what they perceived as the repressive agendas of more powerful state agencies, above all the Interior Ministry, which continued to view Roma and Germans as a threat to national security. MIO officials who participated in an inter-ministerial debate on the Gypsy Question revealed the deeply paternalistic understanding of ‘enlightenment’ that governed this humanitarian concern: ‘Let us 99 100

101 102 103 104

Osvětová práce, VII:16, 246–253. Jirˇí Knapík, Únor a kultura: Sovětizace české kultury 1948–1950 (Prague: Libri, 2004); Petrˇ Šámal, ‘“Česká otázka” ve světle stalinismu: Karel Košik a koncept levicového radikalismu’, Soudobé dějiny, 1:12 (2005), 45–61. On Kopecký, see Jana Pávová, Demagog ve službách strany: Portrét komunistického politika a ideologa Václava Kopeckého (Prague: ÚSTR, 2008). Knapík, Únor a kultura. Martin Franc and Jirˇí Knapík, ‘“Na člověka najíždíme další čtvrtletí”: Volný čas v českých zemích v letech 1948–1956’, Soudobé dějiny, 4/2010, 613–640. Osvětová práce, XI:6 (21 March 1956).

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remember that the Gypsy is a very sensitive and mistrustful person. If you show him good will and offer him a helping hand, he will become a responsible citizen and worker. Gypsy citizens do not know how to live in any other way, and so . . . we must teach them.’105 In September 1952, the MIO organised a summer school for twenty-seven Roma labourers at a former summer residence of the aristocratic Lobkowicz family in Horˇín near Mělník. It was regularly used for such purposes, also hosting the Ministry of Justice Law School of the Working People which an anticommunist émigré Czech judge later described as a ‘mill to convert carefully selected proletarians with no prior advanced education into “lawyers” in less than one year’.106 This camp for Gypsy activists was part of a bigger programme for unpaid ‘activists’ working with other problematic groups such as women or Germans, local history (vlastivěda) specialists, or parish chroniclers.107 National Committees in the Bohemian lands were requested to select ‘conscientious Gypsy workers (preferably literate, so they can take their own notes during the course), male and female, and especially young people’.108 Few NVs responded to a request that clearly was not viewed as a priority, and the MIO had to remind them repeatedly to nominate their delegates. A typical delegate was a Roma man aged between twenty and forty years old, working in mining, building, or agriculture, preferably a party member who displayed a desire for self-improvement. Thus the Hradec Králové KNV nominated one Mr Horváth because ‘he is much more culturally and socially advanced than the other local gypsies, and shows an interest in education and working with other gypsies.’109 In summer 1954, the MIO organised a second longer course for Gypsy activists, also attended by non-Roma writers, journalists, students, linguists, and bureaucrats. Among them was a young Communist novelist who had recently published a novel about a Roma village in prewar Czechoslovakia, a philologist interested in the Roma language, some young women ethnography students, a Roma journalist on the trade unions paper, and the headmaster of an experimental boarding school for Roma children.

105 106 107 108 109

NA, Ministerstvo informací (MI), f. 861, kart. 16, inv. č. 45: MIO report on ‘culturaleducational care for the gypsies’, 25 October 1951. Otto Ulč, The Judge in a Communist State: A View From Within (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1972), 9. NA, MI, f. 861, kart. 135: Sbirka obězníků pro KNV 1950, č. 83. MIO: Ústanovení propagačních důvěrníků a školení propagačních pracovníků, 21 November 1950. NA, MI, f. 861, kart. 135: Ministerstvo Informací a Osvěty (MIO). Ústrˇední kurs krajských instruktorů pro práci mezi cikány, 1952. NA, MI, f. 861, kart. 135: Letter from KNV Hradec Králové to MIO, 15 September 1952.

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Roma activists received training on Marxist-Leninist theory and international politics, as well as lectures from journalists or pedagogues such as Miroslav Dědič, the headmaster of the Makarenko-inspired School of Peace. Typically, such courses included private study of standard texts such as Information Minister Václav Kopecký’s speech at the Ninth KSČ Congress, the text of the Soběslav Plan, and KSČ resolutions on cultural and educational work. Progressive films were shown every evening, and there were group readings of the prison diary of Communist hero Julius Fučík, after which each participant publicly pledged to work for the construction of socialism.110 The MIO attempted to tailor the course syllabus for Roma by combining older traditions of ‘Gypsiology’ with socialist propaganda. Thus participants recorded the songs of a group of nomadic Vlach Roma who were passing through the area, and the Roma workers themselves formed a musical group that performed every evening. Most importantly of all, these brand-new citizens were provided with their own national history. The MIO reported that the lecture on the history of the Gypsies was the most important part of the training: For the first time our Gypsy comrades found out about their origins, about the pilgrimage of their forefathers, why they are darker-skinned than our people, why they speak a different dialect, why their way of life differs from ours, how and why we want to solve the gypsy question. This lecture really has the greatest significance for the gypsies, because they are already developing a healthy popular self-consciousness and dignity, and many of them are already following the right path by themselves.111

Roma activists such as Elena Lacková were, however, not permitted to teach courses on ‘political’ questions such as KSČ nationality policy. In 1954 a Slovak Rom, Gustáv Karika, was selected to run the training course at the Horˇín castle on the grounds that he was ‘a Gypsy himself, one of them’, who ‘speaks their language and knows their mentality better than anyone else’.112 Twenty-four-year-old Karika had joined the party in 1948. Originally a locksmith, he took an accelerated preparatory course for workers in 1950 and completed a degree at a party university, the Higher School of Law in Prague, four years later.113 Despite the fact that he was working as an advisor on Gypsy affairs at the Košice KNV, the MIO did not trust Karika to teach the course on nationality policy. Instead, a ministry official took charge, claiming that 110 111 112

NA, f. 861, kart. 135: MIO, Školení osvětových pracovníků – rámcový návrh, Školení Krajských instruktorů osvětových besed, 1952. NA, Ministerstvo kultury, f. 867, kart. 231, inv. č. 352: Evaluation of 14-day course with 26 participants for instructors in cultural work with Gypsies, 26 May 1954. 113 Ibid. SNA Bratislava, f. Zväz Cigánov-Rómov, kart. 1.

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Karika was ‘unable’ to teach the course, particularly regarding the ‘correct line’ regarding use of the ‘gypsy language’.114 In later years Gustáv Karika would emerge as a firm supporter of Roma cultural rights and a founder of the first Slovak Union of Gypsies-Roma, established after the Prague Spring in 1968. Fragmentary correspondence suggests that Karika trod a careful path between his official position and private views. During the summer school, Karika hastily scribbled a note to the Roma children at the School of Peace that deliberately employed the term ‘Roma’ rather than the official ‘Gypsy’. Echoing party rhetoric, Karika addressed the note to ‘our dear youth’ and explained, ‘We are at a school for workers with Roma. We are learning how to work so that Roma become good builders of our homeland. We are pleased that you are studying, and you must keep it up, so you can show that Roma do know how to study and live like people who belong in our new society.’ Karika finished his letter with the Communist salutation ‘Honour to work’, written in Romani (Ašardi amári búti!) as well as Slovak (Česť práci!).115 A Roma worker who took part in the 1952 MIO course for Gypsy activists later sent a whole series of letters to the Prime Minister’s Office protesting racial discrimination against Roma in Ostrava and calling for state support for the ‘gypsy language’.116 Jan Šipoš presented himself as an ordinary labourer who had become politically and socially conscious through his Communist education and minimising references to his own ‘gypsy origin’. Šipoš claimed that the 1952 Prague conference of Gypsy workers had convinced him of the need to ‘raise the living standards of all honest gypsies’. After starting work in the Ostrava mines, he also did voluntary work with local Roma after his shift finished at 3 PM, persuading National Committee officials to assist families ‘living in filth, infested with bed-bugs and lice’. He petitioned the Klement Gottwald Steelworks to improve its housing and helped set up literacy classes and political meetings for Roma. His efforts got him noticed by the Ostrava KNV, he asserted, which is how he was nominated to the 1952 training course. Šipoš described his mission as persuading local bureaucrats that ‘Gypsies do not have backwardness in their blood, but are suffering from poverty caused by years of capitalist oppression.’117

114 115 116 117

NA, Ministerstvo kultury, f. 867, kart. 231, inv. č. 352: Evaluation of 14-day course with 26 participants for instructors in cultural work with Gypsies, 26 May 1954. MRK Brno, f. Miroslav Dědič: Letter from Gustáv Karika, Horˇín, 17 May 1954. NA, Úrˇad prˇedsedníctvo vlády – běžná spisovna (ÚPV-B), f. 315/1, kart. 3409: Correspondence from Jan Šipoš. NA, ÚPV-B, f. 315/1, kart. 3409: Letter from Jan Šipoš to ÚPV, 11 January 1955.

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After Jan Šipoš and another Roma worker personally visited the office of Prime Minister Viliam Široký in April 1953 to voice their concerns about racial discrimination, the office recommended that the KSČ Central Committee investigate the conditions of Roma in Ostrava more closely.118 Yet when Šipoš made the controversial proposal for state intervention to save the ‘gypsy language’ spoken by one hundred thousand Czechoslovaks from decline, his request was sharply rejected. Šipoš had also called for a legislative solution to the Gypsy Question, arguing that otherwise local bureaucrats would never take the problems of the Roma seriously. The Prime Minister’s Office firmly replied that legislation on the Gypsy Question ‘would conflict with our constitution’.119 Crossing the Line In April 1953, a Czech medical doctor and International Red Cross volunteer named Karel Holubec petitioned the Ideological Department of the KSČ Central Committee to recognise the Gypsies as a nationality, basing his argument on his study of Stalin’s Marxism and the National and Colonial Question.120 ‘At the end of the day, there’s no other path for communists to follow. We can tell a Gypsy that if he works well, we’re prepared to forget about his shameful origins. . . . The second option is to give them the possibility of cultural development, so they don’t have to conceal their origins.’ Admitting that Roma could not be defined as a ‘nation in the historical sense of the word’, Holubec argued that he knew ‘from personal experience’ that the Soviet Union even recognised small ‘backward’ peoples as nationalities. Soviet Roma had certainly been included in the Stalinist nation-building campaigns of the 1920s, but their nationality status had been revoked in 1936.121 By the time Karel Holubec was writing, the Romen theatre in Moscow was a mere ‘hangover’, as Michael Stewart writes, from the days of Soviet affirmative action.122 Apparently influenced by his prewar study of oriental languages in Prague, his time as a volunteer with the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, and his experience of the 118 119 120 121 122

NA, ÚPV-B, f. 315/1, kart. 3409: Letter from ÚPV to Josef Tesla, ÚV KSČ, 28 April 1953. NA, ÚPV-B, f. 315/1, kart. 3409: Reply to Šipoš. NA, AÚV KSČ, f. 05/3, sv. 36, a.j. 295: Letter from Karel Holubec to ÚV KSČ, April 1953. Brigid O’Keeffe, ‘“Backward Gypsies”, Soviet Citizens: The All-Russian Gypsy Union, 1925–1928’, Kritika, 11:2 (2010), 283–312; Alaina Lemon, Between Two Fires. Michael Stewart, ‘Communist Roma Policy 1945–1989 as Seen Through the Hungarian Case’, in Will Guy (ed.), Between Past and Future: The Roma of Central and Eastern Europe (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001), 71–92.

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occupation, which he spent in hiding, Holubec wrote numerous letters to the authorities calling for Roma cultural rights, lectured on public health to Roma, and published a pseudonymous collection of Gypsy songs, including an ode to Stalin.123 Holubec explicitly referred to other socialist regimes, especially Bulgaria, which he claimed had already introduced Roma schools and magazines: ‘There the term Rom, i.e. their word for their own nationality, is already blazing a trail.’124 As Holubec was writing, the Soviet bloc was shaken by the death of Stalin and widespread dissatisfaction among workers – supposedly the beneficiaries of the socialist economy – about social and economic conditions. The first Five Year Plan saw significant industrial unrest – more than half the 401 strikes recorded between 1946 and 1968 took place during this period.125 Stormy demonstrations and strikes in Brno in November 1951 and Plzenˇ in 1953 involved Communist as well as non-party workers and were suppressed violently by large numbers of police and armed People’s Militias.126 By July 1953, trade union officials at the Klement Gottwald Steelworks in Kunčice had to acknowledge that the new government regulation imposing draconian punishments for worker absenteeism and ‘fluctuation’ (switching jobs without employers’ permission) would have meant sending 1,400 workers at Kunčice to the state prosecutor.127 Workers’ demands were less about politics (though democratic representation on factory councils remained a constant bone of contention) than social problems, such as the cancellation of Christmas bonuses or especially the 1953 currency reform that rendered citizens’ savings worthless. Tens of thousands of workers and citizens took to the streets of Plzenˇ and other Czech towns on 1 June 1953, in some places for two or three days, in an outburst of anger and resentment that alarmed party and trade union leaders.128 Although Czechoslovakia was not affected as deeply by de-Stalinisation as Hungary or Poland, the events of 1953 were nonetheless stormy.129 In August 1953 Holubec joined a group of Roma activists, bureaucrats, 123 124 125 126

127 128 129

NA, AÚV KSČ, f. 05/3, sv. 36, a.j. 295: Letters from K. Holubec. NA, AÚV KSČ, f. 05/3, sv. 36, a.j. 295: Letters from K. Holubec. Peter Heumos, ‘Vyhrnˇme si rukávy, než se kola zastaví!’ Dělníci a státní socialismus v Československu 1945–1968 (Prague: Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, 2006), 66. Kevin McDermott, ‘Popular Resistance in Communist Czechoslovakia: The Plzenˇ Uprising, June 1953’, Contemporary European History, 19:4 (November 2010), 287–307. Heumos, ‘Vyhrnˇme si rukávy, než se kola zastaví!’, 72. McDermott, ‘Popular Resistance in Communist Czechoslovakia’, 287. The non-event of 1956 in Czechoslovakia will be discussed later, but see the excellent study by Muriel Blaive, Une déstalinisation manquée: Tchécoslovaquie 1956 (Bruxelles: Ed. Complexe, 2005).

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and party functionaries for a meeting held at the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union to discuss the lack of a clear political line on the Roma. In his opening speech, Holubec appealed for Gypsies (Cikáni) – rather than ‘gypsies’ (cikáni) as commonly used in official discourse – to be considered as a national community.130 The Interior Ministry regulation of 1952 did not clearly define the term ‘Gypsy’, the participants complained. Soviet nationality policy had attempted to displace political nationalism to the realm of culture to strengthen socialism. Similarly, the Czechoslovak experiment with cultural uplift for ‘backwards’ Roma had created an elite which refused to limit its activities to a depoliticised cultural sphere. At the Writers’ Union meeting in August 1953 there were open calls for Romani textbooks and public recognition of Romanes as a language. Karel Holubec criticised the official definition of Gyspies as a social group, and the Romani language as a ‘sort of cant’. Antonín Daniel, a Moravian Rom from Oslavany (one of very few in his native village to have escaped deportation to Auschwitz), demanded a university department for the study of the Romani language.131 Shortly before the meeting Holubec warned the Central Committee that Daniel and the other members of the Gypsy intelligentsia were deeply disappointed with the lack of progress. Despite being fluent in several languages, the schoolteacher Antonín Daniel was ‘fed up and depressed’ by the authorities consistently ignoring his requests for a position where he could work ‘scientifically and pedagogically with Gypsies’.132 Daniel was badly off financially and would not be able to pay for a trip to Prague himself. Other Roma such as Rudolf Daniel had been organising political activities for the KNV in Brno but ‘did not earn enough to live on, was in severe financial straits, had disagreements with the KNV and had stopped dealing with Gypsy affairs’.133 Also present at the Writers’ Union was Gustáv Karika, the Slovak Rom who taught the MIO course for Gypsy activists. Comrade Karika had written to Holubec that a meeting on the political definition of the Roma question was ‘necessary, necessary, necessary!’ Appealing to the Stalinist party leadership,

130 131

132

133

NA Praha, AMV-D, f. 850/3, kart. 1283: Zápis porady o cikánské otázce a prvních úkolech v jejím rˇešení, 3 August 1953. Ctibor Nečas, Romové na Moravě a ve Slezsku (1745–1945) (Brno: Matice Moravská, 2005), 222–225; see also Daniel’s correspondence with the British Gypsy Lore Society, cited in Dora Yates, ‘Hitler and the Gypsies’, Commentary (November 1949), 455–459. NA Praha, AÚV KSČ, f. 05/3 (Ideological Department), sv. 36, aj. 295: Návrhy občanů na rˇešení cikánské otázky – Letter from Holubec to V. Mucha, ÚV KSČ, 22 August 1953. Ibid.

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Holubec urged the Central Committee, ‘We must not be the last in the socialist world to solve this question!’ The culmination of activist attempts to achieve a ‘Stalinist’ solution to the Gypsy Question was a petition signed by some forty volunteers and experts that called for a reformulation of the political line on the Gypsy Question in December 1953. The petition was cautiously framed as a call for ‘scientific research’ on Roma in the fields of ethnography, linguistics, history, art, and sociology and was put forward by a Preparatory Committee for a Commission on the Study of the Gypsy Language at the Oriental Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (ČSAV). Central European orientalists had been interested in Romani linguistics since noticing similarities with Indian languages in the eighteenth century.134 The most prominent prewar Czech orientalist, Vincenc Lesný, who was a personal friend of Rabindranath Tagore, had published several studies of Romani dialects in Bohemia and Moravia, including an article stressing the Indian origins of Roma, published during the Nazi occupation.135 These orientalist leanings were given new verve and immediacy with Indian independence and the reorientation of Soviet foreign policy towards the post-colonial world. Milena Hübschmannová, one of the signatories of the petition and later the most influential supporter of a literary Romani language in Czechoslovakia, was in 1953 a twenty-year-old student studying a degree in Hindi, Urdu, and Bengali at Charles University. Yearning for India – but prevented from travelling there because of her father’s political views – Hübschmannová instead sought fulfilment by studying Romani, claiming in numerous interviews that her first contact with the language was a student brigade in Ostrava, where she recognised the Romani word Šun! (Listen!) as the Hindi Sun! and Dikh! (Look here!) as Dekh!136 The Oriental Institute petition was signed by many of the activists who had attended MIO cultural enlightenment events for Roma in 1952. Carefully presented as a call for a more scientific approach to the Gypsy 134

135

136

Thomas Acton, ‘Modernity, Culture and “Gypsies”: Is There a Meta-Scientific Method for Understanding the Representation of “Gypsies”?’, in Nicholas Saul and Susan Tebbutt (eds.), The Role of the Romanies: Images and Counter-Images of Gypsies / Romanies in European Cultures (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2004), 98–116. Vincenc Lesný, ‘Cikáni v Čechách a na Moravě’, NVČ XI, č. 2 (1916), 193–216 and XII, č. 1 (1917), 57–63; ‘Jazyk Cikánů v ČSR’, in Československá Vlastivěda III (Prague: 1934); Etymologisches Wörterbuch: Mundart der böhmischen, mährischen und slowakischen Zigeuner, Archiv orientální, XII (1941), 3–4; ‘Die Zigeuner sind ursprünglich die indischen Doms’, Archiv orientální, XII, 1–2 (Prague: 1941), 121–127. Karolína Ryvolová, ‘Milena Hübschmannová o sobě’, Romano džaniben (nˇilaj 2006), 12–26.

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Question, the petition also voiced criticism of continuing discrimination against Roma within the bureaucracy and from other citizens, as well as ‘unbelievably low living standards, and neglect in matters of health, housing, schooling, mass education and politics’. Activists demanded that the KSČ resolve the ‘vague’ ideological approach to the Roma, especially the question of nationality status, and if necessary establish a government committee to coordinate all issues related to Roma. Moreover, the material and social conditions for many Roma, especially in eastern Slovakia, were described as ‘conflicting with the spirit of our constitution and the principles of our people’s democracy’.137

Conclusion If the socialist dictatorship crushed liberal civil society in Czechoslovakia after 1948, what was created in its place? Gypsies appeared as the ideal citizens of Stalinism, ripe for emancipation from the capitalist class oppression of the past. Legal equality backed up by social and economic rights formed one part of the promises held out by socialist citizenship, and it was not by chance that Labour Minister Erban compared the position of Roma to women rather than that of national minorities. Yet the introduction of Stalinist nationality policy offered a parallel vision of limited cultural autonomy to communists such as Tomáš Holomek and Elena Lacková, who despite their loyalty to the regime tried to find ways of persuading the state to support the Romani language and culture. Although never demanding what Labour Minister Erban warned against – ‘a Gypsy republic within the republic’ – Holomek and Lacková themselves subscribed to the nationalist ideas that were so successfully appropriated by Communist regimes across Eastern Europe. Here lay the source of numerous conflicts and contradictions about the idea of the ‘Gypsy worker’ that dominated official discourse during this period. However, for the vast majority of Roma in Czechoslovakia the image of the industrial worker portrayed in Jirˇí Weiss’s My Friend Fabián was very far away from everyday life in the early 1950s. The overwhelming majority of Roma in Eastern Europe during the Stalinist era were rural village dwellers. How could the vision of socialist citizenship based on industrial labour and urban living be translated in the small villages and hamlets of rural Slovakia? This question has partly been explored in the case of Roma migrants to the Czech borderlands, although largely from the 137

NA Praha, ÚPV-B, f. 315/1, kart. 3409: Memorandum adopted at the first meeting of the Preparatory Committee for Study of the Gypsy Language, Oriental Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, 14 December 1953.

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perspective of the state. Matěj Spurný and Eagle Glassheim have explored the resettlement of the borderlands left depopulated by the expulsion of three million German speakers in 1945–1946. The social history of Roma migrants through the 1950s in industrialised Bohemia and Moravia is vital to understanding the mechanisms whereby the socialist dictatorship established its legitimacy among parts of the population, but it was not the reality of the majority of Roma, who were rural village dwellers. The following chapter therefore shifts the focus away from the chimneys and mine shafts of Ostrava towards the dusty roads of eastern Slovakia.

3

But Roma Are Rural!

The Stalinist ‘citizen of Gypsy origin’ was imagined as a heroic industrial labourer, but in reality the majority of Roma in Eastern Europe were rural villagers in the late 1940s. During the first decade of socialist rule, activists such as Elena Lacková and Gustáv Karika travelled to the countryside to educate rural Roma about their rights as citizens of the new republic. Ethnographers, public health experts, teachers, planners, and other local officials of the state were dispatched to villages to map the dimensions of the Gypsy Question and suggest solutions. In Czechoslovakia, the main focus of such investigations was Slovakia, the rural, mountainous, religious, and multilingual eastern part of the republic. Slovakia itself was a very recent invention, a region known as ‘upper Hungary’ until it was attached to the new Czechoslovak state after World War I. Unlike the ethnically cleansed Czech borderlands, which seemed to represent a laboratory for the construction of a utopian socialist modernity, the Slovak village appeared to contemporaries as a place of unacceptable backwardness and tradition.1 As Kate Brown described so eloquently in her study of the Polish kresy, the ethnic purification of ‘backward’ border zones in Eastern Europe was carried out in the name of cultural and economic progress, using the tools of the centralising, modernising state.2 Campaigns to solve the Gypsy Question in the countryside accelerated during Stalinism but were rooted in a longer history of administrative reordering of ethnicities in nationally ambiguous border regions since the nineteenth century. Tens of thousands of Slovak, Hungarian, and Vlach Roma had lived in small villages and settlements (osady) in eastern Slovakia since at least the 1

2

On the Czech borderlands as a laboratory for Communist modernity, see Eagle Glassheim, ‘Ethnic Cleansing, Communism, and Environmental Devastation in Czechoslovakia’s Borderlands, 1945–1989’, The Journal of Modern History, 78 (2006), 65–92; Matěj Spurný, Nejsou jako my: Česká společnost a menšiny v pohraničí (1945–1960) (Prague: Antikomplex, 2011). Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

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late eighteenth century. Shortly after World War II, the police (SNB) registered more than eighty thousand Gypsies in Slovakia, mostly in the poverty-stricken eastern districts of Humenné, Košice, Levoča, Prešov, and Rožnˇava.3 State officials viewed the Gypsy Question in Slovakia as a particularly pressing problem. Postwar upheavals compounded the legacy of institutionalised discrimination and persecution of Roma in the fascist Slovak Republic, including the loss of civil rights, ghettoisation, and forced labour.4 Roma living in these regions during the war had also experienced the upheavals of annexation of southern Slovakia by Hungary, armed resistance against the wartime Slovak fascist state, German military occupation, and, later, the force of front-line fighting between the advancing Red Army and retreating German troops. Wartime damage to the economy and infrastructure was more severe in Slovakia than the Czech lands. After Czechoslovakia ceded Carpathian Ruthenia to the Soviet Union in June 1945, the border with Soviet Ukraine cut through this sensitive region. Many people were left destitute in chaotic conditions exacerbated by postwar border changes, population exchanges, and the migration of hundreds of thousands of people to the Czech borderlands.5 The perceived problem of Roma in Slovakia after the war was thus to a large extent a regional problem in the east. In the early 1950s, efforts to bring mass education to Gypsies were local, unplanned, and uncoordinated. Rural Roma were not passive victims of the ‘socialist industrialisation’ of Slovakia but actively sought to claim their rights as citizens, often in the face of resistance from peasant societies that used the language of social justice to exclude undesirable groups from accessing scarce resources within the planned economy. By mid-decade, partly as a result of lobbying by activists, some of whom were Roma, there was a shift towards a more centralised policy of ameliorating the health and social status of the poorest Roma. Slovak planners, meanwhile, became obsessed with plans to ‘liquidate’ the thousands of Gypsy settlements that seemed to symbolise the isolation of Roma from socialist society. By the end of the decade, the socialist 3 4

5

NA Praha, f. Ministerstvo Spravedlnosti (MS), kart. 562: Kriminální ústrˇedna, Soupis cikánů, výsledek na Slovensku, 8 June 1948. Ctibor Nečas, Českoslovenští Romové v letech 1938–1945 (Brno: Masarykova univerzita, 1994); Karol Janas, Perzekúcie Rómov v Slovenskej republike (1939–1945) (Bratislava: Ústav Pamäti Národa, 2010). On the connection between population displacement, border changes, and postwar reconstruction, see Jessica Reinisch and Elizabeth White (eds.), The Disentanglement of Populations: Migration, Expulsion and Displacement in Postwar Europe, 1944–1949 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Peter Gatrell and Nick Baron (eds.), Warlands: Population Resettlement and State Reconstruction in the Soviet-East European Borderlands, 1945–50 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009).

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state had not succeeded in eliminating social inequalities in eastern Slovakia, but the experience of building socialism in the countryside would inform the politics of Romani activists in the decades that followed, both nationally and internationally.

A New Dawn: Gypsies in Socialist Slovakia In 1950, Elena Lacková appeared alongside portraits of partisans and shock-workers in a book called A Reborn Land: Images and Reportage from Slovakia Today by the young journalist Jirˇí Ruml.6 Lacková set up the first amateur Gypsy theatre group in Slovakia after the war, which performed in villages and local cultural halls. Her play The Burning Gypsy Camp dramatised the plight of a Roma family forced to leave their homes and seek refuge in a forest by the paramilitary Hlinka Guard during the wartime Slovak state. Angela, the family’s courageous young daughter, falls in love with a dashing Slovak engineer, joins the partisans, and helps defeat the fascists. The Burning Gypsy Camp borrowed the plot and motifs of socialistrealist narratives, along with influences from the popular romances that Lacková might have read or heard as a young woman.7 Although apparently unique in its treatment of Roma suffering during the war, it was also an example of the proliferation of state-sponsored schemes to support cultural life in the villages, for example through the state-run Village Theatre (Vesnické divadlo / Dedinské divadlo) or mobile cinemas which staged hundreds of theatrical performances and film showings around Slovakia through the 1950s that were seen by millions of people.8 In a 1949 interview with the Prešov party newspaper Hlas Lˇudu, Lacková explained she wrote the play to call attention to ‘the suffering of the Gypsies in the so-called Slovak state. Because of the labour camps where Gypsies were imprisoned, the beatings, the unjust way we were treated. And because after the liberation no-one paid any attention to the Gypsies.’9 Writing in 1952, the young Slovak journalist Ladislav Mnˇačko observed, ‘The Gypsy in the east is still always – a Gypsy, a person who is ridiculed, ignored, undervalued, detested . . . The Gypsies are one of the most serious problems of eastern Slovakia and one that we have still not done much to solve.’10 The observation appeared in a book 6 7 8 9 10

Jirˇí Ruml, Země v prˇerodu: Obrázky a reportáze z dnešního Slovenska (Prague: Orbis, 1950). Elena Lacková, Narodila som se pod šťastnou hvězdou (Prague: Triáda, 1997, with an introduction by Milena Hübschmannová). Karel Kaplan, Proměny české společnosti 1948–1960: Část druhá: Venkov (Prague: ÚSD Praha, 2012). ‘Horiaci cigánsky tábor’, Hlas ľudu (26 June 1949). Ladislav Mnˇačko, Vpád: Rok na stavbe HUKO (Bratislava: Tatran, 1952).

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publicising the construction of the Eastern Slovak Steelworks (HUKO) – a kombinát that promised to revolutionise life in the poverty-stricken eastern provinces of Czechoslovakia. Many of the workers on the HUKO construction site were Roma from the settlements near Košice, and as the editor of the works magazine, Mnˇačko published articles praising ‘the Slovak worker, together with the Hungarian worker, the Gypsy, and the Czech engineer, who together with Soviet supplies are all fighting for peace, shoulder to shoulder, with their productive labour’.11 Remarkably for a Slovak newspaper of the time, as well as containing many articles in Hungarian, the HUKO paper also included articles written in Romanes under the name of Július Bunda, a worker.12 Further articles highlighted the social benefits of industrialisation for the Romani settlement in Veľká Ida, claiming that some eighty children were now attending school only because of the construction of the Hutní kombinát.13 The story of heroic Gypsies being liberated by the new steel combine was supposed to mirror the salvation of eastern Slovakia through ‘socialist industrialisation’. In fact, however, the HUKO experiment did not end well. The Czechoslovak economy, straining under the first Five Year Plan, was unable to support the costs of a new kombinát. Meanwhile, engineers discovered that the site was literally unable to bear the weight of HUKO: the ground was firm to a depth of eight metres but below this turned to mud and sand. The Hukostav company was closed down in January 1953, and its management was arrested by the State Security (StB). Internal party reports on the case cited geological surveys which revealed a lack of iron ore, while press reports referred to sabotage.14 The collapse of the scheme was only one of the many obstacles that confronted the communists in Slovakia during the early 1950s. The Czech party leadership in Prague feared not only the influence of the Catholic and Uniate churches or rebellious minorities such as Hungarian- or Ruthenian-speakers acting as a fifth column in concert with their allies across the state border (such as the remnants of the armed Ukrainian nationalist Banderovci) but also what they termed ‘bourgeois nationalism’ amongst Slovak Communist Party leaders associated with the wartime Slovak National Uprising. 11 12 13 14

L. Mnˇacko, ‘V duchu proletárskeho internacionalizmu’, HUKO – Stavba socializmu, 6 (10 November 1951). Július Bunda, ‘Savore terne manušenge’, HUKO – Stavba socializmu, 5 (7 November 1951). P. Čepek, ‘Budou nám dorůstati negramotní občane?’, HUKO – Stavba socializmu, 6 (10 November 1951). Michal Barnovský and Juraj Briškár, ‘K otázke výstavby hutného kombinátu na východnom Slovensko (Huko)’, Historica Carpatica, 2 (1970), 81–106.

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Before the premature demise of HUKO, managers on the construction site had complained about the living conditions of local Roma who made up a significant part of their workforce. In March 1952, the Hukostav company appealed for funds to build a residential school for local Gypsies, more than 90 per cent of whom were working on the construction site, and thus save the expense of importing qualified labourers from the western parts of the republic. Due to the long history of ‘bourgeois’ and ‘fascist’ persecution, the company claimed in a letter to Prime Minister Antonín Zápotocký, the attempt to improve ‘the gypsies’ standard of living, work morale, and morale in general presents a particular and very sensitive problem, which requires exceptional care’.15 The report claimed that rural Roma suffered from very high rates of infant mortality, lice infestations, infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and trachoma, and a high percentage of respiratory, skin, and sexually transmitted diseases. Living standards were described as catastrophic: ‘They live in half-destroyed shacks with leaking roofs or no roof at all. Ten-twelve people live in each hut (chajda), in rooms of 4 metres square. There is hardly any furniture. They sleep on rags on the ground, which turns into mud and puddles in rainy weather. The huts are crammed together . . . without any kind of facilities. Electricity cannot even be brought to these hovels.’16 The ‘socialist industrialisation’ of Slovakia was presented as one of the major goals of the KSČ after 1948, although many of the Communist regime’s policies originated in the regional development programmes of the interwar years. Most workers in rural Slovakia had been excluded from the prewar systems of social insurance that provided benefits to unionised industrial workers or civil servants in the Czech lands. The Communist government promised to create ninety thousand new jobs for Slovaks during the first Five Year Plan, and as a result millions of people became eligible for social benefits, free health care, and education. Eastern Slovakia was targeted for the construction of textile factories, chemical production, and food processing. By 1960 some 80 per cent of agricultural land was in the socialist sector, although collectivisation proceeded more slowly than in the Czech lands (97 per cent by 1960). Campaigns to collectivise agricultural land and develop industry were presented as the solution to economic and political backwardness in Slovakia. In 1950 Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg wrote of seeing the Vah Valley in Slovakia flooded with electric light as a symbol of the 15 16

NA, Úrˇad prˇedsednictva vlády – běžná spisova (UPV-B), f. 315/1, kart.1708, sg. 916: Letter from Hukostav to Ministry of Construction. Ibid.

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introduction of socialist modernity in Eastern Europe.17 However, the socialist state encountered significant resistance in Slovakia, where popular support for Communism was never as high as in the Czech lands. Collectivisation sparked peasant resistance in many Slovak regions, and private farming continued in mountainous regions well into the 1960s.18 Moreover, since welfare benefits were administered wholly or partly by the trade unions and presupposed an employment relationship, peasants who had not joined collective farms and self-employed craftspeople were not included in the new schemes. Benefits for workers on collective farms were introduced gradually through the 1950s and remained lower than for industrial employees. Social conditions were particularly turbulent in eastern Slovakia during the early 1950s as the Czechoslovak regime sought to secure its sensitive new eastern border after ceding the province of Subcarpathian Ruthenia to the Soviet Union in 1945 and to convert this ethnically, religiously, and socially heterogeneous region to socialism.19 In the immediate postwar period, security concerns in eastern Slovakia had focused on the possible cross-border activities of Ukrainian nationalists – particularly the so-called Banderovci, gangs of Ukrainian irregulars operating in western Ukraine and eastern Slovakia – and Ruthenians, a national minority spread across the Carpathian Mountains, who were also not recognised as a nationality in postwar Czechoslovakia. After 1948 the KSČ liquidated the Greek Catholic Church (a strong pillar of Ruthenian national identity) – which was supposed to merge with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church – and launched massive campaigns against the Roman Catholic Church, closing down monasteries and imprisoning hundreds of priests.20 Security concerns remained high priority in this sensitive border region, where population exchanges and political campaigns had failed to eliminate cross-border confessional, ethnic, or

17 18

19 20

Cited in Timothy Johnston, Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour and Everyday Life under Stalin, 1939–53 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Jaroslav Rokoský and Libor Svoboda (eds.), Kolektivizace v Československu (Prague, Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů, 2013); Samuel Cambel, Pätdesiate roky na slovenskej dedine: Najťažšie roky kolektivizácie (Prešov: Universum, 2005); Karel Jech, Soumrak selského stavu 1945–1960 (Prague: Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, 2001); Karel Kaplan, Proměny české společnosti 1948–1960: Část druhá: Venkov (Prague: USD AV ČR, 2012); Daniel Miller, ‘Collectivization in the 1970s and 1980s in Zamagurie, Slovakia’, Agricultural History, 73:3 (Summer 1999), 281–302. Jan Pešek, V tieni totality: politické perzekúcie na Slovensku v rokoch 1948–1953 (Bratislava: Historický ústav SAV, Nádacie Milana Šimečku, 1996). Michal Barnovský, ‘K otázke tzv. ukrajinského buržoázneho nacionalizmu na Slovensku’, Historický časopis, 1 (1996), 64–82; Marian Gajdoš, ‘K niektorým otázkam tzv. ukrajinského buržoázneho nacionalizmu’, in Pešek, V tieni totality.

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linguistic ties. In 1953, violent collectivisation campaigns resulted in severe social unrest breaking out in the Prešov region.21 Solving the Gypsy Question was therefore of secondary importance for most local officials in the Prešov and Košice regions during the late 1940s and early 1950s, a state of affairs that Roma activists employed by the National Committees sought to change. In the absence of a collective interest organisation for Roma, party-trained Gypsy activists such as Lacková acted as mediators within the National Committees, the agencies of the state in municipalities, districts, and regions. Gustáv Karika was assigned for several years to the so-called Third Department (security and internal affairs) of the Krajský Národný Výbor (KNV) in Košice, while Elena Lacková worked for the cultural department of the Prešov KNV. By the early 1950s, the National Committees had been transformed from revolutionary organs of self-government into bureaucratic institutions dealing with most aspects of local government.22 Officials had sweeping powers, ranging from the authority to issue ration coupons to meting out penalties (including prison sentences) for criminal offences.23 Roma activists, according to a Košice Regional National Committee resolution of March 1953, were supposed to ‘monitor the development’ of the Gypsy population and ‘increase their participation in public life: in congresses and meetings, in National Committee work – such as the women’s commissions – and in the mass organizations’.24 Activists employed to monitor and educate the Gypsy population were part of a broader campaign to transform and politicise rural life through public meetings, visits from brigades of agitators, lectures, discussion circles, and professional training.25 Activists were forced to negotiate the boundaries of acceptable criticism of state policy when seeking to raise politically sensitive questions, such as the persistence of racial discrimination in local government. In October 1954 Elena Lacková and her husband made a long trip to Prague to complain that the Prešov Regional National Committee (KNV) was ‘acting in an almost discriminatory way towards persons of gypsy origin’ by refusing to issue Roma with permission to build new 21 22 23 24

25

Michal Barnovský, Prvná vlna destalinizácie a Slovensko (1953–1957) (Brno: Nakladatelství Prius, 2002). Jozef Žatkuliak, Vývoj národných výborov na Slovensku v prvých rokoch výstavby socializmu (1948–1954) (Bratislava: Veda, 1986). Jozef Žatkuliak, V mene zákonov a proti občanom? (Trestnosprávna právomoc národných výborov na Slovensku v rokoch 1950–1957) (Bratislava: HÚ SAV, 1994). ŠObA Košice, f. KNV Košickeho kraja, 1949–1960: Zvýšenie starostlivosti o osoby cigánskeho pôvodu, Zápisnica z 10. schôdzky dnˇa 3. marca 1953, in Anna Jurová, Rómska problematika 1945–1967: Dokumenty (Prague: Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, 1996). Kaplan, Proměny české společnosti.

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houses, even though their war-damaged houses had not yet been repaired. Moreover, the only three Roma employed as advisers on the Gypsy Question in the Prešov KNV had been dismissed, meaning that the Prešov KNV ‘has no member who is a person of gypsy origin – even though there are some 25 000 persons of gypsy origin in the Prešov region’.26 In response the Bratislava Board of Commissioners accused Lacková and her husband of ‘substandard work’. Prešov National Committee officials claimed that the couple ‘suffered from serious moral flaws’ which disqualified them from working for the Communist bureauracy. ‘Comrade Lacko is very often drunk, and once, while in a drunken state, he beat his wife so badly she could not come to work for a week.’ As a result, the three Roma activists were downgraded to less influential positions. Dismissing Lacková’s claims, the Prešov KNV declared, ‘The effects of creating the new man and a new social order can be seen in the current way of life of citizens of gypsy origin in the Prešov Region, and their way of life favourably reflects the care of the state.’ The Prešov authorities claimed that ‘whole settlements have been rebuilt, wells and toilets have been constructed in many settlements, health care has been improved, illiteracy is gradually being eliminated, and citizens of gypsy origin are being integrated into permanent employment, etc.’27 When Lacková suggested to the Prešov KNV that school attendance among Roma children might improve if the state would allow the publication of a monthly magazine in the ‘Gypsy language’, she was rebuffed: ‘My husband and I have walked around the settlements and asked them if they’d read such a thing, and we met with a good response. We have comrade Dr. Sninčák, who’s written a Gypsy grammar. Then we could publicise the results in the whole region. We’ve had a few articles in the magazine New Life, and people have come to us, saying that they liked them.’ In response, the deputy KNV president retorted that the KNV had no funds to publish such a magazine; moreover, this would not support the eventual aim of integrating Gypsies into Czechoslovak society, which required that they master the Czech or Slovak languages. Instead, he said, Gypsy children should receive extra schooling during the holidays to prepare them for entry into the apprenticeship boarding schools used to prepare teenagers for work in key industrial sectors. ‘A literary Gypsy language does not exist,’ he claimed. ‘We cannot agree with this, it would be a step backwards.’ ‘Today we’re not here to solve 26

27

NA Praha, ÚPV-B, f. 315/1, kart. 3409, sg. 257: Úrad predsedníctva sboru povereníkov, Komisia pre otázky všeobecného riadenia národných výborov: Nedostatky v práci medzi občanmi cigánskeho pôvodu v Prešovskom kraji, 5 January 1955. NA Praha, ÚPV-B, f. 315/1, kart. 3409, sg. 257.

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the Gypsy question, because no such Gypsy question exists, that’s been solved, just like the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Ukrainians, they’re living in the Czechoslovak Republic, and we just want to solve some problems that we find among citizens of gypsy origin.’28

We Have Lived Here for One Hundred Years! Despite the fact that the 1948 police register of Gypsies in Slovakia was based on the 1927 law on ‘nomadic Gypsies’, only a small proportion of Romani families were professionally itinerant. Diverse and differentiated by class as well as ethnicity, Roma living in Slovakia after the war spoke dialects of Romanes influenced by Slovak or Hungarian, while itinerant Vlach Roma maintained their own distinct dialect and customs, often viewing the settled Rumungri Roma with disdain. While Vlachs were horse-traders who lived on the road, travelling with wagons and tents, Rumungri worked as blacksmiths, musicians, brick-makers, or hired labourers. In addition there were small numbers of German Sinti in western Slovakia and Romanian-speaking Beash korytári in the east, as well as groups of Polska Roma near the Polish border. Vlach, Sinti, Slovak, and Hungarian Roma spoke different – but mutually comprehensible – dialects of the Romani language.29 Since the eighteenth century, Roma in Slovakia maintained their singularity in the face of massive state assimilation campaigns, preserving highly differentiated and localised identities. By constantly performing ‘Gypsiness’ in everyday life, speech, and song, anthropologist Michael Stewart has written, Roma maintained a distinct cultural identity in the interstices of modern industrial society.30 When Czech officials in Pardubice showed a group of Slovak Roma migrants an educational documentary film entitled The Gypsy Today and Tomorrow, which depicted nomadic Gypsies being integrated into modern socialist society, they objected strongly, complaining that ‘they hadn’t lived as the film suggested, as they were former Slovak settled Gypsies . . . who had their own houses.’31 Contrary to the image of the 28

29 30 31

ŠOBA Prešov, f. KNV v Prešove. Zápisnice rady, 1949–1960. Zápisnice z 38. schôdzky rady KNV v Prešove, konanej dnˇa 7. novembra 1956. Zasadnutie rady KNV v Prešove: Zpráva o hospodárskych, kultúrnych a zdravotnych pomerov obyvateľstva cigánskeho pôvodu Prešovského kraja, 7 November 1956, in Jurová, Dokumenty, 177. Jelena Marušiaková, ‘Vzťahy medzi skupinami Cigánov’, Slovenský národopis, 36:1 (1989). Michael Stewart, The Time of the Gypsies (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997). NA Praha, AMV-D, f. 850/3, kart. 1283, sg. 215: KNV Pardubice: Film ‘Cikán včera a dnes’, 22 January 1954.

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wandering Gypsy, institutionalised in Nazi policy but rooted in much older cultural stereotypes, Roma were rooted in the life of the Slovak village, where class divisions were mapped onto the everyday practices, rituals, and spaces of agricultural life. Roma ‘settlements’ (osady) were often separated spatially from the main village, but their inhabitants were linked by numerous forms of daily interaction, whether labour, charity, or entertainment.32 Ethnographers who conducted fieldwork in the early 1950s found that Roma referred to the settlements in Romani as the Romani osada (Roma settlement), along with the name of the nearby village.33 The depiction of Roma as ‘isolated’ from socialist society – a common trope in socialist government reports – belied these multiple connections.34 Informal systems of patronage linked Roma families to the ‘better families’, wrote ethnographer Jozef Kandert in his study of a central Slovak village.35 Wealthier peasants would act as patron or godfather – kmotr – to a local Gypsy family. Collectivisation and modernisation dramatically reshaped the material environment of the village, but as Kata Horváth has shown, in everyday life these invisible hierarchies continued to influence relations between Gypsies and peasants throughout the socialist era.36 Popular representations of Gypsies as ‘alien’ to the land were crucial to maintaining these hierarchies. Symbolically as much as economically, land was central to the peasant world view, as ethnographies of peasant responses to collectivisation have shown.37 Thus when the District National Committee in Turčiansky St. Martin proposed to resettle Roma from Martin on fertile land along a municipal boundary (chotár) in June 1945, six local municipalities wrote an outraged petition to the Slovak parliament in Bratislava, warning that ‘concentrating gypsies’ on the edge of their jurisdiction ‘would endanger the families and livelihood of our peasants, not to speak of their property’. As well as repeating familiar tropes about Gypsies’ propensity to crime and infectious disease, the petition referred to the alleged failure of the

32 33 34 35

36 37

Ada Engebrigsten, Exploring Gypsiness: Power, Exchange and Interdependence in a Transylvanian Village (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007). Rómsky Inštitút, Bratislava, Archive of Dr Emília Horváthová, kart. 5, sv. 11: Sociální postavení a některé společenské vztahy u Cikánů. Stewart, The Time of the Gypsies. Josef Kandert, Každodenní život vesničanů strˇedního Slovensko v šedesatých až osmdesatých letech 20. století (The Everyday Life of Villagers in Central Slovakia from the 1960s to the 1980s) (Prague: Nakladatelství Karolinum, 2004). Kata Horváth, ‘Gypsy Work – Gadjo Work’, Romani Studies, 5, 15:1 (2005), 31–49. Edit Fél, Edit and Tamás Hofer, Proper Peasants: Traditional Life in a Hungarian Village (Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1969).

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eighteenth-century Josephinian decrees to turn Roma into productive citizens by embracing the peasant way of life: History proves that the gypsies would not take care of the land, because when the former emperor and queen gave the gypsies land, more than one hundred years ago, with the intention that they should settle in one place, create small farms and tend the soil, they sold the plots and continued to live an itinerant life, living by damaging their neighbours and begging. It is well known that the gypsy race avoids all work.38

Fiercely challenging such attacks, a June 1945 petition from the Fečo family – wealthy animal breeders and musicians whose descendants recollected living ‘as one family with the Slovak peasants’ – denounced their local National Committee chairman to his superiors at the District National Committee in Giraltovce for stirring up anti-Gypsy sentiment.39 Their petition implied that the chairman was a former fascist who had changed his political allegiance after the war (he ‘switched from one political party to the other’) and had ordered the eviction of the Gypsies from the nearby Gypsy camp to a remote piece of swampy land to gain support ahead of the first postwar elections: ‘We Gypsies have been living in this municipality for more than 100 years, we live in a proper Christian way, we work like other decent citizens, we marry properly, we go to church, we dress like other citizens, and so we go about our daily lives.’40 The Fečos claimed that the chairman violated their rights as citizens in the postwar state: ‘We should not be treated as a different sort of people, who are not the same in body and soul as other citizens. We believe that there is no legal basis for the order to move from this place, where we have lived for more than 100 years . . . It is publicly known that we were continually persecuted in the former so-called Slovak state and our rights were limited, so everyone should understand that this is a matter of diktat and not people’s democracy.’41 Ethnographic research amongst rural Roma during the early 1950s – some of which could not be published for political reasons 38

39 40 41

SNA. f. Povereníctvo vnútra – bezpečnostný odbor, 1945–1959/1960, kart. 442, sp. 6503: Slovenské Pravno, Rúdno, Kalamenové, Liešne, Budiš, Jasenovo – Protest uvedených obcí proti rozhodnutiu ONV v Turčianskom Sv. Martine o koncentrácii Rómov do obcí Hadviga a Briešťa, 16 July 1945, in Jurová, Dokumenty, 35. Interview with Verona Fečová and Olga Fečová, in Milena Hübschmannová, Po Židoch Cigáni: Svědectví Romů ze Slovenska 1939–1945 (Prague: Triáda, 2005), 150–156. SOKA Bardejov, f ONV v Giraltovciach (1945–1960) kart 29, č sp 7790/48: Roma from Lúčka to ONV Giraltovce, 2 June 1946, in Jurová, Dokumenty. SOKA Bardejov, f ONV v Giraltovciach (1945–1960) kart 29, č sp 7790/48: Roma from Lúčka to ONV Giraltovce, 2 June 1946, in Jurová, Dokumenty.

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at the time – provides fragmentary evidence of the services performed by Gypsies within the village economy and the transformation of these economic niches as a result of socialist industrialisation. The same sources indicate that these services, such as metalwork, basket-making, or the production of valky (unbaked bricks of clay and straw) – far from being relics of ‘Gypsy tradition’ – were the result of constant adaptation to the demands of a modernising society. In August 1954, for instance, researchers observed Roma who specialised in making bricks at a clay pit on a piece of urbarial land in Muránská Dlhá Lúka, which was one of the largest sites of this type of Gypsy seasonal work.42 Roma living in Zdichavá and other settlements travelled to Muránská Dlhá Lúka during the summer months and lived in temporary huts, or koliby. Originally the clay pit was larger, but a peasant had purchased two-thirds of the plot (formerly urbarial land) in the First Republic. Women and children were the main producers, while the men were employed elsewhere, usually tending livestock. The work was hard and dependent on fair weather, since the bricks took three days to dry, but a Roma woman told the researchers that they made two hundred bricks on a good day, earning Kč 300 for one thousand bricks. The researchers recognised that the production of bricks was ‘seasonal migration’ for economic reasons, rather than an example of an inherent tendency to ‘wander’, and that ‘by this time next year, there will be six new houses in the Slovak village, made from the Gypsies’ bricks.’43 The liquidation of private enterprise, however, rendered niche Gypsy trades not only unprofitable but also illegal. In Jelšava, researchers discovered a Roma blacksmith still producing handmade bells and chains in a koliba used as a workshop. Until the previous year, the man and his wife had been sleeping on the floor in his workshop on a bed made of rags. In 1953, they moved into a house in the village. Samko was still sending the bells to his brother’s workshop in Hungary for finishing – ‘until they shone like gold’ – and for sale. He claimed that ‘he had a permit’ to do so, but the researchers noted, ‘We must not forget an important fact – which is that Samko’s bell production is secret and untaxed.’ He no longer made bells officially, since ‘the high taxes would make it unprofitable.’44 42

43 44

Rómsky Inštitút, Bratislava, Archive of Dr Emília Horváthová, Kart. 5, Sv. 11: Eva Davidová: ‘Z výzkumu Slovenské Akademie Věd, konaného dna 9.-21.VIII.1954 . Poznámky k výrobě valků v Muránské Dlhé Lúce – “Na Hlinisku”.’ Ibid. Rómsky Inštitút, Bratislava, Archive of Dr Emília Horváthová, Kart. 5, Sv. 11: Eva Davidová: Z výzkumu Slovenské Akademie Věd, konaného dna 9.-21.VIII.1954. Poznámka ke zvonkárˇskému zaměstnání Jelšavých Cikánů, 9–21 August 1954.

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Nevertheless, the researchers noted that this blacksmith lived in a village where a number of Gypsy craftspeople and musicians had been permitted to buy land directly in the village and thus to integrate with the peasants. Moreover, Roma from the village worked alongside Gadje in the local magnesite mine, and villagers would enter the Gypsy settlement to buy goods produced by the Gypsies. The Roma paid a quarterly tax to rent plots of land, where they grew maize, cucumbers, vegetables, and flowers, as well as fruit and nut trees. In addition, each family was required to send a man to sweep the streets in the town every Saturday. Yet at the same time, the researchers noted a factor influencing these hierarchical relationships within the village economy that government officials rarely admitted: the legacy of wartime discrimination persisted into the postwar years. Although industrialisation was providing new economic opportunities for Gypsy workers, the legacies of fascism continued to influence the hierarchical relationships between Roma and Gadje. Ethnographers noted that wartime restrictions on Roma in Jelšava had been less stringent than in nearby Revúca, for example, because the Jelšava Roma were needed for work in the mines. In 1940 Gypsies were forbidden from entering the town outside set times, which were fixed by the municipality. In Revúca, Gypsy men swept the streets in the morning from 6 am until 7 am, and the women were only allowed to go shopping in the town between 8 and 9 am. Gypsies were totally prohibited from entering public buildings, trains or buses. Those who broke the rules had their heads shaved and were held in police custody for two nights, where they were given nothing to eat or drink. Later special labour camps for Gypsies were established. Gypsies were not allowed to speak Romanes in public.45

As a result, the ethnographers noted; The relationship with officials in the municipality to which the settlements are attached is very strained. Disputes with the local population, due to the Gypsy temperament and the peasants’ mistrust of this foreign element, mean that until today the Gypsies have not been able to buy sufficient land in Jelšava. There is a similar problem with drinking water in the gypsy settlements . . . which can only be solved by digging wells and installing sewers, and above all by educational work to make sure that Gypsies themselves take part in this work. The Gypsies have their own representative on the local National Committee, but he says himself that it is a very difficult role, as he is often attacked by both sides.46

45

46

Rómsky Inštitút, Bratislava, Archive of Dr Emília Horváthová, Kart. 5, Sv. 11: Eva Davidová: Z výzkumu Slovenské Akademie Věd, konaného dna 9.-21.VIII.1954, Sociální postavení a některé společenské vztahy u Cikánů. Ibid.

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Memories of fascism, despite the absence of a formal culture of commemoration, continued to shape daily interactions between Roma and local agents of the state, such as the National Committee chairperson or local functionaries. Jan Kolarčík, a schoolmaster and amateur folklorist in the village of Fintice, reported to the Information Ministry in 1955 that ‘the village Gypsies remember the capitalist-fascist era with great bitterness: witness the lament Andro da taboris jaj phares buťi kherel (I go to the camp) which emerged in the labour camps.’ When the song was performed, wrote Kolarčík, all the Roma wept, ‘both the old and the young’. Furthermore, he emphasised, the Gypsies ‘are a nation that has suffered at the hands of fate, and especially, a nation that has lost any feelings of sympathy and trust towards non-Gypsies . . . The law sees them as equal, but they rather see the law as something that protects them against non-Gypsies.’47 A song performed by a thirty-five-year-old woman from Slovenský Grob and transcribed by the ethnographer Emília Horváthová challenged the communists to make amends: We were sitting around one day No idea what was coming our way Two gendarmes showed up Threw us into their car. We were kindness itself We gave food to the partisans They took us away in their car. To those agonies in the camps We clasped our hands together. These are baptised people These are people who have been confirmed They are married in church They are married in church. So you’ll punish them You’ll give houses to women and mothers You’ll give work to young men You’ll give work to young men.48

47

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ŠObA Prešov, f. KNV v Prešove, Odbor školstva a kultúry (1949–1960), kart. 201, č. 2881, Jozef Kolarčík, Zlepšenie výchovnej práce medzi cigánmi, 12 August 1955, in Jurová, Dokumenty, 342–352. Rómsky Inštitút, Bratislava, Archive of Dr Emília Horváthová, kart. 3, č. 39: Prieskum v Slovenskom grobe, Slovenský Grob, okr. Pezinok, M. Biháryová, 35 r., circa 1953 (handwritten transcription).

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Ethnography: Studying Gypsies after Race Science In 1953 the Institute of Ethnography, part of the recently established Slovak Academy of Sciences, employed a young ethnographer called Emília Čajanková (later, Horváthová) to lead a collective research project on Slovak Gypsies. Born in 1931 in central Slovakia, Emília Horváthová was part of the first generation of students to experience the Sovietisation of ethnography in Czechoslovak universities.49 For her doctoral dissertation she conducted fieldwork amongst Vlach Roma in Rožkovany, Šariš, which was published as a series of articles in ethnographic journals such as Slovenský národopis.50 Horváthová’s research over the next decade culminated in a monograph published in 1964 on The Gypsies in Slovakia: A Historical-Ethnographic Study, which provided a historical materialist account of Romani culture. In one of her earliest articles, published in 1952, Horváthová claimed that ethnographic research on ‘gypsy culture’, language, and history would ‘disprove racial theories about Gypsies’ and provide evidence to classify Gypsies as ‘a nationality’.51 This seems to have been influenced by the misapprehension that Gypsies constituted a nationality in the Soviet Union, whereas in fact Czechoslovakia consistently interpreted Stalinist nationality policy to mean that Gypsies constituted a social group, rather than an ethnic community. Emília Horváthová became the most influential ethnographer of Slovak Gypsies during socialism but never again referred to them as a nationality. Caught within an impossible theoretical bind, Gypsies were thereafter defined as a backwards social group distinguished by a particular lifestyle. Cultural difference, in other words, was recoded as a social question. Marxist ethnography, influenced by older national folklore traditions, was the main academic discipline within which ‘Gypsies’ were studied in this period, since disciplines associated with wartime race science had fallen into disrepute and sociology was discredited as a ‘bourgeois’ science.52 The ‘Sovietisation’ of Czechoslovak ethnography 49

50

51 52

More generally on Soviet influences on university education, see John Connelly, Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945–1956 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Emília Horváthová (Čajanková), ‘Život a kultúra rožkovianských Cigánˇov’, Slovenský národopis, 2:1–2 / 3–4 (1954), 149–175 / 285–308; ‘Staré zvyky kočovných Cigánˇov’, Príroda a spoločnosť, 3:7 (1954), 331–334; ‘Cigáni z hľadiska historicko-etnografického’, Naša veda (1954), 110–114. Emília Čajanková, ‘Zpráva o výskume života a kultúry cigánov na Slovensku’, Národopisný sborník SAVU, 11 (1952), 398–406. On the disappearance (and later rehabilitation) of sociology, see Michael Vorˇíšek, The Reform Generation: 1960s Czechoslovak Sociology from a Comparative Perspective (Prague: Kalich, 2012).

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was accomplished by means of the translation and circulation of key Soviet texts, the creation of academic institutions (such as the Academy of Sciences) on the Soviet model, and Czechoslovak scholars’ visits to universities and research institutions in the Soviet Union.53 At the same time, however, ethnographic representations of Roma were influenced by broader shifts in scientific practice, in particular the public repudiation of race science in the aftermath of Nazi rule.54 In 1950 and 1951 UNESCO published two statements on the biological aspects of academic debates concerning ‘race’, which were explored further in a series of booklets by anthropologists and biologists in a series on ‘The Race Question in Modern Science’.55 The UNESCO Statements on Race denounced the biological basis of racism but remained silent on existing practices of racism, notably in the United States and the colonial territories of Western states. Moreover, the shift towards explaining hierarchies of ‘civilisation’ in terms of culture – rather than biology – dovetailed with Cold War American diplomacy and programmes for ‘modernising’ lessdeveloped economies in the Third World.56 The Soviet Union, meanwhile, continued to emphasise racial discrimination in the United States after 1954, when it finally ratified the UNESCO Constitution following a period of boycott based on the organisation’s alleged ‘pro-Western’ bias.57 Ethnography had played a crucial role in the development of Stalinist nationality policy in the Soviet Union of the 1920s. Ethnographers were charged with ‘constructing’ nationalities, as scientific knowledge and associated techniques for classifying populations according to assumed ‘national’ criteria – the census, map, or museum – helped the Soviet state in its imperial mission of creating nations as conduits for Bolshevisation.58 In contrast to British 53

54

55

56 57 58

For broader discussions of ethnography as a discipline in state socialist countries, see Ulf Brunnbauer, Claudia Kraft, and Martin Schulze Wessel (eds.), Sociology and Ethnography in East-Central and South-East Europe: Scientific Self-Description in State Socialist Countries (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2011); Chris Hann, Mihály Sárkány, and Peter Skalník, Studying Peoples in the People’s Democracies: Socialist Era Anthropology in East-Central Europe (Münster: LitVerlag, 2005). For arguments about the interwar years, see Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Michelle Brattain, ‘Race, Racism, and Antiracism: UNESCO and the Politics of Presenting Science to the Postwar Public’, American Historical Review, 112:5 (December 2007), 1386–1413. Antony Q. Hazard, Postwar Anti-Racism The United States, UNESCO, and “Race,” 1945–1968 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Hazard, Postwar Anti-Racism, 74–75. Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).

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or French colonialists, whose classification of nationalities assumed national or racial characteristics to be innate or given, Soviet ethnographers proceeded from the assumption that nations could be created. During the 1930s the policies of the Soviet ‘affirmative action empire’ gave way to violent campaigns designed to protect Soviet borders from the threat of fascism, such as deportations of ‘unreliable’ nationalities.59 Ethnography was, however, rehabilitated during World War II, resulting in the resurrection of the moribund Institute of Ethnography in 1942.60 Stalin’s Marxism and the Problem of Linguistics (1950) was the key text of the new ethnography. Theoretical discussions were imported by means of monographs and research articles in journals such as Sovietskaya Etnografiya as well as personal contacts.61 Soviet scientists were invited to Czechoslovakia for lectures while Czech ethnographers visited the Soviet Union on study trips. Otakar Nahodíl, who studied ethnography in Leningrad in the late 1940s, was among the strongest supporters of Marxist theory in Czechoslovak ethnography and organised the first National Conference of Ethnographers in January 1949 with support from the Ministry of Information.62 By October 1953, a conference of folklorists and ethnographers at Liblice adopted Marxism-Leninism as the foundation for future scientific work in their discipline.63 The quest to identify the defining characteristics of Czechoslovak national culture nonetheless remained at the heart of the resolution formulated by participants at the Second National Conference of Ethnographers held in Prague in 1952.64 Czechoslovak ethnographers combined Marxist theory with older national (and nationalist) traditions of folklore studies. Moreover, in Slovakia the institutional context for Marxist ethnography was more complicated, largely due to the campaign against Slovak ‘bourgeois’ nationalism in this period. The first Slovak Institute of Ethnography was closed down in 1951 for this reason and reopened only in 1953.

59 60 61

62 63 64

The well-known phrase is from Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors, 308. Blanka Koffer, ‘Ethnography in the ČS(S)R: Scientification through Sovietization?’, in Ulf Brunnbauer, Claudia Kraft, and Martin Schulze Wessel (eds.), Sociology and Ethnography in East-Central and South-East Europe: Scientific Self-Description in State Socialist Countries (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2011). Jan Grill, ‘Struggles for the Folk: Politics of Culture in Czechoslovak Ethnography, 1940s–1950s’, History and Anthropology, 26:5 (2015), 619–638. Koffer, ‘Ethnography in the ČS(S)R’, 175. Gabriela Kiliánová and Katarína Popelková, ‘Ethnology in Slovakia during the Socialist Period’, in Brunnbauer, Kraft, and Schulze-Wessel, Sociology and Ethnography, 191.

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Emília Horváthová was selected to study the local ‘Gypsy settlement’ in the first collective research project on the transformation of folk culture in a new Type III collective farm in the Upper Hron valley in central Slovakia.65 Influenced by Soviet kolkhoz research of the 1930s, the focus of Slovak ethnography in this period shifted to chronicling the rapid transformation of folk culture and the organisation of work as a result of collectivisation and the mechanisation of agriculture.66 Ethnographers were now expected to determine which elements of traditional rural culture could serve to build a ‘new socialist culture’.67 While historians and ethnographers have studied the evolution of ethnography as a discipline in state socialism, there has been less discussion of the way in which ethnographic knowledge was appropriated as a form of social practice or indeed political activism.68 Repudiation of the ‘race’ concept – as a biological and hereditary determinant of human existence – was central to the first state-funded ethnographic project that studied the everyday life of Roma as part of the ‘new socialist culture’ in Slovakia. The first expedition of the ethnographic collective took the young researchers to Rožnˇava for a two-week fieldwork trip in August 1954. The collective included three young women (ethnographer Eva Davidová, photographer Radka Mikulová, and painter Mila Dudychová) and three Roma activists, who were all young men. As speakers of Romani, Gustáv Karika, Rudolf Balaž, and Ján Cibuľa were given the task of collecting folklore and customs. They travelled in a car on loan from the Košice National Committee, which enabled them to conduct research in a number of villages, including Revúca, Jelšava, Muránˇ, Hucín, Muránská Dlhá Lúka, Brzotín, Krásná Hôrka – Podhradie, and Klenovec.69 In 1955 Horváthová conducted a similar collective research project in Bardejov, Prešov, Michalovce, and Košice and a third in Košice in July 1958. Between 1952 and 1958 she conducted fieldwork among Roma in forty-five districts in Slovakia.70 In her published

65 66

67 68

69 70

Jan Mjartan, ‘Prvý výskum ľudovej kultúry na družstevnej dedine’, Slovenský národopis, 1:1 (1953), 253. Jan Mjartan introduced a translation of the Soviet ethnographer Vorobjevov’s writing in Sovetskaja etnografia, ‘Program sbieranie materiálu pre skúmanie života kolchoznej dediny’, Národopisný sborník, 11 (1952). Kiliánová and Popelková, ‘Ethnology in Slovakia’, 192. See Brunnbauer, Kraft, and Schulze-Wessel, Sociology and Ethnography, and Hann, Sárkány, and Skalník, Studying Peoples, although Michael Vorˇíšek addresses the political role of sociology in his fascinating study The Reform Generation. Emília Horváthová, ‘Prvý kolektivný výskum Cigánov na Slovensku’, Slovenský národopis, 3:1 (1954), 123–124. Arne B. Mann, ‘Zakladateľka romistiky na Slovensku Emília Horváthová (1931–1996)’, Romano džaniben, 3:1–2 (1996), 141–144.

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report on the first research trip, Horváthová justified the selection of the settlements as representing a ‘variety of developmental levels’ that allowed researchers to study a range of ‘living standards’ amongst their inhabitants. In line with the expectation that ethnography should chronicle the disappearance of traditional customs under conditions of socialist modernity, Horváthová explained that her project would trace the development of Gypsies’ material and spiritual culture from ‘primitive’ society to complete integration.71 Activists used ethnographic knowledge, meanwhile, to support their claims on the socialist state. In December 1955 Gustáv Karika joined forces with Elena Lacková, Rudolf Balaž, and three village schoolteachers (who all spoke Romani) to research Gypsies’ participation in ‘building socialism’ in Prešov and Košice, the regions with the largest Roma populations. The report, which was sent to the Ideological Department of the KSČ Central Committee, was critical about the effects of state campaigns to educate Gypsies, instead stressing that Roma were adapting to socialism on their own terms. In contrast to the typology used by the ethnographer Emília Horváthová to divide the Roma into groups based on their level of development from ‘primitive’ society, this report divided the Roma into three groups: musicians, ‘settlement gypsies’, and nomads. It stated that musicians were ‘the most economically and culturally advanced, and lived in their own houses in the towns. Their children have relatively good education and work as waiters, civil servants, teachers, officers etc.’ So-called settlement gypsies were working ‘in claypits, quarries, brickworks, help the peasants in the fields, some also work as blacksmiths or make things – chains, nails – in exchange for flour, potatoes, cabbage, lard, and old clothes from the peasants. More recently they have been working on the construction of houses and railway tracks.’ Some of them also earned a living by playing music at ‘weddings, parties, in pubs and so on, but they cannot be compared to musicians of the first type’. Nomadic gypsies were living in Rožkovany and Kendice in eastern Slovakia and made a living by trading in horses and selling knives, while the women begged, told fortunes, and sometimes stole, mainly produce from the fields and poultry.72 Based on their own research in the settlements, Roma cultural workers reported that state authorities in Prešov and Košice did not have the personnel or means of transport to carry out health inspections as often as they should. Settlement Roma enjoyed attending lectures on public 71 72

Horváthová, ‘Prvý kolektivný výskum Cigánov na Slovensku’. NA, AÚV KSČ, f. 05–3 (Ideologická oddělení), sv. 36 a.j. 298: Osvetové ústredie, Bratislava: Zprava o prieskume spôsobu života obyvateľov cigánskeho pôvodu.

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Figure 3.1. Nursery school and blacksmith’s forge, Košariská, Slovakia, 1966. From the private collection of Dr. Emília Horváthová, Roma Institute, Bratislava, Slovak Republic.

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health, especially if films were shown at the same time, but the ‘practical results of these actions was very limited.’73 In general, Roma seldom attended ‘enlightenment events, lectures or political discussions’, although they turned out in large numbers for ‘demonstrations and celebrations such as the First of May or the harvest festivals’. When asked who Khrushchev and Bulganin were, Roma in Michalovce said that ‘they were our ministers. They thought comrade Gottwald was still the president.’74 By contrast, Roma were described as avid cinema-goers, especially of war and adventure films. Residents of Trebišov and Trhovište in Michalovce complained that Gypsies turned up to the cinema ‘unshaven, unwashed, uncoiffed, and dirty’, along with their babies, whose nappies they changed during the performance. ‘They lie the babies on the tables and in winter dry their nappies on the stove.’ One cinema manager reported that Roma women smoked so much during the performance that ‘you can hardly see the screen.’75 The British sociologist Will Guy, who conducted fieldwork in Slovakia during the early 1970s, highlighted the points of similarity between Romani villagers and non-Roma. Guy recorded the response of a village headmaster in one Spiš village to a 1958 government questionnaire about the living conditions of local Gypsies, who wrote, ‘“They don’t have bathrooms”, wryly adding, “(and there isn’t one in the village headmaster’s house either!)”’.76 Yet research conducted by Elena Lacková in the mid-1950s suggested that Roma investment into their houses was not matched in any comparable degree by public spending.77 Returning migrant workers from the Czech lands spent their earnings on building new houses in their Slovak settlements, and Will Guy notes that ‘what they built was based on their idea of a proper village house.’ As the typical village house had no bathroom at that time, Roma did not add one either, even more so because unlike electric lighting, a bathroom and toilet involved more complex building problems and a larger house. ‘To them a lavishly furnished “best room” in imitation of the villagers’ izba is a more immediate demonstration of their respectability and better supported a claim to higher status. The Gypsies spent thousands of crowns on massive beds, veneered wardrobes and dressers and exceptionally mirrors and ornaments of costly cut-glass; only later did bathrooms become a mark of status.’78 Elena Lacková likewise reported that Roma 73 76 77 78

74 75 Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Will Guy, ‘The Attempt of Socialist Czechoslovakia to Assimilate Its Gypsy Population’ (Bristol: PhD dissertation, University of Bristol, 1977), 452. NA, AÚV KSČ, f. 05–3 (Ideologická oddělení), sv. 36 a.j. 298: Osvetové ústredie, Bratislava: Zprava o prieskume spôsobu života obyvateľov cigánskeho pôvodu. Guy, ‘The Attempt of Socialist Czechoslovakia’, 467.

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with good jobs, such as musicians, had houses with ‘nice bedrooms, modern kitchens, couches, armchairs, paintings and expensive carpets’, sometimes transported from looted German properties in the Czech borderlands.79 Roma villagers and activists instrumentalised Communist rhetoric about modernisation to petition state authorities for public amenities, such as electrification. In January 1955, Roma living in Lúčka petitioned the Interior Ministry for an extension of the electric grid in language that deliberately echoed contemporary propaganda about the electrification of the Slovak countryside. ‘Thanks to our party and government, the living standards of our workers are increasing day by day. Great advances have also been seen in our area. The old shacks have already been demolished in our settlement. New ones have been built, with big courtyards, and we have progressed a great deal in terms of hygiene.’ The Lúčka Roma had heard that their village had been included in the plan for electrification, but they were concerned about being left out. ‘We have grand plans for the future. We want to install electricity in three houses, because we want every fourth house to have a water pump.’ Finally the Roma appealed: We hope you will hear our legitimate request and enable our children to do their homework by electric light, and ensure that our radios do not just stay in the cupboard, but rather entertain us after a hard day’s work, informing us about the latest world events and life in our country. This will definitely help us to become politically and culturally mature people who can contribute to building socialism in our country and to strengthening peace in the world. We are sure you will answer our request positively and help us to be lit up with electric light.80

Along with electricity, one of the few amenities installed in Roma settlements were loudspeakers which broadcast public announcements, political speeches, or, most commonly, light music from the office of the local National Committee. Will Guy reported that Roma tended to ‘approve of [loudspeakers] for they offered some tangible indication that the Gypsies formed part of the village from which the inhabitants normally strove to exclude them’.81 Likewise Roma researchers found that the ‘radio is a great favourite. They mostly listen to the news and to popular music.’82 79 80 81 82

NA, AÚV KSČ, f. 05–3 (Ideologická oddělení), sv. 36 a.j. 298: Osvetové ústredie, Bratislava: Zprava o prieskume spôsobu života obyvateľov cigánskeho pôvodu. SNA Bratislava, f. PV-adm, kart. 1051, sp. N2/2-1285: Ciganská osada v Lúčkách: Rožsírenie prim. siete – žiadosť, 24 January 1955, in Jurová, Dokumenty, 152. Guy, ‘The Attempt of Socialist Czechoslovakia’, 464. NA, AÚV KSČ, f. 05–3 (Ideologická oddělení), sv. 36 a.j. 298: Osvetové ústredie, Bratislava: Zprava o prieskume spôsobu života obyvateľov cigánskeho pôvodu.

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What the reports confirmed was that Roma were adapting to socialism on their own terms and that National Committees were lagging behind in their responsibilities to stamp out discrimination and improve the material conditions of the republic’s poorest inhabitants. Moreover, the correspondence between Roma activists such Gustáv Karika and Emília Horváthová demonstrated the importance of ethnographic knowledge for supporting efforts to build Romani national consciousness. Preserved in Horváthová’s private papers, for instance, are short texts and grammatical exercises typed on the official paper of the Internal Affairs Department at the Košice National Committee, which was where Karika was working in the early 1950s.83 In 1954, Karika addressed a short letter to Comrade Ján Adam, a musician in Rožnˇava, asking for his help in collecting examples of Romani folk culture: ‘Yes, after a thousand years the Gypsies have the houses they have been waiting for’, wrote Karika, who then asked Adam to ‘write down any gypsy songs or fairy tales in the gypsy language [v ciganštine] because this will also help our work . . . You know, we have to show that the Gypsies also have their ancient culture.’84

Liquidate the Settlements! The Politics of Public Health Against the efforts of Roma activists to promote Roma national consciousness through education and culture, a parallel vision of socialist modernity was taking shape in the minds of planners and public health experts, who saw rural Gypsies as particularly visible targets for the interventionist practices of socialist medicine. As Bradley Moore has recently shown, the socialist state opened up opportunities for hygienists and public health officials to introduce interventionist approaches to preventive medicine in the name of improving population health and building Communism itself.85 A new state hygiene service, overseen by the Department of Hygiene and Epidemiology within the Ministry of Health, was supposed to combat the ‘biologisation’ of disease, which had focused unduly on heredity and therefore obscured the material and environmental determinants of human health. A 1952 Law on Hygienic and Anti-Epidemic Care stressed that ‘health protection is provided by the state’ and entrusted hygienists with the responsibility of protecting 83 84

85

Rómsky Inštitút, Bratislava, Archive of Dr Emília Horváthová, kart. 2, sv. 19: Cigansky jazyk. ŠObA Košice, f. Odbor pre veci vnútorné rady KNV Košického kraja (1949–1960), kart. 48, sp. 37: Gustáv Karika (KNV Košice) to Ján Adam (described as ‘hudobník, Betliar, okres Rožnˇava’), 6 March 1954, in Jurová, Dokumenty, 139. Bradley Matthys Moore, ‘For the People’s Health: Ideology, Medical Authority and Hygienic Science in Communist Czechoslovakia’, Social History of Medicine, 27:1 (2013), 122–143.

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communal hygiene, safeguarding consumer goods and working environments against hazards and risks, fighting communicable diseases, and participating in the planning, design, and construction of industrial plants, mass housing, and other public facilities.86 Epidemics of typhus and malaria were a serious threat to public health in eastern Slovakia during the early 1950s, and Gypsies were frequently represented as carriers of infectious disease. Local government reports about the Gypsy Question in eastern Slovakia immediately after the liberation were dominated by the alleged threat to public health posed by isolated Roma settlements. The representation of Gypsies as carriers of disease recalled wartime tropes about Jews and Gypsies that were used to support ghettoisation and incarceration across Nazi-occupied East Central Europe.87 Fears of Gypsies carrying disease continued in peacetime in the context of mass migration and resettlement. Discussing the ‘nationality question’ at a meeting in 1952, officials at the Košice National Committee fretted that the state company established to build the Trať Družby (Friendship Railway) linking Czechoslovakia with the Soviet Union had sacked seventy Roma workers on the grounds that they were infested with lice. Discussions and reports about Roma produced by National Committees in the volatile years between 1948 and 1953 constantly featured concerns about the impact of the alleged health risks posed by Gypsy settlements on employment, child health, and literacy programmes. The Slovak Board of Education justified the apparently widespread practice of sitting Roma schoolchildren on separate benches on the grounds that they were dirty and flea infested.88 Companies building new factories insisted on the expulsion of Roma settlements for the same reasons, as illustrated by a long-running dispute about the resettlement of a Roma settlement of around one hundred people to make way for a new pharmaceuticals factory outside Ostrovany, a village in the Šariš valley north-east of Prešov. According to local archives, the management demanded that the Roma settlements outside the nearby villages of Ostrovany and Michaľany be removed ‘for health reasons’ as they ‘could infect the water in the wells at the factory’.89

86 87 88

89

Moore, ‘For the People’s Health’, 131–132. Paul Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). SNA Bratislava, f. PV – adm., 1949–1960, kart. 1023: Povereníctvo školstva, vied a umení: Cigánsku otázka v ČSR – návrh smerníc. Pripomienky, 8 February 1952, in Jurová, Dokumenty, 91. ŠObA Prešov, f. KNV v Prešove, Referáty a odbor pre vnútorné veci, 1949–1960, kart. 31, inv. č. 14, Zápisnica dnˇa 11. júla 1953 na Okresnom národnom výbore v Sabinove, ref. V in Jurová, Dokumenty, 122.

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Public health interventions based on assumptions that Roma were carriers of disease persisted through the 1950s, signalled by scattered references in National Committee records to ‘insecticide’ operations in Roma villages, including the use of DDT. Used to combat malaria during the war, DDT was then approved for use as an agricultural insecticide to aid the transition to intensive agricultural production, and continued to be used in public health campaigns. In early 1951, health inspectors in the spa town of Bardejov reporting on ‘preventive care’ for Gypsies referred to ‘disagreements’ between ‘the comrade sanitary officer and inhabitants of the settlements, who viewed DDT and disinfection operations as a humiliation . . . Despite this, insecticide operations were still carried out in Vyš, Tvarožec, Nižné Raslavice, and Bardejov.’90 When a KNV official in Košice made the dubious claim at a meeting in March 1953 that ‘the Gypsy children in Moldava are already telling us they want to be sprinkled with insecticide,’ his colleague retorted, ‘The gypsies don’t trust us. Whenever we come to do a health inspection, they all scatter. We are going to train up some Gypsy health workers . . . They are people the others trust, and they have access to them. We need mass education for everyone, there should be understanding on both sides, and re-education for everyone, for the Gypsies as well as our people.’91 In 1954 the Slovak Health Ministry issued a decree on health education for Gypsies that included a huge list of concerns, including ‘personal hygiene, housing, settlements, food, whitewashing houses, building wells and toilets, reducing infant mortality, alcoholism, venereal disease, whooping cough, tuberculosis, typhus, trachoma, malaria, dental care, and dangerous lice infestations’.92 Mass education for Roma in rural areas could be physically intrusive, humiliating, and violent. Activists were given the responsibility of implementing the productivist and natalist goals of the state. In socialist Hungary, forced collective bathing was used as a ritual humiliation of Roma villagers.93 Competitions for the ‘cleanest gypsy village’ promised prizes for the cleanest Gypsy house or child. Health educators in Prešov reported that 90

91

92 93

ŠOkA Bardejov, f. ONV v Bardejove, kart. 97, sp. 54/51 sekr: Zpráva o cigánskych udalostiach v okrese a o priebehu preventívnej starostlivosti, 19 February 1951, in Jurová, Dokumenty, 72. ŠObA Košice, f. KNV Košického kraja, Zápisnice rady KNV, kart. Q, zápisnica z 10. Schôdzky dnˇa 3. marca 1953: Zvýšenia starostlivosti o osoby cigánskeho pôvodu, 3 March 1953, in Jurová, Dokumenty, 112. SNA Bratislava, f. f. PV, 1949–1960, kart. 65: Povereníctvo Zdravotnícva: Zasadnutia kolegia, 27 September 1954. Open Society Archives, Forced Bathing in Hungary: Shaving, Stripping, Public Humiliation: Disinfecting Gypsy Settlements During Socialism, http://w3.osaarchivum .org/galeria/catalogue/2002/forced_bathing/index.html.

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‘the cleanest children will be rewarded with books, and photographs of themselves. Pictures of the cleanest settlements will be displayed in the local farmers’ newspapers.’94 Roma activists, meanwhile, sought to use health education to encourage rural Roma to claim their rights as socialist citizens. Despite the official policy not to recognise Romani as a minority language, health workers printed Romani-language educational leaflets about Kalochas (whooping cough), Trachoma, and Dajóri (advice for mothers). Gustáv Karika was instructed to read aloud from these texts when he visited the settlements, and other health workers in Košice and Levoča were reportedly trained in Romani to help them ‘get closer’ to the Gypsies. Romanilanguage recordings were played on portable wind-up gramophones that activists brought with them to the villages or through the loudspeakers wired up in many Gypsy settlements (despite the lack of other amenities) which broadcast public announcements, political speeches, or – most commonly – light music from the office of the local National Committee. Health education films were also part of these pedagogical campaigns, which combined the rhetoric of socialist modernisation with older discourses about the health of the nation. In 1955 three Roma activists cooperated with the Slovak Ministry of Health to produce a thirty-minute health education film called Upre Roma! 95 The Romani title of the film can be translated as Roma Arise! One of the activists was Ján Cibuľa, a young Roma medical student from Klenovec who would later become a founding member of the International Romani Union. Upre Roma! aimed to publicise the benefits of vaccination and medical treatment for infectious diseases and childbirth through the story of a Roma village whose inhabitants are mired in the ignorance of tradition. When a white-coated doctor and his entourage of nursing assistants arrive by car in the village to offer vaccinations, a young family hides away its children. A Phuri daj – an elderly woman – instead offers traditional remedies for their ailing infant daughter. Progress is brought to the village by a son returning from military service, where he has learnt to read and write. Seeing his brother fall ill, the young man rolls up his sleeve and is the first to offer his arm for the doctor’s needle. To the accompaniment of music, the villagers are then shown learning how to build a well, clean their houses, and burn their old straw bedding, while watching with hilarity as a man in protective clothing kills fleas with a chemical spray. Joyfully, a small girl tips delousing powder over her own 94 95

‘Zpráva o cigánskej problematike’, Krajský osvetový lekár (20 April 1957). Slovenský Filmový Ústav, Upre Roma (directed by Dimitrij Plichta, Dokumentarní Československo, 1955, 33 minutes).

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head. Finally, a young father-to-be is shown waiting for his wife to deliver her baby in the maternity ward, rather than at home. In a closing scene, the man tries to pass some crumpled bank notes across the consulting table to his doctor, only to be told – in a solemn manner – that health care under socialism is provided for free. Medicine was represented as an entitlement conferred by a munificent state, in explicit contrast to the repression of Gypsies under capitalism. The voice-over for Upre Roma! explained that socialist law – zákon – guarantees the rights of the Roma, liberating them from tradition for a healthy productive future. By the mid-1950s, the Slovak Board of Commissioners policy towards socially isolated Roma had coalesced around one major goal: the ‘liquidation’ of the Gypsy settlements (osady). Liquidation (likvidace in Czech) sounds dramatic and modern, as Eagle Glassheim writes; the term is rooted in a long history of ‘liquidating’ social enemies in the region, from the Nazi murder of the Jews and the expulsion of Germans to the Communist liquidation of private enterprise.96 Officials frequently viewed these Roma settlements as a slur on the reputation of Slovakia as a fast-modernising socialist state. The local planning ˇ ubovna requested government funds in midcommission in Stará L 1956 to demolish five wooden huts occupied by Roma quarry-workers and their families in the tourist area of Vyšný Ružbachy on the grounds they might be used as negative propaganda ‘by visitors from capitalist countries’.97 In summer 1955 the State Hygiene Service conducted ‘research in isolated gypsy settlements to evaluate the quality of environmental conditions in which citizens of gypsy origin live’.98 Hygienists relayed a list of problems, including the fact that 85 per cent of houses were made of clay, with damp floors, leaky roofs, and no sanitation. In most houses the residents apparently ‘slept two or three to a bed’ regardless of age or gender. The report linked these environmental factors to a host of social problems in the settlements, including persistent unemployment, illiteracy, and truancy. A report commissioned from the Regional Administration for Housing and Civil Construction (Oblastná správa pre bytovú a 96

97

98

Eagle Glassheim, ‘Ethnic Cleansing, Communism, and Environmental Devastation in Czechoslovakia’s Borderlands, 1945–1989’, The Journal of Modern History, 78 (2006), 65–92. ŠObA Prešov, f. KNV v Prešove. Referáty a odbor pre vnútorné veci (1949–1960), kart. 219, inv.č. 53: Okresná plánovacia komisia Rady ONV Stará Lˇubovna: Návrh na riešenie výstavby rodinných domov občanov cigánskeho pôvodu v obci Vyšné Ružbachy, mid1956, in Jurová, Dokumenty, 174. SNA Bratislava, f. Povereníctvo zdravotníctva, 1945–1960, kart. 24, č. Sp. 748. Povereníctvo zdravotnictva: Návrh na zlepšenie starostlivosti o občanov cigánskeho pôvodu, 17 August 1955.

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občiansku výstavbu, OSBOV) found that one hundred thousand people in Slovakia were living in 1,300 ‘gypsy settlements’, which were described as a threat to public health and a serious social problem, not least because government officials believed that ‘communal life in these colonies preserves old habits and ways of life.’ In total, there were about fifteen thousand dwellings in the settlements – often shacks made of crude bricks, stones, or wood, covered with sheet metal or tarpaulin, most of which OSBOV deemed unsuitable for human habitation.99 OSBOV officials estimated that twenty thousand new houses or apartments would be required to solve the problem of Gypsy settlements across the republic, a figure that seemed insurmountable given the huge discrepancy between supply and demand in the housing sector. OSBOV suggested four solutions to the problem of rehousing Roma, not only subsidised government loans for individual housing construction and allocation of apartments from the state housing fund but also organised resettlement of Slovak Roma to the Czech borderlands and mass recruitment to the mining industry.100 The second Five Year Plan foresaw the construction of six thousand new houses in Slovakia, yet OSBOV remarked that twenty-four thousand applications for permission to build family homes were expected in 1957 alone, meaning that replacement housing for Roma would have to be built outside the Plan. Recognising that Roma were often refused statesubsidised building loans, the housing authority suggested a one-off grant of Kč 10,000 for every deserving Gypsy citizen wishing to build a house outside a Gypsy settlement. These proposals were, however, often rejected. In a typical response, the deputy chairman of the Prešov KNV retorted that preferential treatment of Gypsies through such loans was ‘impossible in the current economic and political climate’. Thus in practice government plans to ‘liquidate’ Gypsy settlements were frequently blocked by the resistance of local villagers. Private housebuilding was tolerated as a necessary evil during the Stalinist era, when industrialisation was starving other sectors of the economy of investment. By the mid-1950s, however, the socialist state was actively supporting individual and cooperative housing with subsidised loans to finance the costs of land and building materials. This tapped into the statesponsored slogan of ‘self-help’ (svépomoc / svojpomoc) that the government 99

100

SNA Bratislava, f. PV – Sekretáriat povereníka (1949–1960), kart. 177, sp. 976/56: Oblastná správa pre bytovú a občiansku výstavbu na Slovensku: Návrh opatrení na postupnú likvidáciu cigánskej osád, 15 November 1956, in Jurová, Dokumenty, 179. ŠObA Prešov, f. KNV v Prešove. Zápisnice rady (1949–1960). Zasadnutie rady KNV v Prešove: Zprava o hospodárskych, kultúrnych a zdravotnych pomerov obyvateľstva cigánskeho pôvodu, 7 November 1956, in Jurová, Dokumenty, 177.

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used to encourage citizens to improve public amenities in collective – and ‘voluntary’ – activities through campaigns such as Akcie Z. Despite official rhetoric about the levelling of differences between town and country, self-built family houses remained the norm in Slovak villages during the first two decades of socialism. These houses were not typically connected to the public water supply and sewerage systems as in towns, and the provision of drinking water and sanitary facilities was the responsibility of the individual house-owner.101 The right to housing belonged among the fundamental social rights of socialist citizens, achieving such social and cultural significance that the ‘right to a quiet life’ in the privacy of one’s apartment became one of the central legitimising factors of developed socialist society by the 1960s.102 Yet the rhetorical emphasis on housing as a basic right was also a thorn in the side of the socialist regime, a constant reminder of the gulf between the capacities of the planned economy to fulfil the needs of the population. Czechoslovakia – as in postwar Europe as a whole – experienced massive shortages of housing after World War II. Kimberley Zarecor has recently shown that wartime damage to the housing stock and the expulsion of the Germans provided the impetus for mass housing schemes that translated the modernist architectural visions of the interwar years into state policy.103 The standardised prefabricated apartment blocks – panelaky or Plattenbauten – that seemed to dominate cities across East Central Europe by the last decades of socialist rule were, however, only part of the story. Residential property was not owned exclusively by the state but also by housing cooperatives, companies, or even private individuals.104 In fact, during the first half of the 1950s, more than 40 per cent of all new housing in Slovakia was built by citizens rather than the state.105 In the case of Roma, the universal right to housing promised by the socialist state conflicted with a longer history of nationalist conflicts over property rights that excluded ‘Gypsies’ from the land. Thus the Roma settlement of Letanovce, Slovak historian Anna Jurová has written, was created by the nationalising land reforms of the 1920s, when the municipality gained land from a nearby estate and used the opportunity to

101 102 103 104

105

Guy, ‘The Attempt of Socialist Czechoslovakia’, 466. Paul Betts, Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Kimberley Elman Zarecor, Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia, 1945–1960 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011). Jakub Rákosník, Sovětizace sociálního stát, 435–466. On housing in the Soviet Union, see Mark B. Smith, Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010). Rákosník, Sovětizace sociálního stát, 460.

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resettle Roma on a remote plot bordering a nearby forest. The ghettoisation of Letanovce Roma intensified under the wartime Slovak Republic, fuelled by rumours of typhus-bearing Gypsies, and villagers later put up strong resistance to allowing Roma back into the village. A 1959 report by the Košice Regional National Committee found that local officials had resorted to expropriating land for five Roma families because villagers refused to sell to them. In several cases it appears the expropriated land belonged to Jewish families who had either been killed or emigrated. When the local National Committee called a public meeting in the village to discuss the situation, the KNV reported, ‘All the residents were saying the Gypsies are dirty, backward and steal potatoes . . . The Secretary and other MNV functionaries are very negative about liquidating the settlement and say the Gypsies should be allocated flats in the factories where they work.’106 Although Letanovce was marked out for ‘liquidation’ in the 1950s after health inspectors reported on the catastrophic living conditions of many of its one hundred inhabitants, the settlement remained in place through forty years of socialist rule.

Conclusion The May 1948 Constitution promised citizens of Czechoslovakia not only the right to work, education, leisure, and a decent wage but also the right to health. Improving the health of Roma in rural areas such as eastern Slovakia was an urgent and sensitive task in the aftermath of fascist persecution and front-line fighting during the war. Despite the efforts of activists to use public health education as a means of raising the selfconsciousness of Slovak Roma through the film Upre Roma!, however, reports from the Prešov region in the late 1950s suggest that the representation of the eastern Slovak Gypsy settlements as a ‘severe epidemiological problem’ increasingly became used as a means of disciplining their inhabitants. While activists were influenced as much by socialist ideology as by older nationalist traditions that sought to use public education as a means of constructing a national identity for Roma, planners and social policy officials embraced an interventionist approach towards the Gypsy Question that sought to eliminate the material roots of Roma poverty by force if necessary. 106

Anna Jurová, ‘Niekoľko poznámok k otázkam rómskych osád (‘Kauza Letanovce’)’, Člověk a společnosť, 6:1 (2003). By 2000 some 650 people were living in the settlement. Amidst accusations that the Roma were illegally occupying land to which they had no right in the context of land restitution, the local council unilaterally stripped all the inhabitants of their residence rights.

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The eliminationist logic of social cleansing – including ethnic – was used to legitimise these aims, as seen in policies for the ‘liquidation’ of Roma villages as a means of eradicating poverty in the Slovak countryside. On the ground, local conflicts over land between villagers, Roma and non-Roma, often stymied the radical policies of nationalisation and redistribution adopted by the Stalinist state. Initially, the Slovak health services had emphasised that the material conditions of life in the Gypsy settlements were responsible for the increased incidence of infectious disease. In the face of Gypsies’ resistance against coercive measures carried out by hygienists, such as the use of DDT powder in delousing operations in Gypsy settlements, health education was proposed as a means of ‘persuading’ and ‘enlightening’ the Gypsies about the benefits of conventional medicine. Because this approach was frequently based on the premise that cultural difference was the cause of the Gypsies’ resistance and that self-discipline was the key to improving public health, the discourse of public health institutionalised the connection between the Gypsy settlements as both an epidemiological and a social problem. Moreover, the fact that the allocation of public goods such as state housing was based on subjective criteria – such as individual performance in the workplace – increasingly placed the blame for the Gypsies’ living conditions on the inhabitants of the settlements themselves. For Romani activists such as Ján Cibuľa, born in the Romani village of Klenovec and later a medical student, the experience of building socialism in the Slovak countryside would influence his later activities in the International Romani Union during the 1970s.

4

Cracking Down on Nomadism

As the Soviet bloc sought to restore stability after the crises of 1956, regimes from the Soviet Union to Bulgaria launched a wave of campaigns to criminalise ‘Gypsy nomadism’. Even though only a small minority of Vlach Roma were professionally itinerant by the 1950s, the antinomadism campaigns were premised on the image of the ‘wandering Gypsy’ that had been central to the European cultural imagination for centuries. Romantic fascination with Gypsies saturated the national imagination in Germany, Spain, and Russia during the nineteenth century.1 Fetishised as the embodiment of ‘the wild’ and the antithesis of ‘civilised’ national culture, Gypsies appeared in the Pushkin’s poetry and Bizet’s opera Carmen as existing outside of time and history. By the time the socialist anti-nomadism campaigns were launched, however, most Eastern European Roma were no more mobile than any other citizens. The campaigns of the 1950s did, nonetheless, largely eradicate travelling as a way of life for Vlach Roma in the Eastern bloc.2 But Vlachs were a minority amongst Roma groups. Anti-vagrancy legislation also criminalised the more ‘ordinary’ labour migration of tens of thousands of Roma and others who failed to comply with laws regulating the mobility of socialist workers. This chapter discusses the Czechoslovak campaign to criminalise travelling amongst Roma within the wider context of the post-Stalinist turn towards national tradition and the use of socialist legality to discipline ‘parasitism’, ‘hooliganism’, and a whole range of behaviours that the state – and society – perceived as ‘asocial’ or socially deviant.3 The state 1 2

3

Alaina Lemon, Between Two Fires: Gypsy Performance and Romani Memory from Pushkin to Post-Socialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). Nina Pavelčíková, Romové v českých zemích v letech 1945–1989 (Prague, Úrˇad dokumentace a vyšetrˇování zločinů komunismu, 2004); Will Guy, ‘The Attempt of Socialist Czechoslovakia to Assimilate Its Gypsy Population’, (Bristol: PhD dissertation, University of Bristol, 1977); Matěj Spurný, Nejsou jako my (Prague: Antikomplex, 2011). Volker Zimmermann and Michal Pullmann (eds.), Ordnung und Sicherheit, Devianz und Kriminalität im Staatssozialismus: Tschechoslowakei und DDR 1948/49-1989 (Göttingen:

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campaign to assimilate Roma in Czechoslovakia was renewed during the late 1950s in the wider context of the stabilisation of socialist rule after Stalinism. During the crisis year of 1956, Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Soviet Party Congress triggered revolts against Communist rule in Hungary and Poland that were brutally suppressed by Soviet troops. The crisis of Stalinism resulted in an explosion of challenges to Communist hegemony in Eastern Europe, yet as Pavel Kolárˇ has written, the larger question for historians is rather to explain why socialist regimes endured for so long in its wake.4 Socialist legality was an instrument of social control and legitimisation for socialist regimes after the violence and arbitrary rule of Stalinism. By the end of the 1950s, the arbitrary use of judicial repression to punish crimes against the state was on the decline. A reform of the laws on the state security in 1959 placed greater emphasis on ‘prophylactic’ measures to control socially deviant behaviour. Judicial repression was now used in conjunction with educational and preventative measures to reform behaviours judged nonconformist in the socialised economy. With the significant exception of prostitution, the focus was largely on the antisocial activities of young men.5 Following a 1956 Soviet decree banning nomadism, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia led the way in East Central Europe, issuing a secret decree in April 1958 on Work Amongst the Gypsy Population and, later that year, a new Law on the Permanent Settlement of Nomadic Persons. To avoid charges of racism, this law did not refer openly to Gypsies, although the context in which the law was drafted and discussed made it clear that Roma were its main target. The use of law to criminalise allegedly ‘Gypsy’ behaviour as asocial sheds light on the relationship between the state, social policy, and societal conflicts over law and order in post-Stalinist Czechoslovakia. Coinciding with the almost total liquidation of legal private enterprise and the expansion of social rights to politically loyal worker-citizens, the aggressive language of the Gypsy Decree took aim at both the most traditional aspects of Roma customs –

4 5

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014). Until recently most scholarship on ‘asociality’ under socialism had focused on the GDR and USSR: Thomas Lindenberger, ‘“Asociality” and Modernity: The GDR as a Welfare Dictatorship’, in Katherine Pence and Paul Betts (eds.), Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008); Sven Korzilius, ‘Asoziale’ und ‘Parasiten’ im Recht der SBZ/ DDR: Randgruppen im Sozialismus zwischen Repression und Ausgrenzung (Cologne: Böhlau, 2005); Brian Lapierre, ‘Making Hooliganism on a Mass Scale: The campaign against petty hooliganism in the Soviet Union, 1956–1964’, Cahiers du Monde Russe, 47/1–2 (January–June 2006), 349–376. Pavel Kolárˇ, ‘The Party as a New Utopia: Reshaping Communist Identity after Stalinism’, Social History, 37:4 (2012), 402–424. Duane Huegenin, ‘Mutations des pratiques répressives de la police secrete tchécoslovaque (1956–1968): Du recours à la force au contrôle social’, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, 96:4 (2007).

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the horse dealing and fortune telling of itinerant Vlachs – and the most modern –the rebellious teenage (páskovský) style of young urban workers, with their styled hair, tight trousers, leather jackets, and provocative behaviour. At the same time, as this chapter will argue, the criminalisation of nomadism was a result of pressure from below – citizens calling for ‘law and order’ – as much as ideological dogma from above.6 Viewing the 1958 Gypsy Decree through the lens of socialist legality, as well as the state’s response to popular pressure to criminalise the supposedly ‘deviant’ behaviour of minorities, thus also challenges some central narratives of Czechoslovak history since 1956, in particular regarding the relationship between ‘civil society’ and the state in the era of post-Stalinism. From an international perspective, moreover, the cultural construction of Roma as ‘nomads’ sheds light on the deeply politicised conflicts over freedom of movement at the height of the Cold War. Emigration to the West became an obsession for socialist states and societies, and the Hungarian revolution of 1956 triggered a refugee crisis within Europe. The cultural construction of Gypsies as ‘nomads’ – in Western and Eastern Europe – has obscured investigation into histories of everyday Roma migration and mobility. Sociologists and political scientists have forcefully demonstrated how the cultural concept of nomadism continues to legitimise discrimination and segregation of Roma in contemporary Europe.7 The post-socialist migration of Roma to Western Europe forms the backdrop to the ongoing political, legal, and societal construction of ‘Roma nomads’ in Italy, France, and the United Kingdom. Relatively little attention, however, has been paid to the longer historical context. Western European states such as France and Germany continued to maintain registers of ‘nomads’ or ‘nomadic Gypsies’ through the 1950s and 1960s.8 ‘Nomadism’ served to legitimise the criminalisation of itinerancy as socially deviant, as demonstrated by systematic institutionalisation of Jenisch children in Switzerland under the auspices of the Pro Juventute Foundation.9 Moreover, as Ari 6 7

8

9

See Matěj Spurný, Nejsou jako my (Prague: Antikomplex, 2011). Nando Sigona, ‘Locating “The Gypsy Problem”: The Roma in Italy: Stereotyping, Labelling, and “Nomad Camps”’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 31:4 (July 2005), 741–756. Gilad Margalit, Germany and Its Gypsies: A Post-Auschwitz Ordeal (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002); Emmanuel Filhol, Le contrôle des Tsiganes en France (1912–1969) (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2013); Ilsen About, ‘Underclass Gypsies: Historical Approaches to Categorisation and Exclusion in France, 19th–20th Century’, in Michael Stewart (ed.), The Gypsy “Menace”: Populism and the New Anti-Gypsy Politics (London: Hurst, 2012). Walter Leimgruber, Thomas Meier, and Roger Sablonier, Das Hilfswerk für die Kinder der Landstrasse: Historische Studie aufgrund der Akten der Stiftung Pro Juventute im Schweizerischen Bundesarchive (Bundesarchiv Dossier 9) (Bern: Schweizerisches Bundesarchiv, 1998).

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Joskowicz has argued, during the 1950s Western governments rehabilitated the idea of ‘nomadism’ as a reason for rejecting the asylum claims of Eastern European Gypsies seeking to enter the West.10 At the height of Cold War competition over ideals of freedom and democracy, the ‘human’ right to freedom of movement was a contested political idea on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Socialist Legality and ‘Civil Society’ after Stalin The emphasis on rights and legality in debates about the behaviour covered by the Gypsy Decree and other forms of ‘asocial’ behaviour reflected a wider shift within Communist discourses of rights in the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc states, such as the German Democratic Republic.11 In the Soviet Union, this was reflected in citizens’ contributions to the all-people’s discussion about the new constitution after 1958.12 From the mid-1950s, the turn towards legalism – coupled with the seismic shift in international relations caused by decolonisation – contributed to a revival of interest in human rights in the Soviet Union and East Central Europe. Materialist conceptions of socialist rights were part of attempts to develop a more legalistic and rationalised form of government, reliant on procedural norms rather than arbitrary rule.13 Viewing Czechoslovakia after 1956 from the perspective of socialist legality and those social groups whom it marginalised forces a reassessment of the surprisingly durable historical narratives that view Czechs and Slovaks as heroic – or passive – victims of the political repression of Stalinism. During the Cold War, as Muriel Blaive has written, émigré Czech historians often portrayed Czechoslovakia as a small democratic nation swallowed up by the Soviet Union and forced into forty years of passivity.14 The failure of Czechs or Slovaks to rise up alongside Poles or Hungarians in 1956 is attributed in these narratives to far-reaching 10 11 12

13 14

Ari Joskowicz, ‘Romani Refugees and the Postwar Order’, Journal of Contemporary History (2015), 1–28. Sven Korzilius, ‘Asoziale’ und ‘Parasiten’ im Recht der SBZ/DDR – Randgruppen im Sozialismus zwischen Ausgrenzung und Repression (Cologne: Böhlau, 2005). Benjamin Nathans, ‘Soviet Rights-Talk in the Post-Stalin Era’, in Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (ed.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 166–190. Paul Betts, ‘Socialism, Social Rights, and Human Rights: The Case of East Germany’, Humanity, 3:3 (Winter 2012), 407–426. Muriel Blaive, ‘The Danger of Over-Interpreting Dissident Writing in the West: Communist Terror in Czechoslovakia, 1948–1968’, in Friederike Kind-Kovács and Jessie Labov (eds.), Samizdat, Tamizdat, and Beyond: Transnational Media During and After Socialism (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2013), 137–155.

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political repression that destroyed civil society and democratic dissent. While protestors stormed the streets in Budapest and Poznań, the major cities of Czechoslovakia remained quiet. Yet as Blaive has argued in her path-breaking account of Czechoslovakia’s 1956, the relative absence of unrest is more plausibly attributed to rising levels of material satisfaction amongst Czechs and Slovaks and the ability of the regime to incorporate nationalist sentiments into socialist ideology than to terror.15 Unlike Poland and Hungary, Czechoslovakia had no Soviet troops stationed on its territory during the 1950s or 1960s. In the second half of the 1950s, the turn towards socialist legality was accompanied by a further wave of welfare expansion, with the result that ever-increasing numbers of citizens acquired a crucial stake in the state. Against Cold War accounts which tended to emphasise the role of the Communist Party, repression, and ideology, recent scholarship has revised the historical interpretation of 1956 as a crisis within MarxismLeninism, rather than against it. This has important consequences for our understanding of categories such as ‘civil society’ which have been so important for shaping ideas about state-society relations in Communist regimes. In Poland, as Agnes Arndt has argued, the concept of ‘civil society’ was not a product of the anticommunist, Catholic Polish dissent of the 1970s but rather emerged from the revisionist debates of Marxist intellectuals after 1956 as part of a transnational dialogue with interlocutors in the West.16 Meanwhile, Michal Kopeček has shown that debates among and between Marxist revisionists in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland were part of a process of coming to terms with their own intellectual and emotional involvement with Stalinism that cannot be reduced to a simple narrative of victimisation.17 The expansion of social rights over the course of the 1950s meant that the ‘great majority of Czechoslovak citizens acquired an important stake in the system.’18 Despite the economic failures of the first Five Year Plan and the political turmoil of de-Stalinisation, policymakers quickly retreated from attempts to roll back the welfare state in 1953. Access to welfare benefits and higher wages became a key means of rewarding loyalty to the state. Political opponents of the regime, along with those 15 16 17 18

Muriel Blaive, Une déstalinisation manquée: Tchécoslovaquie 1956 (Brussels: Editions complexes, 2004). Agnes Arndt, Rote Bürger: Eine Milieu- und Beziehungsgeschichte linker Dissidenz in Polen (1956–1976) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013). Michal Kopeček, Hledání ztraceného smyslu revoluce: Zrod a počátky marxistického revizionismu ve strˇední Evropě 1953–1960 (Prague: Argo, 2009). Tomasz Inglot, Welfare States in East Central Europe, 1919–2004 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 139.

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guilty of petty crimes such as absenteeism or frequent job-hopping (fluktuace), were punished by a reduction in social benefits or pensions. The regime expanded social rights while simultaneously linking these material benefits more closely to work (by the late 1950s meaning almost exclusively employment by the state). As Tomasz Inglot argues, popular anti-poverty measures introduced in the late 1940s, such as basic flat rate benefits and social pensions for the poor, were reduced in favour of ‘more restrictive, work-related regulations of pensions, sickness insurance, and family assistance’ for manual workers, collectivised farmers, and working women.19 The welfare policies of the dictatorship shifted away from redistribution and egalitarianism, while social insurance benefits were ‘partially converted into tools of labour mobilization and discipline’.20 Within this broader context of evolving social policy, the Gypsy Decree and Nomad Law were also part of a shift towards the use of law and rationalised government in the Soviet bloc as Communist regimes grappled with a massive crisis of legitimacy after 1956. Stalin’s successors saw the re-establishment of the rule of law as crucial to recovery from mass violence and political terror, embracing zakonnosť – legality or, more literally, lawfulness – as an antidote to the arbitrary rule of the Stalin era.21 Reforms of Soviet criminal law during the 1950s meant that individuals could be sentenced only if they had broken a law and not simply because an official chose to designate them as an enemy of the people or a socially harmful element.22 The category of the ‘enemy of the people’ ceased to exist in Soviet criminal law in 1958, but not all legal reforms under Khrushchev should be interpreted as signs of liberalisation. Now the attention of lawmakers shifted to defining petty crimes against the state. De-Stalinisation provoked furious debates between lawyers and police officials over the use of law to control socially deviant behaviour in rapidly industrialising societies undergoing huge demographic and social change. Offences such as ‘hooliganism’, ‘parasitism’, and ‘disturbing the peace’ were presented in the media and official texts as innovative and new, when actually in many ways they represented a return to the past.23 19 20 21 22 23

Tomasz Inglot, Welfare States in East Central Europe, 137. Tomasz Inglot, Welfare States in East Central Europe, 137. Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 5. Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer, 5. See further, Matěj Kotalík, ‘“Eine große Anziehungskraft haben lose Gruppen”. Die polizeiliche Auseinandersetzung mit “chuligánství” und “Rowdytum” in der ČSR/ČSSR und der DDR (1955-1966)’, in Volker Zimmermann and Michal Pullmann (eds.),

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Legislation on ‘antisocial’ behaviour, whether of rowdy youth, workshirkers, or alcoholics, was modelled on imperial codes dating back to the tsarist or Habsburg empires. Drawing on pre-socialist law and societal norms, these categories classified ‘socially deviant’ behaviours as alien to the conduct of the good socialist citizen. Yet as this chapter will show, the process of imposing socialist legality does not fit neatly into a Foucauldian narrative in which the socialist state regulates and disciplines the private lives of its citizens. Socialist legality was as much a moral as a legal vehicle for fashioning consent. Consensus between rulers and ruled over the rather petty bourgeois concept of what constituted ‘asocial’ behaviour was, as Thomas Lindenberger has shown, one of the few fragile bridges between society and state under state socialism.24 ‘Socially useful’ work attained a specific meaning in the Khrushchev era, and in this context the Supreme Soviet decreed in October 1956 that Gypsies in the Soviet Union should give up their vagrant lifestyle and adopt a life of settled wage labour.25 The decree criminalised nomadism, which could be punished by between two and five years of hard labour, and was introduced in conjunction with a decree against petty hooliganism in the same year. Harsher laws regulating antisocial and ‘parasitical’ behaviour were adopted in 1957.26 Such laws signified that the principle of socialist legality also resulted in increased surveillance and state action against ‘an expanding array of outsider identities’, as Brian Lapierre has written, by inserting new categories of deviance into everyday life.27 In Czechoslovakia, evidence from internal party and government reports strongly suggests that the rhetoric of the Gypsy Decree was influenced by citizens’ complaints filtering up from below and not only by Soviet policy.28 Correspondence between the Interior Ministry, the uniformed police (VB, Verˇejné Bezpečnost or Public Security), and the Ideological Commission of the Central Committee demonstrates that complaints from citizens, police, and local officials about the allegedly

24

25 26

27

28

Ordnung und Sicherheit, Devianz und Kriminalität im Staatssozialismus: Tschechoslowakei und DDR 1948/49-1989 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2014), 221-252. Thomas Lindenberger, ‘“Asociality” and Modernity: The GDR as a Welfare Dictatorship’, in Katherine Pence and Paul Betts (eds.) Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 211–233. Alaina Lemon, Between Two Fires: Gypsy Performance and Romani Memory from Pushkin to Post-Socialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 103, 135. Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Social parasites: How tramps, idle youth, and busy entrepreneurs impeded the Soviet march to Communism’, Cahiers du Monde Russe, 47:1–2 (January– June 2006), 377–408. Brian Lapierre, ‘Making Hooliganism on a Mass Scale: The campaign against petty hooliganism in the Soviet Union, 1956–1964’, Cahiers du Monde Russe, 47:1–2 (January– June 2006), 349–376. This point is eloquently made by Spurný, Nejsou jako my.

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antisocial behaviour of Roma played a significant role in the decision of party ideologists to draft a new decree on the Gypsies. Popular protests against Gypsies, whether in industrial cities such as Ostrava or rural Slovak villages, gained a new edge after 1956. Nationalism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism were reportedly on the rise, according to the thousands of reports collected by the State Security (StB) in an effort to monitor the mood of the population, as well as according to information culled from drunken conversations in pubs, muttered complaints on the factory floor, or graffiti hastily scrawled in public places.29 Secret-police reports are notoriously unreliable, reflecting the prejudices or strategic interests of the monitors as much as those under surveillance. More significant, then, is not whether the citizens’ complaints collected in the central government archives are an accurate reflection of popular perceptions about Roma but that official rhetoric shifted to accommodate the language of protest on the street. The security services had never ceased to contest the decision to decriminalise the ‘Gypsy way of life’ by cancelling the Law on Nomadic Gypsies in 1950.30 In 1954 an Interior Ministry report called for an unspecified ‘solution’ to the Gypsy Question, complaining that earlier policies had failed to integrate Roma because ‘no one took into account that Gypsies consider themselves a separate nationality, with their own language, their customs and deep-rooted traditions, even their own courts, their own form of marriage and family life.’ Taking aim at the rhetoric of ‘equal rights’ that was so central to socialist discourses about minorities, the Interior Ministry claimed that Roma were taking advantage of fears that state action against them ‘would be seen as racism’, merely enjoying the rights of citizenship – such as pensions and sickness insurance – while failing to fulfil ‘their basic duties towards state and society’. Moreover, the report unashamedly deployed ethnic stereotypes about Gypsies being innate criminals who ‘own more property than decent working citizens. Every gypsy family is sitting on piles of gold and cash . . . destroying our economy while the toiling masses are building socialism in our homeland.’31 In June 1957 party ideologists agreed with ministry and trade union representatives on the need to issue a ‘ban on nomadism and 29 30

31

Karel Kaplan, Kronika komunistického Československa: Doba tání, 1953–1956 (Brno: Barrister & Principal, 2005). Tomáš Zapletal, ‘Prˇístup totalitního státu a jeho bezpečnostních složek k romské menšině v Československu, 1945–1989’, Sborník Archivu bezpečnostních složek 10 (2012), 13-83. NA, ÚPV-B, f. 315/1, kart. 3409, sg. 14257: Ministerstvo vnitra, Toulavé osoby cikanského původu – opatrˇení, 23 January 1954.

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vagrancy’.32 Otakar Zeman, the official responsible for nationality questions in the Ideological Commission of the Central Committee, explained that the growing number of demands for a ‘final solution to the gypsy question’ meant that the whole question must now be solved ‘by the party’. According to pencilled notes made by a participant, Zeman stressed that the new policy should be neither ‘discriminatory’ nor ‘preferential’.33 Participants concluded that previous efforts to integrate Roma had been ‘wrecked by the constant mobility of the majority of the Gypsy population’ and that prohibiting nomadism – on the Soviet model – should provide the basis for all further work with the Gypsies. The failure to guarantee equal rights for Roma was most often attributed to faulty implementation of sound policies and in particular the failings of local National Committees rather than broader structural obstacles to integration. A particularly dramatic tale of administrative incompetence was relayed in a police report to the Central Committee: some fifty Roma workers, living in twelve caravans and one canvascovered wagon, were loaded onto railway wagons and sent to Liberec after their temporary work on a Slovak construction site had ended. The Liberec National Committee refused to accept them, so the group was sent back by rail to Slovakia. In October they arrived in Žilina, from where they were sent all the way to Cheb in the far west of Bohemia, then from Cheb to Chomutov, and on to Kladno, Karlovy Vary, Prˇíbram, and back again to Žilina. Officials were scandalised that ‘gypsy families were transported all around the country, just because National Committees wanted to get rid of them, despite the shortage of railway wagons, and right in the middle of the potato and beet harvest campaigns.’34 This was a particularly extreme example of a more general trend, whereby local and national state agencies pursued contradictory approaches to Roma migration; local authorities supported migration to get rid of their Gypsies, while central bodies attempted to limit or stop mobility. The paradoxical situation that resulted seems to have influenced the decision to prohibit ‘nomadism’.35 The Main Administration of the Public Security (Hlavní správa Verˇejné bezpečnosti) warned the Central Committee in several reports that a failure to address citizens’ complaints about ‘Gypsy crime’ would

32 33 34 35

NA, MPS, f. 992, kart. 519, sg. 2020: Záznam o jednání o rˇešení otázky cikánů na ÚV KSČ dne 21. červne 1957 a návrh dalšího postupu. NA, ÚPV-T, f. 315/2, kart. 1625: Handwritten notes on the meeting with Zeman. NA, AÚV KSČ, f. 05/3, sv. 36, a.j. 289: Ministerstvo vnitra – Hl. Správa VB: Zpráva o problematice cikánských osob v ČSR – dodatek k návrhu na rˇešení, 29 November 1957. Matěj Spurný, Nejsou jako my, 249.

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undermine the legitimacy of the state and lead to popular violence.36 To illustrate the danger, the HSVB cited an attack by a village mob against Roma in Malinovo, south-east Slovakia, on 5 November 1956. After an altercation in which a ‘Gypsy’ had allegedly ripped a white villager’s coat with a knife, some fifty or sixty villagers armed with knives and pitchforks broke down the doors and windows of the Gypsies’ wagons, forcing them to flee. This was just one case mentioned in a lengthy report from August 1957, which included forty complaint letters from National Committees and the general public.37 Other denunciations were sent directly to the government, such as a telegram from workers at Vodotechna Teplice alleging that a Gypsy had murdered a co-worker and calling for a ‘radical solution’ against Gypsies in Teplice, who were known for ‘shirking work, stealing state property, drinking and harassing decent citizens on the streets’.38 In addition to drawing on citizens’ petitions, the HSVB drew strategically on both domestic tradition and recent developments in Soviet criminal law to back up their proposals to the Central Committee, forwarding an analysis of pre-socialist Czech laws as well as a report from the Czechoslovak Embassy in Moscow on the post-1956 Soviet battle against ‘antisocial elements, parasites and disturbers of the peace’.39 Chief party ideologist Jirˇí Hendrych submitted a report and draft resolution on ‘work among the gypsy population’ to the Politburo in March 1958. A Czech translation of the Soviet decree on nomadic Gypsies was attached as an annex. The report explained that ‘complaints about gypsies, especially nomadic ones, have been increasing throughout the whole territory of the ČSR recently’ and described the Gypsies’ way of life as ‘insupportable’. Hendrych’s report began with a formulaic acknowledgement that the ‘history of the gypsies is marked by centuries of bloody oppression and persecution by the ruling classes.’ Unlike previous official documents on the Gypsy Question, however, it referred explicitly to the negative impression that Gypsies made on foreign visitors. The report claimed: ‘Gypsy mothers neglect their children, who run around the streets filthy, in torn, dirty vests, mostly half-naked – a pretty sight for the cameras of tourists coming from capitalist countries.’ Even more worrying for the party was the 36 37 38 39

NA, AÚV KSČ, f. 05/3, sv. 36, a.j. 289: Ministerstvo vnitra – Hl. Správa VB: Zpráva o problematice cikánských osob v ČSR – návrh na rˇešení, 5 August 1957. Ibid. NA, ÚPV-T, f. 351/2, kart. 1625: Resoluce zamestnanců Vodotechny n.p. Teplice, 15 June 1957. NA, AÚV KSČ, f. 05/3, sv. 36, a.j. 294: Ministerstvo zahraničních věcí, Sovětský odbor: ˇ ádná legislativně-právní zpráva č. 2/57, Zesílení boje s protispolečenskými živly, prˇíživníky a R narušovateli verˇejného porˇádku v SSSR, 25 September 1957.

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appearance of such images in the foreign press. Recently ‘the English magazine [sic] Life had published pictures of gypsies from Český Krumlov,’ a picturesque town in southern Bohemia that was one of Czechoslovakia’s major tourist attractions.40 The KSČ Decree on Work Amongst the Gypsy Population divided Roma into three categories: settled, semi-settled, and nomadic. It declared that the overriding aim must be to ‘increase the number of settled Gypsies, re-educate the semi-settled Gypsies and liquidate the nomadic way of life’. Settled gypsies were judged to be fully assimilated and allegedly often sought to forget their ‘gypsy origin.’ On the other hand, ‘semi-settled Gypsies’ were defined as people who ‘frequently changed their workplace and address’, lived at a ‘very low cultural level’, and were mostly ‘illiterate or semi-literate’. The explanatory notes attached to the decree recalled racist rhetoric about Gypsies, claiming that they ate carrion meat and neglected their children. Finally, the ‘nomadic Gypsies’ comprised a group of seven thousand to eight thousand people who ‘roam from place to place in various kinds of vehicles’, living a life of crime, begging, stealing, and trading in horses. These were the Gypsies who ‘provoked the most complaints from the workers’.41 Integration into the waged labour force, according to the party resolution, was to be the main tool for ensuring that Gypsies became ‘citizens with full rights [plnoprávne občany]’.42 Trade unions were instructed to ensure that ‘Gypsies were scattered in small groups or as individuals in the workplace’, as well as in works flats, dormitories, and youth training homes, ‘in order to intensify the educational influence of other workers as much as possible’.43 Regional and local National Committees were supposed to create permanent commissions to monitor ‘the reeducation of the gypsy population’, comprising local government officials, representatives of the mass organisations, trade unions, as well as ‘gypsies and other members of society’. In areas with large Roma populations a

40

41

42

43

NA, AÚV KSČ, f. 02/2, sv. 172, a.j. 234, bod. 7. Politické byro Ústrˇedního výboru KSČ, Usnesení ÚV KSČ o práci mezi cikánským obyvatelstvem v ČSR, prˇedkládá J. Hendrych, 26 March 1958. NA, AÚV KSČ, f. 02/2, sv. 172, a.j. 234, bod. 7. Politické byro Ústrˇedního výboru KSČ, Usnesení ÚV KSČ o práci mezi cikánským obyvatelstvem v ČSR, prˇedkládá J. Hendrych, 26 March 1958. ŠObA Prešov, f. MNV v Prešove (1949–1960). Sekretariát predsedu, č. kart. 65, kat. č. 730 tajné, ÚV KSČ Zásadní směrnice o práci mezi cikánským obyvatelstvem ČSR. Prˇísně tajně! 8 April 1958, in Anna Jurová, Rómská problematika 1945–1967. Dokumenty (Prague: Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, 199ž), vol. 3, 190. ŠObA Prešov, f. MNV v Prešove (1949–1960). Sekretariát predsedu, č. kart. 65, kat. č. 730 tajné, Uznesenie Ústredného výboru KSČ o práci medzi cigánským obyvateľstvom v ČSR, in Jurová, Dokumenty, 191.

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government official was to be nominated as responsible for this agenda. The Interior Ministry was instructed to draft a law which would ‘completely liquidate the Gypsies’ nomadic lifestyle by the end of 1959’, to make a register of ‘all gypsy persons living on our territory’ by May 1958, and to ensure that local government kept precise records on the Gypsy population in the future, including of ‘pre-school children, gypsy women and youth’. The Ministry for Education and Culture was instructed to take measures ensuring the ‘liquidation of illiteracy among adult Gypsies’, while the Health Ministry was ordered to carry out a survey of the health of the Gypsy population and ensure that preventive health measures (such as vaccination) were carried out in all ‘Gypsy settlements and quarters’.44 The Central Committee resolution on work among the Gypsy population was secret and thus the text was distributed only to high-level party functionaries and not published. Lower-level party and state officials, as well as professionals and activists, were informed about the new policy through conferences and propaganda. However, the main vehicle for publicising the new party line was the Law on the Permanent Settlement of Nomadic Persons, adopted by the Czechoslovak National Assembly on 17 October 1958. This law was thereafter referred to in official discourse – such as the media or government handbooks – as the main tool for implementing the new policy on the Gypsy Question.45 It criminalised individuals and families leading ‘nomadic lifestyles’, defined as groups or individuals who ‘roam from place to place, avoid honest work or make their living in some disreputable way, even if they have permanent residence in some municipality’. Offenders faced a prison sentence of six months to three years.46 This introduced harsher sanctions than could already be imposed for the crime of ‘disturbing the peace’ on the grounds that ‘leading a nomadic way of life’ posed a greater threat to society.47

Vlach Roma: Eradicating a Way of Life The Nomad Law was not aimed exclusively at Vlach Roma, for whom travelling as a way of life was central to their identity in the late 1950s. Yet the anti-nomadism campaigns in Eastern Europe undoubtedly registered 44

45 46 47

ŠObA Prešov, f. MNV v Prešove (1949–1960). Sekretariát predsedu, č. kart. 65, kat. č. 730 tajné, Uznesenie Ústredného výboru KSČ o práci medzi cigánským obyvateľstvom v ČSR, in Jurová, Dokumenty, 191. Rudé právo, 18 October 1958: Druhý den zasedání Národního shromáždění. Z projevů zpravodajů k návrhům zákona, 2. Zákon ze dne 17. rˇíjna o trvalém usídlení kočujících osob, Sb. Zák nr. 74/1958. NA, AÚV KSČ, f. 05/3, sv 36, aj 282. Vládní návrh Zákon o trvalém usídlení kočujících osob - Důvodová zpráva.

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their most dramatic results against Vlachs, eradicating their customary way of life. ‘To immobilise the nomads was simple enough’, wrote the sociologist Will Guy: ‘the wheels were ripped from their carts and wagons and their horses confiscated. Sometimes they were given money for their draught animals but in many cases these were slaughtered without compensation.’48 Based on his fieldwork in eastern Slovakia in the early 1970s, Guy suggested that it was ‘the sub-ethnic group of nomadic Vlachs that probably aroused the greatest hostility among the non-Gypsy population. They still made a living in the manner of their forefathers – horsedealing, knife-grinding, fortune-telling, and petty theft – and the most instantly successful part of the 1958 campaign was in preventing this small yet emotively significant group of true nomads from continuing their travels, bringing to an end in five brief days a traditional way of life that had survived in Czechoslovakia for as many centuries.’49 Traditionally engaged in raising and trading in horses, Vlach Roma had travelled for centuries in extended family groups through East Central Europe since migrating from the Balkans, preserving a dialect and cultural identity that was distinct from other Slovak or Hungarian Roma. Their capitalist trading and lack of respect for administrative territorial boundaries inspired a deep mistrust among local state authorities. When a succession dispute broke out after the death of an elderly Vlach vajda in the Slovak district of Behynce, the local police impounded the vajda’s insignia, including a heavy gilded chalice. The local National Committee reported that the Behynce Roma lived rather well although they apparently ‘did not work’. There were suspicions about their illegal economic activities when one Vlach Rom emerged as the only serious buyer for the local doctor’s house, offering Kč 75 000 in cash. The Šafárikovo MNV refused permission for the sale, fearing that the house – which overlooked the village green – would ‘become a centre for nomadic gypsies’. The Behynce Roma were accused of illegally trading in horses, grazing their animals without permission on cooperative and private land, and attacking local villagers, while the women were accused of spreading venereal disease.50 If the state authorities did not intervene, warned the local National Committee, the Slovak villagers would soon intervene to ‘punish these thieves’.51

48 50 51

49 Guy, ‘The Attempt of Socialist Czechoslovakia’, 198. Ibid., 198. NA, ÚPV-T, f. 315/2, kart. 1625, Úrad Predsedníctva Sboru Povereníkov: Sťažnosti občanov obce Behynce, okr. Šafárikovo, 21 March 1957. NA, ÚPV-T, f. 315/2, kart. 1625, MNV Behynce, okr. Šafárikovo: Žiadosť na odpoveď pre občanov Behynce, 18 November 1956.

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Figure 4.1. Lovara, near Prˇíbram, Czechoslovakia, 1959. Nomadic Roma settled by the state. Photographer: Eva Davidová. From the Gypsy Lore Society Collections, University of Liverpool Special Collections and Archives.

The Czechoslovak law aspired to a different aim than vagrancy legislation in Western Europe, which socialist officials viewed as restricting vagrant lifestyles without regard for their social context. Czech ideologists presented the KSČ Decree on the Gypsy Population as inseparable from the imminent transition to Communism, distancing themselves from the ‘legalised persecution’ of Gypsies in liberal democracies by insisting that the 1958 law was a part of the ‘assistance’ provided by the state to all ‘nomadic persons’.52 Ideally, a Gypsy worker was supposed to enter into permanent employment with a state-owned company, thereby becoming eligible for company-owned housing and benefits such as sickness or accident insurance, while officials from the trade unions, Czechoslovak Youth Organization, or Women’s Union would offer 52

Práca medzi cigánskym obyvateľstvom: Prˇíručka pre národné výbory – len pre úradnú potrebu (Bratislava: Úrad Predsedníctva Sboru povereníkov, 1959).

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practical and pastoral care for his wife and children. The reality of work for most Roma migrant workers was often very different. Roma migrants rarely experienced employment in the way envisaged by planners and central government officials. Slovak Roma arriving in the Czech lands were much more likely to be offered temporary work on a short-term ‘brigade’ or other unskilled jobs. The state employment agency (OPS) in Ostrava, the largest borderland city, reported in late 1956 that only 435 men and 74 women of the 1,735 Gypsies reportedly living in this sprawling industrial town were registered as officially employed.53 Most were working as unskilled labourers in construction, where there was a permanent shortage of labour, and as a result the OPS claimed that construction companies were continually recruiting Roma from Slovak regions with high unemployment, especially Prešov, Košice, and Nitra. The OPS classified many of these Roma as ‘semi-settled’, which in practice meant that they did not have a permanent place of residence. In the tourist spa town of Karlovy Vary most Roma were employed by the city council to fill undesirable unskilled jobs, such as sweeping streets, collecting rubbish, or laying asphalt on the streets. The OPS openly acknowledged that Roma were recruited as brigade workers but then refused permission to remain as permanent residents or that migrant workers left the city when their applications to swap workers’ barracks for ‘family accommodation’ were turned down.54 Migrant Roma in borderland cities often maintained community ties with extended family groups coming from the same Slovak villages, which persisted for decades after the first family members left ‘to Bohemia’ in the postwar years.55 Roma migrants were of various social backgrounds, from the poorest settlement Roma to elite musicians, and the characteristics of Roma migration were likewise varied. While some Roma integrated permanently into Czech society, others aimed only to earn money and return home to build a house in Slovakia. State authorities responded in a contradictory manner: local authorities frequently supported migration to get rid of local Gypsies, while the central authorities attempted to limit or stop migration, creating a paradoxical situation that influenced the decision to prohibit ‘nomadism’.56 53 54 55

56

NA Praha, MPS, f. 992, kart. 400, sg. 2313, inv. č. 831: OPS Rady KNV Ostrava: Report on employment of Gypsies. NA, MPS, f. 992, kart. 400, sg. 2313, inv. č. 831: OPS Rady KNV Karlový Vary. Czech ethnographers began studying the ‘problematic’ Roma in industrial cities in the 1980s. See Materiály k problematice etnických skupin na území ČSSR: Cikáni v průmyslovém městě (problematika adaptace a asimilace) (Prague: Ústav pro etnografii a folkloristiku Československé akademie věd, 1988). Spurný, Nejsou jako my, 249.

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Ethnographers studying the lives of Roma migrant workers painted a slightly more complex picture, although such studies were rare in the 1950s when there was little official interest in conducting ethnographic studies of urban life. A study of migrants in Ostrava showed that Roma men moved into dilapidated apartments or temporary barracks, where they were joined by their wives, children, or other relatives. Unfamiliar with urban life, which included paying rent and using a bathroom, Roma were frequently accused of destroying their new homes. In Karvina, Davidová reported that Roma ripped up their floorboards for firewood, sold their bathtubs, and ‘got the toilets into such a state that it was hardly possible to use them’.57 Without enough beds, they slept on ‘straw mattresses on the ground, next to piles of potatoes’. When workers’ barracks lacked cooking facilities, families would share a stove. Integration manifested itself in changing daily routines, as Slovak Roma took their meals in factory canteens and prepared traditional Slovak dishes such as halušky only for holidays. Young girls gave up their village dress for modern city clothes, although Davidová noted that they retained a ‘love of bright colours, especially red, green, and gold for women, and unusual contrasts of colour and cut. Broad full skirts are typical, often with flounces around the hem, and long-sleeved blouses in clashing colours.’58 Older men were distinctive in formal black trousers with long-sleeved white shirts, boots, and wide-brimmed hats. Contemporary observers also noted that young Roma men adopted the style of the pásek, or rebellious teenager. Migrant labourers living on the fringes of city life were a familiar feature of life in the Eastern bloc, especially in the massive new Stalinist towns such as Nowa Huta in Poland and Sztálinváros in Hungary. A photograph by Davidová of a group of Roma boys outside a Doubravá workers’ hostel called ‘At the Brickworks’ displayed this subcultural style: wearing high-waisted trousers, open-necked shirts, and carefully greased quiffs, the boys faced the camera with a cheeky, challenging expression. Forced to conform to the rhetoric of the time, even a sympathetic observer such as Davidová was obliged to gloss the lifestyle of urban Roma migrants as ‘parasitic’ and uncivilised.59 Yet the Roma boys parading their styled hair were part of a huge and influential youth subculture that obsessed Czech lawmakers, 57

58 59

Eva Davidová, ‘Cikánské obyvatelstvo v Orlové, Doubravě a Karviné (K problematice migrace cikánů ze Slovenska do průmyslových oblastí českých zemích po druhé světové válce’, Radostná země, 8:1 (1958), 1–9. Ibid. Eva Davidová, ‘K cikánské problematice na Ostravsku-Karvinsku (K problematice asimilace slovenských cikánů v průmyslových oblastech českých zemích)’, Radostná země, 11:3 (1961), 73–80.

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educators, and moralists during the 1950s. Like the phenomenon of bikiniarswto that Katherine Lebow has described in Nowa Huta in People’s Poland, the Czech páskové signalled an emerging socialist youth culture in the new industrial towns of the People’s Democracies.60 The new criminal offences of ‘hooliganism’ and ‘parasitism’ that Czech lawmakers introduced in 1956 were responses to the forms of sociability and subcultures that emerged as unintended consequences of socialist modernisation and industrialisation.61 Return migration to rural Slovakia was also a common phenomenon. In comparison to the relative anonymity of life in a Czech town, renting a state flat in an unprepossessing block, suggested Will Guy, the home settlement ‘represented a refuge from the many vicissitudes of a migrant’s life, whether from ill-health, loneliness, family break-down, unpleasant work, pursuit by the police or from less specific problems such as fear of new measures against Gypsies’.62 One woman who moved with her family back to Spišská Nová Ves in 1951, after spending one year in the Czech lands, explained, ‘We only stayed for a few months in Ostrava because we didn’t like it there. The air was very dirty and it was so cold as our flat had a concrete floor. Our new baby was ill all the time we were there, so we came home again.’63 The number of Roma in the settlements living on disability pensions was high, especially among the older generation, as a consequence of childhood privations and a life of physical labour, long shifts, and dangerous work. Police officers and National Committee officials carried out registers of ‘nomadic persons’ across the country over three days in February 1959. Both the regular police (Verˇejná Bezpečnost, VB) and the political police (Státní Bezpečnost, StB) were put on alert while the registers were being carried out, while the security services in Poland and Hungary were asked to step up security at the borders.64 Registration documents for each family were prepared by the police and National Committees, with photographs of all family members more than fifteen years old and details from identity cards, birth certificates, certificates of state citizenship, and military service records. People without identity cards were photographed, fingerprinted, and given a document confirming their presence 60 61

62 63 64

Katherine Lebow, Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949–56 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). Matěj Kotalik, ‘“Páskové” a “chuligáni” proti režimu? Na okraj tradičních konceptů odboje a rezistence’, in Odboj a odpor proti komunistického režimu v Československu a ve strˇední Evropě (Prague: ÚSTR, 2010), 225–232. Guy, ‘The Attempt of Socialist Czechoslovakia’, 486. Guy, ‘The Attempt of Socialist Czechoslovakia’, 485. Zapletal, ‘Prˇístup totalitního státu’, 49.

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in the register.65 In northern Bohemia, as Matěj Spurný has shown, a Regional Staff for the Settlement of Nomadic and Semi-Nomadic Persons sent out nineteen specialised teams who reported back by telephone every evening to the regional headquarters in Ústí nad Labem.66 After dark, police officers raided local pubs to ensnare anyone who had escaped the register during daylight hours. Against expectations, the Regional Staff claimed that most people reported for the register voluntarily, ‘nicely dressed in clean clothes’.67 Similar reports came in from Slovakia, where the registration took place in early 1959. The Slovak Interior Ministry reported similar occurrences, for example in Nové Zamky, where authorities went as far as to claim that the register created ‘a rather festive atmosphere’ with families arriving to be processed in their best clothes.68 Despite the ethnically neutral wording of the Nomad Law, operational instructions for police officers and local authorities clearly stated that the main targets were Roma. ‘Nomadism’ was vaguely defined, and settled Roma could also be included on the register if local authorities decided their conduct at work or home was unsatisfactory or if their children failed to attend school. People with a record of absenteeism could also be registered, as could ‘parasites’, such as Roma men who profited from the earnings of wives who begged, stole, or worked as prostitutes. Slovak local authorities were informed that Gypsy musicians who played at family celebrations, at parties, or on the streets could be registered as ‘semi-nomadic’. National Committees were advised to add a person’s nickname or ‘Gypsy name’ to their records. Individuals whose identity was in doubt were photographed and fingerprinted. Anticipating the panic that was likely to ensue, local authorities were advised not to publicise the register on the radio or village loudspeakers. Instead, officials were supposed to knock on doors, ‘inviting’ individuals to bring their documents to the relevant office.69 In the end, the Central Committee claimed the register was carried out ‘peacefully’ before referring euphemistically to a few ‘slip-ups’: ‘Many settled, cultured gypsy families were registered, even including some party members, and in some places Gypsies were caught in the streets or the woods. It was often necessary to stop panic spreading and to convince the gypsies they would not be taken 65 68

69

66 67 Ibid. Matěj Spurný, Nejsou jako my, 270. Spurný, Nejsou jako my, 270. SNA, f. PV – Sekretariát povereníka (1949–1960) č. kart 232, sp. 028/59 sekr., Situačná správa č. 2 (Súpis kočujúcích a polokočujících osôb dnˇa 4. febrúara 1959, in Jurová, Dokumenty. ŠoBA Prešov, f. KNV v Prešove, Referáty a odbor pre vnútorné veci, kart. 221, inv. č. 53: Vysvetlivy k niektorým otázkam vykonanie zákona č. 74/1958 Sb. o trvalom usídlení kočující osob, in Jurová, Dokumenty, 209.

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to concentration camps or to India.’70 In the region around Košice, where ten thousand adults and children were registered, rumours circulated that Roma would be ‘shipped off to Siberia or Asia’; at least one woman was arrested for spreading ‘dangerous gossip’.71 Roma in Lehnice, near Šamorin, were heard to complain that ‘this was the sort of thing that happened under Horthy or Hitler’, while in Petržalka, a suburb of Bratislava, an angry group of citizens ‘threatened to go to the newspapers’.72 Forty-six thousand people – of whom half were children – were put on the Nomad Register in 1959.73 Very few fitted the description of a ‘nomadic person’. Fewer than 900 were actually living in caravans. Nearly 8,500 adults were resident in what the authorities termed ‘proper houses’, while almost 12,300 adults were living in ‘gypsy settlements, mostly shacks’. More than 1,000 were living in temporary accommodation. The registers differentiated between ‘gypsies’ and ‘non-gypsies’, with only some 3,000 people listed as ‘various non-gypsy elements’.74 Within months, officials reported that some five hundred letters of complaint had flooded into the Central Committee. More were sent to President Novotný. Citizens protested that their inclusion on the Nomad Register prevented them from finding a job. Others expressed anger about their treatment by police or National Committees. Many held licences to run private businesses – such as travelling fairs – and insisted they were not ‘Gypsies’, while Roma musicians were furious about being labelled ‘nomads’. Others – now categorised in official parlance as ‘former nomads’ – argued that hostility from other citizens and National Committees made it impossible to fulfil their duty under the law to settle down.75

70 71

72

73

74 75

NA, AÚV KSČ, f. 05/3, sv. 36, a.j. 289: Kontrolní zpráva o plnění usnesení ÚV KSČ o práci mezi cikánským obyvatelstvem v ČSR ze dne 8. dubna 1958. ŠoBA Košice, f. KNV Košického krája. Odbor pre vnútorné veci (1949–1960), č. kart. 48, č. sp. 53b: Vykonanie súpisu kočujúcich osôb podľa zák. č. 74/1958 Zb. v Košickom kraji: vyhodnocujúca zpráva, in Jurová, Dokumenty, 220. SNA Bratislava, f. PV – Sekretariát povereníka (1949–1960) č kart 232, č sp 028/59 sekr.: Situačná správa č. 1 (Súpis kočujúcich a polokočujúcich osôb dnˇa 3. febrúra 1959) Tajné!, in Jurová, Dokumenty, 210. NA, AÚV KSČ. Kancelárˇ 1. Tajemníka ÚV KSČ Antonína Novotného, f. 1261: Prˇipomínky k materiálu pro politické byro ÚV KSČ: Plnění usnesení ÚV KSČ o práci mezi cikánským obyvatelstvem, 18 December 1961. NA, AÚV KSČ, f. 05/3, sv. 10, a.j. 57: Sekretariát ÚV KSČ: Zpráva o plnění usnesení ÚV KSČ o práci mezi cikánským obyvatelstvem v ČSR. NA, AÚV KSČ. Kancelárˇ 1. Tajemníka ÚV KSČ Antonína Novotného, f. 1261: Prˇipomínky k materiálu pro politické byro ÚV KSČ: Plnění usnesení ÚV KSČ o práci mezi cikánským obyvatelstvem, 18 December 1961.

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Although the state was supposed to provide housing for ‘former nomads’ – unlike capitalist states that simply criminalised travelling – ‘settlement’ was crudely defined in the implementing regulations. National Committees were given the power to settle nomadic families ‘temporarily’ in their own wagons ‘after removing their horses and tractors’.76 Vlach Roma in some Slovak municipalities were simply left in their immobilised wagons after police officers took away the wheels. In the north Bohemian borderlands, Matěj Spurný notes, some local authorities simply evaded their responsibilities by declaring, ‘Only a negligible number of people live in wagons in the region . . . thus the question of housing these people will not be addressed for the time being.’77 From 1958, noted the British sociologist Will Guy, the choices facing a Gypsy worker in an eastern Slovak settlement were to either work locally for low pay, commute to a district town where jobs were better paid but hard to obtain, or travel to the Czech lands where highly paid yet arduous jobs were plentiful.78 Migrating for work with a family became much harder during the 1960s, and from 1967 the safest option seemed to many to join a co-op unit, travelling to the Czech lands for work and leaving the family behind in the settlement. The effects of the Nomad Law lingered for those obligated to carry a ‘nomad’ stamp in their identity booklet, which citizens were obligated to carry with them at all times. By the mid1960s the Interior Ministry reported that people frequently tried to ‘get rid of the stamp in their passports by tearing out the relevant pages, or otherwise damaging the booklet, losing it or reporting it stolen. After getting a new passport, if the holder does not manage to avoid being registered again, the same thing very often happens again.’79 Similar strategies were used to destroy the incriminating evidence of uncancelled employment stamps, when employees had switched jobs without getting official permission. Will Guy reported that Slovak Gypsies would frequently leave their jobs in the Czech lands in the spring: ‘Once back in Slovakia the Gypsies had their own ways of dealing with the incriminating stamps in their identity cards. Often they would claim to have lost their cards and the replacement would have satisfyingly blank pages.’80 Nevertheless, Guy’s fieldwork at the Railway Construction Company in 76 77 78 79

80

NA, AÚV KSČ, f. 05/3, sv. 36, a.j. 282: Směrnice k provedení zákona č. 74/1958 Sb. o trvalém usídlení kočujících osob, 8 December 1958. Cited in Spurný, Nejsou jako my, 270. Guy, ‘The Attempt of Socialist Czechoslovakia’, 509. ŠoBA Košice, f. Vsl. KNV (1961–1969), Komisia Vsl. KNV pre cigánske obyvateľstvo, č kart 10, sp. 93, Ministerstvo vnitra, Hlávni správa VB, Vyhodnocení úcinnosti právních norem z hlediska zkušenosti VB, dotýkajících se cikánské problematiky, June 1966. Guy, ‘The Attempt of Socialist Czechoslovakia’, 509.

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Prague as late as 1971 showed that potential Roma employees were still refused employment if they were included on the 1959 Nomad Register. A company manager told Guy, ‘The police come to the compound and check identity cards . . . Just recently we had to refuse a gypsy because his identity card still has an uncancelled Nomad’s Register stamp. He should have brought a document to say that he was cleared but he didn’t. He was a decent enough fellow but we had to send him back to Plzen.’81 Romani Activism and the Crisis of 1956 Roma activists were told in no uncertain terms by party ideologists that no ‘dangerous nationalism’ would be tolerated in the wake of 1956. Attempts by Roma in Hungary and Czechoslovakia to seek permission for a Romani cultural union triggered a hardline response from above. In 1957, Anton Facuna, an engineer and former partisan, responded to an official invitation from the Czechoslovak Communist Party for every citizen to take part in an ‘all people’s discussion’ (všenárodní diskuse) on the new socialist Constitution.82 In October, Rudé právo published a letter from the Central Committee inviting ‘communists, non-party members, and all working people’ to express their views about the ‘completion of socialism’.83 A little more than one month later Facuna responded with a proposal to set up a new union of Czechoslovak Gypsies. His eight-page typed letter contained a set of draft statutes for a Rómáno kultúrno jekhetaniben (Romani Cultural Union) that would be established as a member organisation of the National Front with the aim of ‘working with Gypsies of all occupations to raise their educational, cultural and social level’. Framing his proposal as a contribution to ongoing public debates about the ‘completion of socialism in our homeland’ ahead of the Eleventh Party Congress, Facuna claimed that the two hundred thousand Roma in Czechoslovakia were deeply scarred by the experience of fascist persecution and thus could not trust society or the state. Many Roma, claimed Facuna, did not know that ‘the working class has come to power and that they should educate themselves . . . for the people’s democracy.’84 Describing himself as a ‘citizen-gypsy’, Facuna emphasised his experience as a party member who had ‘worked actively for the socialization of 81 82 83 84

Guy, ‘The Attempt of Socialist Czechoslovakia’, 510. Karel Kaplan, Kronika komunistického Československu: Korˇeny reformy 1956–1968: Společnost a moc (Brno: Barrister and Principal, 2008), 21. ‘Dovršit výstavbu socialismu’, Rudé právo (18 October 1957), 1. NA, f. ÚPV-T, f. 315/2, kart. 1625, Anton Facuna, Návrh na zriadenie sväzu Československých cigánˇov v rámci listu ÚV KSČ, 2 December 1957.

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the village’, as an activist for the regional party committee in Bratislava, and as chairman of the KSS committee at Keramoprojekt, an engineering and construction company in Bratislava. More biographical information about Facuna is found in the files of the Slovak Roma Union established in 1968: born in Sklabina in 1920, Facuna was a soldier in the Slovak Army during World War II before deserting to join a partisan group in Italy. He was then recruited by the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and participated in an OSS operation to aid the Slovak uprising in 1944.85 After the war he studied at the Technical University in Bratislava.86 Although Facuna was unsuccessful, the document is significant because ten years later, on the eve of the Prague Spring, he submitted an almost identical request – and was able to establish the first Slovak Union of Gypsies-Roma. At the first meeting of the Czech Roma Union in 1969, Facuna recalled that he received a telephone call from the Central Committee: ‘Very simply, they . . . told me to leave this alone if I wanted to carry on working. Well, I don’t want to repeat what they said to me word for word, but we had to back off, and so did others who had supported the proposal.’87 Living and working in Bratislava, Facuna was in contact with Magyar-speaking Roma from southern Slovakia. He prepared the petition with Ferdinand Bihári, a musician and tinsmith who also worked for the Bratislava KNV as an activist with Roma, and Ján Cibuľa, a medical student. It seems possible that the men were inspired by reports in the Hungarian press about a Hungarian Gypsy cultural union (Magyar Cigányok Művelődési Szövetség) created in Budapest in the summer of 1957 by Mária László, a Romani-speaking journalist. László was the daughter of a Gypsy musician from the village of Pánd and had already petitioned the Budapest party committee for a Gypsy association in 1954, supported by the signatures of famous Gypsy musicians. In summer 1957 László seized the opportunity of a new National Minorities Department within the Ministry of Culture to set up a small Gypsy association within the ministry itself.88 The Hungarian press reported positively about the 85

86 87

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Interview with Anna Virágová (sister of Anton Facuna) in Milena Hübschmannová (ed.), Po Židoch Cigáni: Svědectví Romů ze Slovenska 1939-1945 (Prague: Triáda, 2005), 858–867. SNA Bratislava, f. Zväz Cigánov-Rómov 1968–1973, kart. 1: Biography of Anton Facuna. Moravský Zemský Archiv (MZA) Brno: f. Svaz Cikánů-Romů, kart 1: Zápis z ustavujícího sjezdu Svazu Cikánů-Romů v ČSR, Brno: Diskusní prˇíspěvek s. Antona Facuny, prˇedsedy Svazu Romů SSR, 30 August 1969. Michael Stewart, ‘Communist Roma policy 1945–89 as seen through the Hungarian case’, in Will Guy (ed.), Between Past and Future: The Roma of Central and Eastern Europe (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001).

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Gypsy association on 5 November 1957. News of this may have reached the Magyar-speaking Roma in southern Slovakia. Facuna argued that the persecution suffered by Roma in the past could only be remedied by state support for the Romani language and the involvement of Romani activists. Administrative measures alone would not suffice. He claimed that he had been collecting material on the history of the Roma for many years as well as compiling a Slovak-Romani dictionary of some 20 000 words. ‘I can confirm, as someone who knows the gypsy language perfectly, that everything can be expressed in this language and it is not true that it has an impoverished vocabulary, as some philologists and writers claim.’ Through lectures, public discussions, and cultural events in Romani, Facuna promised, the Romani cultural union would support the integration or ‘harmonisation’ (zblíženie) of Roma into society, while a fortnightly Romani-language magazine called Nevo díves (New Day) would report on political, cultural, and economic developments relating to the Roma.89 At the same time, the union would support official assimilation policies, including the ‘settlement of all nomadic Gypsies’. Facuna proposed that the union would ‘have the right to keep records on citizens of gypsy origin’ including information about Romani culture, society, health, employment, and general education. Claiming to have spoken with numerous Romani communities during his travels around the country, Facuna insisted that ‘all the Gypsies in the republic’ would greet the union ‘with joy’ and would thus be ‘even more grateful to the party and the government for their help’.90 Increased party control narrowed the political space in which Romani activists such as Anton Facuna could operate. In late October 1958, Elena Lacková, Miroslav Holomek, Gustáv Karika, and other activists were summoned to Prague for a meeting at which party ideologists informed cultural workers, teachers, educators, and mass organisation volunteers about the new party decree. The head of propaganda at the Central Committee, Zdislav Burˇíval, pointedly criticised ‘dangerous’ nationalist opinions circulating among the ‘gypsy intelligentsia’ in Bardejov and ‘gypsies working in the Bratislava National Committee’, who were allegedly calling for the ‘awakening of Gypsy national consciousness’.91 To support their claims, Romani elites had referred to the 89 90 91

NA Praha, f. ÚPV taj., f. 315/2, kart. 1625: Anton Facuna, Návrh na zriadenie sväzu Československých cigánˇov v rámci listu ÚV KSČ, 2 December 1957. NA Praha, f. ÚPV taj., f. 315/2, kart. 1625: Anton Facuna, Návrh na zriadenie sväzu Československých cigánˇov v rámci listu ÚV KSČ, 2 December 1957. NA Praha, AÚV KSČ, f. 05/3, sv. 36, a.j. 290: Zdislav Burˇíval, vedoucí odboru osvěty a státní propagace: Referát k ústrˇednímu aktivu o otázkách prˇevýchovy cikánských obyvatelstva, 29 October 1958.

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new Gypsy Cultural Union in Hungary and all-Roma kolkhozes, cooperatives, theatres, and publications created in the Soviet Union under Stalin. In response, Burˇíval stated bluntly, ‘We will let the Hungarian comrades solve the gypsy question in their own way, i.e. through the Cultural Union of Hungarian Gypsies. It would be premature to judge this experiment.’ Finally, Burˇíval tackled the question of the Indian origins of the Gypsies, which was often advanced to support claims to nationality status. Burˇíval observed that ‘scientific research into the Gypsy language’ had ascertained that the Gypsies had originated from India but claimed: ‘Today they have practically no connection to their Indian homeland. They themselves don’t know that they come from India’.92 All forms of Roma self-organisation were now deemed dangerously separatist, including the practice of placing educated, politically reliable Roma in the state administration to deal with ‘Gypsy affairs’. Burˇíval pointedly warned that Gypsies who held public office in political and social organisations should deal with ‘general affairs’ and not only with the ‘gypsy question’. Since Roma did not constitute a nationality, he added, ‘no kind of autonomous gypsy administration can be allowed’,93 In other words, the ideal citizen of Gypsy origin was no longer the enthusiastic volunteer who wished to ‘struggle for the soul of the gypsy’ by disseminating socialism among his or her ‘kinsmen’, as Elena Lacková had vowed to do in 1952. Activists such as Lacková and Facuna could not expect to win party approval or to build a public identity with such attitudes. Instead, they would be accused of self-interest and seeking personal gain. Burˇíval explicitly described such activists as ‘dictators’ who want to lead and teach others, but still have not begun with themselves’.94 Rudé právo announced a new campaign ‘for the reeducation of the Gypsy population’ that pointedly made no mention of Romani elites.95

Conclusion: Looking West? Social Deviance and Freedom of Movement Czechoslovakia was the first country in the Eastern bloc to follow the Soviet example of (re)criminalising Gypsy travelling after 1956, but 92 94

95

93 Ibid. Ibid. NA Praha, AÚV KSČ, f. 05/3, sv. 36, a.j. 290: Zdislav Burˇíval, vedoucí odboru osvěty a státní propagace: Referát k ústrˇednímu aktivu o otázkách prˇevýchovy cikánských obyvatelstva, 29 October 1958. ‘Aktiv o otázkách prˇevýchovy cikánského obyvatelstva’, Rudé právo (30 October 1958), 2.

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within a few years Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland had all adopted similar legislation on the Gypsy population. Less than a decade after the abolition of the legal category of ‘nomadic Gypsy’ – used during the Nazi occupation to facilitate the registration, internment, and in many cases deportation of Roma – the 1958 Law on the Permanent Settlement of Nomadic Persons reinstated identification cards for ‘nomads’ as well as prison sentences of between six months and three years for offenders. Yet the rhetorical focus on ‘nomadism’ obscured the important fact that the law was designed as much to control more banal forms of labour migration and mobility as traditional itinerancy. In contrast with Western European Roma and Sinti, only a tiny minority of Roma in East Central Europe travelled as a way of life by the late 1950s. Yet in Western Europe, anti-vagrancy laws that had been used to criminalise Roma as ‘asocial’ under Nazi rule remained in use throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Based on this logic, the West German Federal Court ruled in 1956 that the Nazi persecution of Gypsies had been aimed at ‘the prevention of criminality’, thus ruling out the possibility of compensation for Roma as victims of racial discrimination.96 Gypsies continued to be perceived as inherently asocial in Switzerland, West Germany, Austria, and France. The French law on ‘nomades’, dating from 1912 and used to identify Gypsies under Vichy, remained in use until 1969. In certain states of the Federal Republic, such as Bavaria, police continued to monitor Gypsies using information from the Landfahrerzentralen (Central Police Registers of Vagrants) dating from the National Socialist era.97 Until 1973 the Swiss Stiftung Pro Juventute cooperated with local government in certain cantons through the ‘Hilfswerk für die Kinder der Landstrasse’, which aimed to settle the traditionally itinerant Jenisch by removing their children, often at birth, and putting them into care homes or foster families.98 These continuities not only had consequences in everyday life but at the level of politics, particularly for Roma and Sinti seeking compensation as victims of Nazism.99 96 97 98

99

Julia von dem Knesebeck, The Roma Struggle for Compensation in Post-War Germany (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2011). Margalit, Germany and Its Gypsies. Walter Leimgruber et al., Das Hilfswerk für die Kinder der Landstrasse: Historische Studie aufgrund der Akten der Stiftung Pro Juventute im Schweizerischen Bundesarchiv (Berne: Schweizerisches Bundesarchiv, 1998); Thomas Meier, ‘Zigeunerpolitik und Zigeunerdiskurs in der Schweiz 1850–1970’, in Michael Zimmermann (ed.), Zwischen Erziehung und Vernichtun: Zigeunerpolitik und Zigeunerforschung im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2007); Désirée Corinne Hagmann, Kinder der Landstraße – ‘In gesundes Erdreich verpflanzt.’: Schicksal der Familie Waser-Schwarz (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2009). Knesebeck, The Roma Struggle.

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Freedom of movement became one of the central conflicts between Communist regimes and societies in East Central Europe during socialism.100 Foreign travel became an obsession for citizens as well as functionaries of the party-state, while emigration to the West became one of the major political questions facing the KSČ leadership.101 The ‘West’, to which Czechoslovaks had once perceived themselves as belonging, was forbidden territory after 1948. In comparison to citizens of East and West Germany, who were relatively free to cross the intra-German border during the 1950s, citizens of Czechoslovakia experienced the imposition of strict limits on foreign travel. In addition to passport and visa restrictions, a militarised border zone enclosed the entire country; the creation of the border was, however, the result of social practices as much as state domination.102 If the Soviet Union had briefly appeared as a beacon of liberation in the aftermath of Nazi occupation, Paulina Bren writes, enthusiasm for the East palled after the realities of Stalinist terror, and the West regained some of its seductive power as a place of consumerist freedom.103 Emigration to the West internationalised these social conflicts, and as recent histories have shown, Cold War conflicts between Communist and Western governments shaped the definition of the ‘deserving’ refugee in international law during the 1950s.104 The liberalisation of foreign travel in the mid-1960s not only provided opportunities for Roma to travel abroad but also reignited stereotypes about Gypsies’ involvement in black-market trading. In 1965 Czechoslovak citizens regained the right to apply for a passport to travel outside the Soviet bloc for private visits unconnected with their jobs. Restrictions on foreign currency remained in place, yet thousands of people were now able to see the West for themselves.105 Police in the borderland city of Ostrava reported a sharp increase in foreign travel among Roma and described this as ‘a new form of nomadism’.106 The Ostrava police 100

101 102 103

104

105 106

On the longer history of emigration from the Czech lands as a political question, see Tara Zahra, ‘Travel Agents on Trial: Policing Mobility in Late Imperial Austria’, Past and Present, 223 (May 2014), 161–193. Jan Rychlík, Cestování do ciziny v habsburské monarchii a v Československu: Pasová, vízová a výstěhovalecká politika 1848–1989 (Prague: ÚSD, 2012). Muriel Blaive and Libora Oates-Indruchová, ‘Border Visions and Border Regimes in Cold War Eastern Europe’, Journal of Contemporary History, 50:3 (2015), 656–659. Paulina Bren, ‘Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall . . . Is the West the Fairest of Them All?: Czechoslovak Normalization and Its (Dis)Contents’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 9:4 (Fall 2008), 831–854. Daniel Cohen, In War’s Wake; Peter Gatrell, Free World? The Campaign to Save the World’s Refugees, 1956–1963 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Bren, ‘Mirror, Mirror’, 835. ABS, f. H 1–4, inv. j. 826, fol. 1, Dodatek k situační zprávě KS SNB Ostrava.

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claimed that ‘persons of gypsy origin’ had been travelling abroad in growing numbers since the liberalisation of tourism with other socialist states. Poland was the most popular destination for Roma from Ostrava – unsurprisingly since the Polish border ran just past the city limits – but police claimed that Roma were also travelling to Hungary, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia. Since this was seen as ‘a new form of nomadism connected with criminal activities’, the VB had taken preventive measures, such as instructing the state travel agency Čedok not to issue Gypsies with travel documents and cooperating with the Polish security services to monitor criminal activities allegedly committed by Polish and Czech Roma, such as ‘the sale of fake dollar bills’.107 Most of the cases concerned Roma who had travelled to Yugoslavia via Hungary and Bulgaria and had been discovered after committing crimes. Foreign travel was perceived partly as a means of escaping conviction for crimes already committed in Czechoslovakia and partly as a way of pursuing illegal activities abroad before again crossing state borders to avoid detection. Admitting there was ‘no systematic overview’ of the crimes allegedly committed by Roma abroad, the Czechoslovak police asserted that ‘these incomplete observations show that we are clearly dealing with extensive and organised criminal activity.’108 The willingness of state authorities in the Soviet bloc to tolerate or encourage perceptions of ‘ethnic crime’ has been documented in the case of East Germany and Poland.109 During ‘normalisation’ the image of Roma as smugglers and traders in contraband, such as denim jeans and digital watches, would become a familiar part of Czechoslovak popular culture. The criminalisation of ‘nomadism’ thus had two main effects. First, the law forcibly settled Vlach and other traditionally itinerant Roma who had customarily travelled in extended family groups for at least five centuries, thereby preserving dialects, lifestyles, and identities that were distinct from those of settled Gypsies. But the anti-nomadism laws also affected far greater numbers of Roma migrant workers, villagers, and slum-dwellers who were categorised as asocial by local agents of the state, such as the uniformed police, local government officials, social workers, teachers, and health inspectors. The Gypsy Decree and Nomad Law were examples of the new legal categories used to calibrate and control petty forms of social deviance in everyday life in post-Stalinist East

107 109

108 ABS, f. H 1–4, inv. j. 826, fol. 2. ABS, f. H 1–4, inv. j. 826, fol. 3–7. Jonathan Zatlin, ‘Scarcity and Resentment: Economic Sources of Xenophobia in the GDR’, Central European History, 40:4 (2007), 683–720; Malgorzata Mazurek, ‘Morales de la Consommation en Pologne (1918–1989)’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 68:2 (2013), 499–527.

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Central Europe, such as ‘hooliganism’ (chuliganstvi, Rowdytum) and ‘parasitism’. Despite its emphasis on primitive backwardness, the Gypsy Decree was aimed less against traditional Romani lifestyles than very modern forms of alienation, which were not so much legacies of capitalism as products of socialist society itself. The use of legal and moral categories to define nonconformist behaviour as asocial signalled a shift in both the social realities and political responses to ‘minorities’ in state socialism, from ethnic minorities such as Czechoslovak Germans to the problem of ‘youth’ that dominated public debates during the 1960s.110

110

Duane Huegenin, ‘Les jeunes, l’Ouest et la police secrète tchécoslovaque: Immaturité ou diversion idéologique?’, Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’histoire, 109:1 (2011); Filip Pospíšil and Petr Blažek, Vraťte nám vlasy! První máničky, vlasatci a hippies v komunistickém Československu (Prague: Academia, 2010).

5

Into the 1960s Politics Gets Personal

A teenage Roma girl sits in a bathtub in a run-down shack while a portly trade union official, fully dressed, soaps down her naked body with a sponge. At the same time the man delivers a political speech. ‘Who is the new socialist person?’ he asks. ‘Me!’ replies the girl, her face covered in bubbles. The unsettling scene appears in Larks on a String, a provocative comedy made in 1969 by Jirˇí Menzel, a rising star of the Czech New Wave whose first feature film, Closely Observed Trains, won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1967. But Larks on a String was filmed in the uncertain months following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and was immediately banned, being released only after the Communist regime had collapsed.1 The film satirised the Stalinist terror of the 1950s by poking fun at the political re-education of a motley band of ‘bourgeois elements’ sentenced to hard labour at the Kladno steelworks. Caricatured representations of ‘wild’ Gypsies are used to mock the Communist regime’s obsession with social hygiene and discipline. Thus a prison guard marries a Gypsy woman, who makes a fire on the floor of their brand-new apartment, while the trade union official sneaks after Gypsy children, creepily brandishing a face cloth. By invoking sexualised Roma bodies as symbols of freedom in the face of Stalinist political repression, Larks on a String exemplifies a shift in the politics of the Gypsy Question by the late 1960s. As post-Stalinist regimes retreated from defining equality solely in terms of paid work, Roma were increasingly viewed not as workers and citizens but as objects of care.2 The perception that Gypsies were failing to integrate into socialist society drove planners, bureaucrats, and experts to develop new policies to combat poverty, unemployment, and social exclusion amongst Czechoslovak Roma during the 1960s. Informed by 1 2

Jirˇí Menzel, Larks on a String (Skrˇivánci na niti, 1969, released 1990). On the reformulation of welfare on the basis of ‘need’ in socialist Hungary, see Lynne Haney, Inventing the Needy: Gender and the Politics of Welfare in Hungary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

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deeply gendered assumptions about Gypsy culture and ethnicity, these included the revival of eugenic policies – in particular, the coercive sterilisation of ‘socially unadaptable’ Romani women – to control the ‘quality’ of the Gypsy population.3 As in Western Europe, Gypsies in socialist countries were frequently characterised as ‘deviant’ or belonging to ‘problem families’, whose needs required managing by medical, health, and welfare agencies. The social exclusion of the Gypsy population was medicalised and pathologised by doctors, social workers, educators, and public health experts.4 An increasing number of other social groups – such as abandoned children, the mentally ill, alcoholics, rebellious teenagers, and single mothers – were also categorised in euphemistic terms as ‘socially unadaptable people’ whose citizenship rights were reformulated as ‘needs’ to be managed by the socialist state.5 This tendency became more pronounced as socialist regimes retreated from the Stalinist insistence that a full employment economy would eliminate poverty and social inequality by turning all citizens into workers and socialising the unpaid labour of child-rearing and housework. In 1965, government officials introduced an ambitious new policy of resettling rural Gypsies in industrialised regions. But the resettlement programme, which is discussed in more detail later in this chapter, was a failure. Moreover, the scheme provoked criticism from Czechoslovakia’s leading critical cultural magazine, Literární noviny, demonstrating that utopian schemes of herculean social engineering had lost their grip on the socialist society of the 1960s. As Czechoslovakia edged towards the Prague Spring, a wider range of social actors – including writers, artists, activists, and social scientists – began to redefine the Gypsy Question as a litmus test for individual autonomy and civil rights in the socialist state. The discursive link between Romani bodies, individual autonomy, and citizenship rights has been central to international campaigns around the human rights of Roma in post-communist Europe, above all in claims about the forced or coerced sterilisation of Roma women. This was exemplified in Body and Soul: Forced Sterilization and Other Assaults on Roma Reproductive Freedom in Slovakia, a 2003 report produced by the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights in cooperation with 3 4

5

Věra Sokolová, Cultural Politics of Ethnicity: Discourses on Roma in Communist Czechoslovakia (Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2008). Eszter Varsa, ‘Child Protection, Residential Care and the "Gypsy Question” in Early State Socialist Hungary’, in Sabine Hering (ed.), Social Care Under State Socialism, 1945–1989: Ambitions, Ambiguities, and Mismanagement (Opladen: Barbara Budich, 2009), 149–159. Haney, Inventing the Needy.

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Poradnˇa, a Slovak advocacy organisation. Arguing that discrimination against Roma is ‘historically based’, the report claimed that policies of forced sterilisation under the Nazi regime were ‘continued during Communist times in Czechoslovakia, when Romani women were specifically targeted for sterilization through government laws and programs that provided monetary incentives and condoned misinformation and coercion’. The report concluded that Slovak government officials and health care providers continue to ‘openly condone attitudes and practices that violate the bodily integrity, health rights and human dignity of Romani women’.6 But communist-era sterilisation policies (which, unlike Nazi programmes, have been the main target of contemporary human rights campaigns in post-communist Europe) were not simply a continuation of Nazi policies. Nor were such practices specifically Communist, as demonstrated by the use of sterilisation as a eugenic measure targeting allegedly ‘asocial’ or ‘feeble-minded’ individuals (including Gypsies and Jenisch) in Scandinavia or Switzerland until at least the 1970s.7 Government programs targeting Roma women for sterilisation in Czechoslovakia, alongside housing and education programmes aimed at Gypsies deemed socially ‘unadaptable’, were developed in the context of changing – and contested – conceptions of social rights during the 1960s.

Social Rights and Private Life After the violence and arbitrary rule of Stalinism, citizens across the Eastern bloc were promised a whole range of expanded rights – to education, health, decent housing, rest and relaxation, and even limited ownership of private property.8 Socialist citizens enjoyed higher living standards, longer periods of leisure as a result of shortened working days and extended holidays, and a more robust sense of protection from the state.9 But at the same time, as a wealth of scholarship by historians of 6

7

8

9

Center for Reproductive Rights, Body and Soul: Forced Sterilization and Other Assaults on Roma Reproductive Freedom in Slovakia (New York: Center for Reproductive Rights, 2003). Gunnar Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen, Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1996); Thomas Huonker, Diagnose: Moralisch Defekt. Kastration, Sterilisation und Rassenhygiene im Dienst der Schweizer Sozialpolitik und Psychiatrie 1890–1970 (Zurich: Orell Füssli, 2003). Paul Betts, ‘Socialism, Social Rights, and Human Rights’, Humanity (Winter 2012); Mark B. Smith, ‘Social Rights in the Soviet Dictatorship: The Constitutional Right to Welfare from Stalin to Brezhnev’, Humanity (Winter 2012). Betts, ‘Socialism, Social Rights, and Human Rights’.

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gender and sexuality has shown, societies and states across East Central Europe were challenging the ideal of the worker-citizen as the sole bearer of those rights.10 As Barbara Havelková writes, policies towards women in Czechoslovakia during the 1960s marked a turn ‘from equality of paid work to care’.11 With birth rates declining at a precipitous rate, socialist governments refocused their attention on the protection of motherhood and the family to counteract the effects of women entering employment in massive numbers since World War II.12 The post-Stalin era saw the ideology of equality challenged by debates about ‘natural’ differences between men and women. Gender was thus central to the broader critiques of everyday life under socialist rule that emerged during the 1960s in the aftermath of public debates about the injustices of Stalinism, such as campaigns for the rehabilitation of victims of the Terror.13 Private life – the worlds of home, sexuality, and family – became a key site for struggles over the expanding range of social rights that Communist regimes, seeking legitimacy, offered their citizens in the wake of Stalinism.14 Social rights were a crucial battleground between reformists and conservatives within the Czechoslovak Communist Party during the 1960s.15 Yet this has often been neglected in scholarship on the movement for ‘socialism with a human face’, which has focused on the links between economic reform, cultural liberalisation, and political change culminating in the revival of ‘civil society’ during the Prague Spring of 1968. According to this narrative, the defeat of the Czechoslovak movement for a democratic socialism by Soviet tanks in August 1968 heralded an era of ‘normalised’ socialist rule, in which the Communist Party maintained 10

11

12 13

14 15

Malgorzata Fidelis, Women, Communism and Industrialization in Postwar Poland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Donna Harsch, Revenge of the Domestic: Women, the Family and Communism in the German Democratic Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Josie McLellan, Love in the Time of Communism: Intimacy and Sexuality in the GDR (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Shana Penn and Jill Massino, Gender Politics and Everyday Life in State Socialist Eastern and Central Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Barbara Havelková, ‘The Three Stages of Gender in Law’, in Hana Havelková and Libora Oates-Indruchová (eds.), The Politics of Gender Culture under State Socialism: An Expropriated Voice (London: Routledge, 2014). Haney, Inventing the Needy. See Paulina Bren, ‘Women on the Verge of Desire: Women, Work, and Consumption in Socialist Czechoslovakia,’, in David Crowley and Susan Reid (eds.), Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 177–195. The most eloquent exploration of this theme is Paul Betts, Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Tomasz Inglot, Welfare States in East Central Europe, 1919–2004 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

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control over the population by means of a social contract that promised material security and a quiet life in return for political quiescence. Social welfare, in this version of Czechoslovak history, thus appears as a handmaiden of political repression, clothed in a petty-bourgeois language of family values, consumerism, and peace of mind. But as this chapter shows, the welfare reforms of the 1970s actually originated in the years before the Prague Spring. In 1960, a new constitution declared the ČSR to be a ‘developed socialist state’ with an obligation to guarantee positive social rights to all citizens.16 The preamble stated that the destruction of capitalism had eliminated economic crisis and unemployment, along with the ‘exploitation of man by man’.17 At the same time, Czechoslovakia became the first state to codify the supremacy of the Communist Party in the constitution. Yet almost immediately the country experienced a severe and unexpected economic recession. At the start of the third Five Year Plan, this highly industrialised economy nearly collapsed. Although not the only factor, the economic crisis contributed to a sense among younger party functionaries that the new ‘all-people’s state’ should be more than a triumphalist device to suppress mass resistance but rather the start of a change in the way the country was governed.18 Rethinking the role of the all-people’s state prompted the emergence of new approaches to citizenship, previously dismissed as a bourgeois fallacy by Marxist thinkers. The new system of economic management, announced in 1965, proposed to give enterprises greater autonomy to plan production and boost productivity by incentivising workers through performance-related bonuses. Some reformers, especially Zdeněk Mlynár and Michal Lakatoš, recognised that economic reform would require a deeper rethinking of law and democracy.19 Revisionist Marxism provided an ideological underpinning for legal scholars who began to reconsider the relationship between the state and its citizens in a socialist democracy.20 In his 1964 essay State and Man the lawyer Mlynárˇ – who later drafted the political recommendations in the 1968 Action Programme – suggested that the idea of ‘man as citizen’ (or as a holder of

16 17 18 19 20

Zdeněk Jičínský, Právní myšlení v 60. letech a za normalizace (Prague: Prospektrum, 1992). Prohlášení, Ústava Československé socialistické republiky (11 July 1960). Kieran Williams, The Prague Spring and Its Aftermath: Czechoslovak Politics, 1968–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 16. H. Gordon Skilling, Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976). Michal Kopeček, Hledání ztraceného smyslu revoluce: Zrod a počátky marxistického revizionismu ve strˇední Evropě 1953–1960 (Prague: Argo, 2009).

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equal and natural rights) might be a necessary stage on the path towards the final negation of citizenship under Communism. A year later the Slovak legal scholar Michal Lakatoš provided one of the earliest theoretical formulations of a socialist society based on conflicting interests, not only different relationships to the production process but also ‘natural’ differences such as ethnic origins or gender.21 As the socialist regime began to question the assumption that integrating Roma into paid employment would turn ‘Gypsies’ into fully assimilated worker-citizens, questions of natural or ‘biological’ difference re-entered officials’ vocabulary. Across Eastern Europe, as the anthropologist Michael Stewart writes, ‘the Gypsies became proletarian and yet stayed Rom.’22 Recalling the gendered dynamics of modernising welfare states across Europe, socialist governments displayed a revived interest in regulating the private sphere of Romani family life. Romani culture, rather than the legacies of capitalism, was once again seen as the major obstacle to assimilation. Thousands of Roma were still living in isolated settlements in rural Slovakia, officials noted, while in the Czech lands migrant Roma tended to form close-knit communities in cities and towns. Party officials fretted about the continuing residential segregation of Gypsies, which they saw as a major barrier to integration. Women, in particular, became the main target of criticism. A report submitted to the Politburo by Slovak Communist Party officials in 1961 blamed the unfinished process of integration on ‘Gypsy women, their frequent pregnancies, tendency to laziness, and unwillingness to work’.23 The ‘protection’ of Romani children from the allegedly corrupting influence of their families exemplified the care and coercion exercised by the socialist welfare state over the private lives of Romani citizens. A semi-official practice of placing Roma children in schools for children with special educational needs was a central pillar of the state’s assimilation policy. In 1958, the Education Ministry issued a directive instructing head teachers and National Committees to place ‘neglected’ Gypsy children with a history of absenteeism and truancy in separate schools or classrooms for ‘young people requiring special care’. However, the directive warned, under no circumstances were such schools to be marked with the sign ‘For Gypsy Children’. The ministry further 21

22 23

Michal Lakatoš, ‘On Certain Problems of the Management of Our Political System’, Pravny Obzor, 48:1 (1965), 26–35, cited in Galia Golan, The Czechoslovak Reform Movement: Communism in Crisis, 1962–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). Michael Stewart, The Time of the Gypsies (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997), 138. NA, AÚV KSČ, f. 02/2, sv. 331, a.j. 422/10: Politické byro Ústrˇedního výboru KSČ: Plnění usnesení ÚV KSČ o práci mezi cikánským obyvatelstevm, 14 December 1961.

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instructed schoolteachers and local officials to prosecute the parents of Gypsy children who were persistently absent from school, by either imposing criminal sanctions under the Law on the Protection of Youth or placing the children in care by a decision of the court. Further directives were issued in 1961 and 1963. Pedagogical handbooks focusing on the education of Gypsy children continued to speak of the need to raise ‘new people’.24 The decision to place a Gypsy child in a ‘special school’ was made by psychologists on the basis of IQ tests that were strongly reliant on cultural knowledge. Insufficient knowledge of the Czech language, in particular, was frequently used as a reason. The cultural rights of Roma were reframed as social problems during socialist rule, above all concerning the status of the Romani language. This was partly a legacy of the national traditions of the interwar years when, as we have seen, the cultural rights of minorities were interpreted as collective rights belonging to national communities rather than individual human rights. The nation, as Tara Zahra writes, became the privileged liberal subject in interwar Czechoslovakia, and individuals lost the right to freely choose their nationality. By the 1960s, the socialist government had granted limited cultural rights to speakers of German, Hungarian, and Polish, but Gypsies continued to be defined as a ‘backwards ethnic group’ rather than a nation. Romani was dismissed as a dialect or cant, and Roma children who spoke Czech or Slovak imperfectly were frequently assigned to separate classrooms or schools for children with special educational needs.25 Official policy refused to acknowledge the existence of a Romani language that could potentially support Roma claims to nationhood. In fact the survival of Romani, not as a relic of primitive society but as a language being used in everyday life, was tacitly acknowledged by the KSČ Ideological Committee when it commissioned a Handbook of the Gypsy Language [Prˇíručka cikánštiny] from an academic philologist, Jirˇí Lípa, in late 1959. Local activists in Slovakia had already experimented with cyclostyle ‘Gypsy-Slovak’ dictionaries, but this handbook, which appeared in 1963, was the first to be published by a state publishing house.26 It aimed ‘to familiarise non-Gypsies, at least passively, with the basics of the most widespread dialects of Czechoslovak Gypsy groups 24 25 26

Vladimír Predmerský, Rastú nám noví ľudia.: Problémy výchovy detí cigánskeho pôvodu (Bratislava: Slovenské pedagogické nakladatelství, 1961). Iulias Rostas, Ten Years After. ŠOBA Košice, f. Vsl. KNV, (1960–1969), Komisia Vsl. KNV pre cigánske obyvateľstvo, kart.7, sp. 47, Alfabetizátor. Bulletin pre MNV, OZ, ZDS, ZV-ROH o práci medzi občan. cig. pôvodu, March 1965, vydal Okr. Osvetový dom v Bardejove, p. 8 – refers to ‘the first cyclostyle “‘Slovak-Gypsy”’ dictionary’ produced in 1958 by J. Novák and A. Sivák.

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from the area of Humenné in eastern Slovakia’.27 Jirˇí Lípa had started to research Romani dialects in Slovakia as a student in 1949. The idea of recognising Romani as a language rather than a collection of dialects – and by extension recognising the Gypsies as a nationality – seemed to be anathema to Lípa. At the 1953 conference of Gypsy activists at the Oriental Institute, Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Lípa had strongly criticised efforts by activists such as Karel Holubec to claim cultural rights for the Roma. Holubec later reported to the KSČ that ‘the philologist Dr. Lípa claimed that under socialism the conditions for creating a literary language for this minority don’t exist (!) and that there are only gypsy dialects, and spoke strongly against using the Gypsy language in basic political and health education (!!).’28 That a Romani grammar and dictionary – even if aimed only at teachers and policemen – was deemed necessary by KSČ ideologists indicated that the Romani language could not simply be dismissed as ‘jargon’ or ‘thieves’ cant’, as party ideologists had done in a manner reminiscent of a nineteenth-century criminologist. According to Marxist linguistics, the author of The Gypsy Question in the ČSSR stated, cikánština ‘has no future as an independent language’.29 In practice, however, matters were not so simple. A heated row broke out between the Ideological Committee, the Academy of Sciences, the state publishing house for pedagogical literature, and the Education Ministry about the correct form the ‘Gypsy language handbook’ should take. Otakar Zeman, the party ideologist responsible for policy on the Gypsy Question, had commissioned Jirˇí Lípa – then working at the Czech Language Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences – to write a ‘popular handbook’ on the Gypsy language’ for ‘non-linguists’.30 The book was to include three Gypsy dialects: ‘Czecho-Slovak’, ‘Hungarian’, and ‘Vlach’. Two years later, Dr Lípa was outraged to be told by the publisher that his seven-hundred-page manuscript did not meet the requirements of either brevity or accessibility.31 Moreover, the academicians became irritated when Eva Bacíková, the indefatigable and long-serving Education Ministry official, tried to turn Lípa’s ‘handbook’

27 28 29 30 31

Jirˇí Lípa, Prˇíručka cikánštiny (Prahague,: SPN, 1963). NA Praha, AÚV KSČ, f. 05/3, sv 36, a.j. 295: Letter from Holubec to J. Köhler, Secretary of ÚV KSČ, 23 May 1954. Jaroslav Sus, Cikánská otázka v ČSSR (Prague: Státní nakladatelství politické literatury, 1961), 32. NA Praha, AÚV KSČ, f. 05/3, sv 36, a.j. 296: Letter from Jirˇí Lípa to Otakar Zeman, 21 December 1962. NA Praha, AÚV KSČ, f. 05/3, sv 36, a.j. 296: Letter from Jirˇí Lípa to Otakar Zeman, 21 December 1962.

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into a ‘textbook’.32 Fuming, Dr Lípa wrote a furious letter to Otakar Zeman in which he accused the publisher and Bacíková of ‘demagoguery’ and voiced a suspicion that their doubts about the viability of his weighty tome were not only related to practical problems caused by ‘the current paper shortage’ but also ‘might be connected to their interest in publishing a dilettantish Gypsy Language Textbook by M. Hübschmannová’.33 The battle over Dr Lípa’s ‘Gypsy language handbook’ was not, of course, purely academic. While the academicians asserted that the handbook should merely aid a passive understanding of Romani dialects, Eva Bacíková seems to have argued that a ‘textbook’ for the active use of Romani was needed instead. The head of the Institute for Czech Language, Professor Bohuslav Havránek, claimed that this was nonsense. ‘Almost no-one is going to study the Gypsy language in the same way as Spanish, for example,’ he objected in a letter to Zeman. Jirˇí Lípa was even more explicit. The handbook should answer practical needs, he explained: ‘This becomes clear when we consider how most people will use my handbook. Someone who knows nothing about the Gypsy language – a teacher, for example, or a member of the police force [SNB] – will hear some Gypsy word and will want to understand what it means.’ For this purpose, Lípa continued, a dictionary and a grammar would suffice. Lípa warned that publishing a textbook would ‘give the impression that we are putting emphasis on non-Gypsies learning the Gypsy language’. For Lípa this idea was apparently so ludicrous that it required no further qualification. Finally, still smarting under the indignity of having to cut his voluminous draft to a paltry 150 pages because of the paper shortage, Lípa retorted that a textbook – far from being more economical than his lengthy grammar – would actually be a complete ‘waste of paper’.34 The desegregation of school education for Romani children has become a feature of human rights campaigns in post-communist Europe. A 2007 ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in the case of D. H. v. Czech Republic found that Roma children in Ostrava had suffered from indirect discrimination on the grounds that they were placed in ‘special schools’ rather than mainstream elementary schools. Such cases are interpreted as evidence of racial discrimination against Roma. 32

33 34

NA Praha, ÚV KSČ, f. 05/3, sv. 36 a.j. 296. Letter from Bohuslav Havránek, Director of Czech Language Institute, Czechslovak Academy of Sciences, to Eva Bacíková and Otakar Zeman, 28 February 1962. NA Praha, AÚV KSČ, f. 05/3, sv. 36 a.j. 296. Letter from Jirˇí Lípa to Otakar Zeman, 11 March 1962. NA Praha, AÚV KSČ, f. 05/3, sv. 36 a.j. 296. Letter from Jirˇí Lípa to Otakar Zeman, 11 March 1962.

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The practice of segregated schooling immediately suggests a comparison with the United States before the era of civil rights; lawyers such as Jack Greenberg, who as head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund litigated school desegregation cases including Brown v. Board of Education, have advocated for Roma in cases of school desegregation in post-communist Europe.35 A much-cited article by Greenberg draws a clear parallel between the histories of Roma in Eastern Europe and African Americans, both turning on experiences of slavery and persecution. For the purposes of this chapter, however, Greenberg’s essay is more relevant as evidence of the transnational circulation of civil rights movements during the Cold War and the translation of notions such as ‘racial discrimination’ in the process. The legal backgrounds to the cases of Brown and D. H. v. Czech Republic were, as Greenberg notes, very different. In the United States, state laws mandated the creation of separate schools for black and white students, while in the Czech Republic, the European Court of Human Rights was trying to enforce the implementation of laws that already existed. The tension between official discourses of equality in Communist Czechoslovakia and cultural constructions of racial difference has been brilliantly explored by Věra Sokolová.36 Yet the official ideology of equality was itself undergoing a significant transformation during the 1960s. Official refusal to treat Romani as a language rather than a dialect or cant was rooted in Czech-Slovak traditions of ‘national’ culture and had clear parallels with the treatment of other minority languages in nationalising states throughout Europe. Yet the reformulation of Roma culture as a ‘social problem’ was reinforced by social scientists and experts in the fields of social welfare and health, who insistently framed Roma culture in terms of deviant social behaviour.37 By the mid-1960s, debates about the social rights of Roma citizens – to education, decent housing, and health – saw a marked change from the earlier emphasis on equality in paid work and citizenship. Gendered assumptions about the private lives of Roma and in particular the role of ‘Gypsy women’ as a barrier to assimilation shaped a new set of policies that redefined Roma as objects of care within the socialist state. By law, Roma were equal citizens, but as 35

36 37

Jack Greenberg, ‘Report on Roma Education Today: From Slavery to Segregation and Beyond’, Columbia Law Review, 110:4 (May 2010); see also Iulias Rostas (ed.), Ten Years After: A History of Roma School Desegregation in Central and Eastern Europe (Budapest: Roma Education Fund and Central European University Press, 2012). Sokolová, Cultural Politics of Ethnicity. Vladimír Srb and Olga Vomáčková, ‘Cikáni v Československu v roce 1968’, Demografie (1969), 221–230.

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Věra Sokolová has written, social scientists and experts in the fields of social welfare, education, and health pathologised Gypsy culture and ethnicity as deviant. However, both the socialist state and society recognised that the time for radical social engineering had passed.

Managing the Gypsy Population The KSČ adopted a new policy on the Gypsy Question in 1965, ahead of the Thirteenth Party Congress, for which major reports on social problems, such as youth, had also been prepared. A Government Committee for Questions Relating to the Gypsy Population was established. The State Statistical Office was instructed to collect statistics on the number of Roma in each district and found that more than 220,000 ‘Gypsies’ were living in Czechoslovakia, the fourth largest Roma population in socialist Europe after Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. At the first meeting of the new committee in October 1965, KSČ functionary Otakar Zeman proudly declared that ‘No other country in the world has such a high-level governmental body devoted to solving the gypsy question.’ Composed of planners, ministry officials, prosecutors, the trade unions, and the youth organisation, the committee was also given a budget of Kč 75 million. Zeman claimed that Western countries were fascinated by the Czechoslovak approach, adding that ‘our methods serve as a model for other countries in the socialist camp. The gypsy question and its solution is a global problem’.38 Functionaries in the Central Committee were certainly keeping an eye on developments in the West. In June 1965, leading party ideologist Jirˇí Hendrych reported that a ‘World Gypsy Society’ had been established in Montreuil, France, and was aiming to unite ‘the “roma people” [sic] with the rest of the population across borders, race, class and religion because – they say – “we are all brothers on the earth”’.39 This referred to the Communauté Mondiale Gitane, founded that year by Ionel Rotaru, a Romanian émigré in France, which was the forerunner to the Comité International Tsigane. (The committee was banned in France in 1965, but the KSČ report did not mention this.) Hendrych’s report also noted that the Catholic Church was taking a greater interest in the problem of ‘nomads’ and that the Papal Consistorial 38 39

ŠoBA Košice, f. Vsl. KNV, kart 9, sp. 10: Komisia Vsl. KNV pre cigánské obyvateľstvo: Zápis z jednání Vládního výboru pro otázky cikánského obyvatelstva dne 18. prosince 1965. NA Praha, AÚV KSČ f. 01/1, sv. 110, a.j. 114/4: Prˇedsedníctvo ÚV KSČ: Kontrolní zpráva o plnění usnesení ÚV KSČ o práci mezi cikánským obyvatelstvem v ČSSR, 15 June 1965.

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Congregation had issued instructions on ‘adapting religious ceremonies to the psychology of gypsy populations’. Pope John Paul VI had created an international secretariat for the pastoral care of nomadic peoples within the Consistorial Congregation in 1965. Regional and local Committees for Work Among the Gypsy Population were established across the country and staffed by National Committee officials, as well as volunteers. Otto Ulč, a young judge from Plzenˇ who volunteered to join his local Gypsy Committee, claimed in his memoirs that this position was just one of many voluntary roles he was expected to perform. Writing from the vantage point of exile in the United States after 1968, Ulč remembered his work on the Gypsy Committee as time-consuming, pointless, and frustrating.40 ‘Anyone with any stake in society had to be “involved”’, wrote Ulč. While Ulč’s émigré perspective suggests that volunteering during socialism was not an authentic expression of ‘civil society’, research by Czech sociologists on practices of volunteering reveals a more complex picture, highlighting the social meaning of participation in collective social work, such as participation in labour brigades or Action Z.41 Romani activists, meanwhile, had to tread a fine line between voluntary work and activities that might be construed as supporting Romani nationalism. When Gustáv Karika wrote to Otakar Zeman, the party functionary responsible for Gypsy affairs, asking how he could apply for a position in the new committee, he was rebuffed. An impersonal note from the Ideological Committee informed Karika that ‘submitting an application for this position is pointless. This is not an administrative role but a political function, for which applications are not accepted.’42 This was partly the result of a broader shift away from mass agitation and ideological work, as the Czechoslovak regime instead embraced a less militant concept of ‘cultural and educational work’ with socialist citizens.43 Local party activists who happened to be of Roma origin, however, were obliged to defend themselves against more specific charges of ‘Gypsiology’, which implied politically disloyal Roma nationalism. Thus a member of one regional branch of the Gypsy Committees, who

40 41 42

43

Otto Ulč, The Judge in a Communist State: A View from Within (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1972), 54. Tereza Pospíšilová, ‘Dobrovolnictví v České republice prˇed rokem 1989: Diskurzy, definice, aktualizace,’, Sociologický časopis, 2011, vo. 47:, no. 5 (2011), 887–910. NA Praha, AÚV KSČ, f. 05/3, sv 37, a.j. 301: Z materiálů s. Zemana k otázce Němců, cikánů, mládeže, k mezinárodním vztáhem: Letter from GK to Zeman, Ideological Committee, 29 June 1964. Martin Franc and Jirˇí Knapík, Volný čas v českých zemích 1957–1967 (Prague: Academia, 2013), 71.

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apparently was accused of ‘Gypsiology’ in his work to improve the social conditions of Roma in western Slovakia, retorted in a letter to the Central Committee that he was simply trying to ‘uproot citizens of gypsy origin from the inhuman environment in which most of them live, so that they can live like people and become useful to society, rather than being a burden’.44 Yet reports compiled by the State Security (StB) about Milena Hübschmannová, who would become the leading activist on behalf of Romani culture in Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring, reveal that her interest in ‘Gypsies’ was not yet seen as politically subversive. In the early 1960s, when she was working for Czechoslovak Radio, the StB attempted to recruit Hübschmannová as an informer on the ‘former bourgeois resistance’, whom the regime suspected of trying to sabotage the socialist economy.45 The young woman was viewed as a potential agent because she knew foreign languages and had contacts with the ‘bourgeoisie’, either those who had emigrated or those in Czechoslovakia. Despite her own ‘petty bourgeois’ class origins, the StB believed that Hübschmannová was ‘devoted’ to socialism and had displayed no signs of ‘intellectual liberalism’.46 The StB official assigned to recruit Hübschmannová described her as ‘an intelligent woman’ who was ‘courteous, polite, good-natured and sociable’, ‘principled and serious’. Her attempt to enter the Foreign Ministry as an interpreter in 1956 had failed because of her father’s past. Interviewed by an StB agent, Hübschmannová explained her father had been a lawyer who was interned in 1942 in the Svatoborˇice concentration camp. After the war he was freed but lived estranged from his family outside Prague, having been forced into manual labour in the Kladno mines, and then as a technician for the state railways in Prague. Tactically – and perhaps also truthfully – Hübschmannová claimed that poverty and the absence of her father at home led her to seek ‘a collective outside the family’. She began studying Hindi and Bengali at the age of fifteen and in 1951 entered Charles University to study Indian languages, literature, and journalism. Her StB file presented her work with Roma as an issue of marginal interest, proof only that she was a good socialist citizen who ‘studied the Gypsy language and . . . collected songs and fairytales.’47 44 45 46 47

NA Praha, AÚV KSČ, f. 05/3, sv. 36, a.j. 297: Letter from JK to ÚV KSS, 9 December 1964. ÚSTR ČR, 565307 MV: MV – Osobní svazek spolupracovníka – Krycí jméno MILENA – registrovano u I. zvláštního odb. MV č sv 12210. ÚSTR ČR, 565307 MV: MV – Osobní svazek spolupracovníka – Krycí jméno MILENA – registrovano u I. zvláštního odb. MV č sv 12210. Ibid.

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Debates about economic reform, however, threatened to politicise the Roma question in new ways. Government officials worried about the consequences of the New Economic Model for unskilled Roma workers, especially in Slovakia. There was already widespread concern within the Communist Party about the socially destablising effects of planned reforms. In March 1966 the Central Committee discussed public opinion surveys that registered strong dissatisfaction with the perceived decline in living standards over the past five years.48 Wages were still rising, but consumers were unable to satisfy their demand for goods, and there was a widespread perception that Czechoslovakia was lagging behind the West. Since the legitimacy of the party-state was tied to its promise of delivering higher living standards, party officials worried that citizens’ dissatisfaction would spill over into political unrest.49 A policy paper on the ‘Main Aspects of Social Policy’ in early 1966 defined social policy as a crucial means of ensuring that economic reform did not endanger social security. The report proposed larger contributions from citizens to finance subsidised services, in particular crèches and kindergartens, school meals, and the provision of cultural goods.50 With the introduction of self-management looming, officials suggested that companies should receive subsidies to employ Roma and set up separate schools for their children.51 Contemporary reports were full of complaints about illiteracy, low qualifications, job-hopping, and absenteeism among Roma workers. A 1966 sociological survey of nine hundred Roma workers in eastern Slovakia found a disproportionately high number in unskilled or semi-skilled jobs as bricklayers, electricians and tractor drivers on cooperative farms. More than half were living in dormitories, thus travelling for work and probably able to visit their families once a week at most. Workers were forced to move because permanent jobs in local agriculture or forestry in eastern Slovakia were scarce; most companies preferred to keep a fairly small permanent labour force, supplemented by large numbers of casual labourers in the spring and summer to plant trees or cut the hay. Seasonal agricultural labour, mostly performed by women and teenagers, was correspondingly low

48

49 50 51

Jirˇí Kocian, ‘Soziale Aspekte der Wirtschaftsreform in der Tschechoslowakei in den sechziger Jahren’, in Christoph Boyer (ed.), Sozialistische Wirtschaftsreformen: Tschechoslowakei und DDR im Vergleich (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2006), 477–500. Kocian, ‘Soziale Aspekte der Wirtschaftsreform’, 490; Karel Kaplan, Korˇený československé reformy 1968 (Brno: Doplněk, 2002). Kaplan, Korˇeny, 20–21. Anna Jurová, Vývoj rómskej problematiky na Slovensku po roku 1945 (Bratislava: Goldpress, 1993), 81.

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paid. Officials assumed that practices such as job-hopping were proof of social ‘unadaptability’. In fact, the opposite was true. High-status families in the Roma villages studied by British sociologist Will Guy were the ones who migrated first to the Czech lands and later became the first co-op workers. ‘The most highly motivated Gypsies were constantly watching for better opportunities and made tremendous sacrifices to attain their goals.’52 The new Government Committee for Questions Relating to the Gypsy Population worried that under the new system of economic management, it would be impossible ‘simply to force enterprises to employ these people’.53 Yet officials worried that positive discrimination towards Gypsies would be unconstitutional. Considering the possibility of amending Law 74 on Nomadic Persons for this purpose, one bureaucrat declared that ‘we cannot interpret the Constitution that strictly and juristically . . . I still say that the proposed measures are not unconstitutional.’54 Officials fretted that it was ‘annoying that we are afraid of saying openly that we are trying to solve the gypsy problem’. Once again, grumbled another, ‘they tell us to create sanctions in some camouflaged form, when what we really need is to tell these people openly how they should behave, if they don’t want to face criminal charges’.55 The Government Committee for the Gypsy Population introduced a new administrative classification that divided Gypsies into three groups according to ‘objective indicators’ of social ‘adaptability’ (prˇizpůsobivost).56 The 1958 party resolution had loosely categorised the Roma as ‘settled, semi-settled or nomadic’, but with the exception of ‘nomadic’ Gypsies – who had been targeted by the Law on the Permanent Settlement of Nomadic Persons – these categories were not used by the state administration. National Committees were henceforth instructed to collect statistics on Roma regarding their assimilation into socialist society.57 Government guidelines for classifying Roma assumed that ‘lifestyle’ was an objective factor ‘influencing and accelerating the differentiation process among the Gypsies themselves’. Statistics on the Gypsy population were supposed to accelerate assimilation, enabling 52 53 54 56

57

Will Guy, ‘The Attempt of Socialist Czechoslovakia to Assimilate Its Gypsy Population’ (Bristol: PhD dissertation, University of Bristol, 1977), 496. ABS, f. H 1–4, inv. 762, sv. 1: Zápis z meziresortní porady konané dne 7. rˇíjna 1966. 55 Ibid. Ibid. ŠoBA Košice, f. Vsl. KNV, 1960–1969, Komisia Vsl. KNV pre cigánské obyvateľstvo, č. kart. 9, č. sp. 10, Hlavní směry k rˇešení cikánského obyvatelstva (výtah z referátu prvního zasedání Vládního výboru). ŠoBA Košice, f. Vsl. KNV, 1960–1969, Komisia Vsl. KNV pre cigánské obyvateľstvo, č. kart. 9, č. sp. 10, Úkoly KNV, ONV k zajištění a rozpracování směrnice ÚV KSČ a vládního usnesení č. 502/1965.

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the state to ‘capture the [integration] process at a certain point, abstract from it and express it, by dividing the Gypsies into groups according to their levels of development and then finding the most effective solution for each group’.58 The rhetoric used to define ‘unadaptable’ Gypsies, as Věra Sokolová has written, institutionalised the cognitive union that already seemed to exist in the minds of many government officials between Roma ethnicity, social deviance, and the disorderly ‘Gypsy family’.59 National Committees were required to use these categories when collecting statistics on the Gypsy population. Crimes committed by ‘Gypsies’ (unlike any other ethnic or national group) were included in the national police statistics.60 Demographers at the State Statistical Office launched nationwide statistical surveys of the ‘Gypsy population’, classified as Category I, II, and III: ‘advanced, most adaptable and most backward’. Echoing Nazi rhetoric, the official definition of Category III Gypsies implied that moral ‘degeneracy’ was breeding ‘chronically sick individuals, retards and invalids who don’t even seek treatment because they make a living from their illness without having to work’. Category III Gypsies were described as ‘living in filth, producing parasites and criminals’, working irregularly if at all, and refusing to send their children to school. The Gypsy Committee warned that all the ‘instruments that our society and legal order has at its disposal’ should be used to assimilate these Gypsies, including ‘coercive measures’ used for crimes such as ‘parasitism, disturbances of public order, and theft’. Moreover, the Gypsy Committee recommended removing Gypsy children from their parents, and placing them in state institutions.61 Policies that promised to ‘protect’ Romani children from the allegedly corrupting influence of their families, based on concerns about the quality as well as the quantity of the Gypsy population, recalled older nationalist debates about protecting the health of the nation.

58

59 60

61

ŠoBA Košice, f. Vsl. KNV, 1960–1969, Komisia Vsl. KNV pre cigánské obyvateľstvo, č. kart. 9, č. sp. 10, Hlavní směry k rˇešení cikánského obyvatelstva (výtah z referátu prvního zasedání Vládního výboru). Sokolová, Cultural Politics of Ethnicity. ŠoBA Košice, f. Vsl. KNV, 1961–1969, Komisia Vsl. KNV pre cigánske obyvateľstvo, č kart 10, sp. 93, Ministerstvo vnitra, Hlávni správa VB, Vyhodnocení úcinnosti právních norem z hlediska zkušenosti VB, dotýkajících se cikánské problematiky. Zpráva podává: plk. Jindrˇích Thon, náměstek MV, náčelník HSVB, člen Vládního výboru pro rˇešení cikánské otázky, Praha, červen 1966. ŠoBA Košice, f. Vsl. KNV, 1960–1969, Komisia Vsl. KNV pre cigánské obyvateľstvo, č. kart. 9, č. sp. 10, Hlavní směry k rˇešení cikánského obyvatelstva (výtah z referátu prvního zasedání Vládního výboru).

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Resettlement The centrepiece of the 1965 KSČ programme to ‘solve the Gypsy question’ was a nationwide programme to ‘liquidate undesirable concentrations of gypsies’ – if necessary by demolishing Roma villages and resettling their inhabitants in distant parts of the country. The scheme envisaged a large-scale ‘transfer’ of Slovak Roma to the Czech lands.62 National Committees were supposed to agree to quotas of unemployed Roma for resettlement to Bohemia and Moravia, where they would be provided with jobs and homes. In May 1967 the state set an incredibly ambitious target of re-housing nearly half the 120,000 Roma allegedly living in ‘unhygienic’ dwellings. Roma neighbourhoods were presented as a breeding ground for ‘backwardness’ and the ‘greatest obstacle to the re-education of the gypsy population’.63 National Committee officials responsible for administering the scheme were instructed that only Roma in Category II – ‘demonstrably trying to adopt the basic conditions for a more cultured way of life’ – were eligible for resettlement. Regional inequalities were, once again, a significant factor leading to the introduction of the scheme. Senior officials in the Communist Party of Slovakia (KSS) had been lobbying for an ‘organised’ resettlement of Roma to the Czech lands since 1958, when the KSČ pledged to accelerate the industrialisation of the Eastern Slovak Region.64 In late 1961, KSS First Secretary Karol Bacílek circulated a photograph album of Gypsy settlements to the Politburo to shock senior officials into action.65 The black-and-white images showed dilapidated wooden shacks in scrubland, disintegrating caravans (their wheels having been removed by the police), and ragged, dirty children – flatly contradicting the party’s promise of eradicating poverty and material want. Taken from a distance and at odd angles, presumably by police or government officials, the photographs were accompanied by sarcastic captions: an 62

63 64

65

ŠoBA Košice, f. Vsl. KNV, Komisia Vsl. KNV pre cig. obyvateľsto, kart. 8, sp. 109: Zásady pro org. rozptylu a prˇesunu cikánského obyvatelstva za účelem likvidace nežádoucích cik. soustrˇedění ve smylsu usnesení strany a vlády. NA Praha, AÚV KSČ f. 02/2, sv. 331, a.j. 422/10: Politické byro Ústrˇedního výboru KSČ: Plnění usnesení ÚV KSČ o práci mezi cikánským obyvatelstvem, 14 December 1961. On Karol Bacílek and contemporary politics in Slovakia, see Jan Pešek, Slovensko v rokoch 1953–1957: Kapitoly z politického vývoja (Brno: Edice Krize komunistického systému v Československu 1953–1957 svazek 4, Prius / USD AV CR, 2001); Jan Pešek et al., Aktéri jednej éry na Slovensku 1948–1989: personifikáia politického vývoja (Prešov: Vydavateľstvo Michala Vaška, 2003); Jan Pešek, Slovensko na prelome 50. a 60. rokov: Politicko-mocenské aspekty vývoja (Brno: Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, 2005). NA Praha, f. ÚV KSČ, 02/2, sv. 331, a.j.422/10: Politické býro Ústrˇedního výboru KSČ, Plnění usnesení ÚV KSČ o práci mezi cikánským obvyvatelstvem, Annex IV: Fotodokumentace z cikánských osad, 14 December 1961.

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Figure 5.1. Roma in Kendice, eastern Slovakia, 1960. Photographer: Eva Davidová. From the Gypsy Lore Society Collections, University of Liverpool Special Collections and Archives.

image of a Roma family seated around a campfire was labelled ‘The family of Eliáš Kotlár, waiting for lunch. They cook on the ground, even though they have an oven at home.’66 The KSS report complained vehemently about the social problems caused by the 1,400 Gypsy settlements in Slovakia, of which more than half allegedly lacked basic amenities and posed – according to senior communists – a serious threat to public health.67 The resettlement scheme was launched in a spirit of optimism about the capacity of technocratic planning to achieve social progress. National Committees were keen to reflect this in their reports to central government. Functionaries from the Czech industrial town of Prˇerov, for instance, highlighted the bureaucratic efficiency of their visit to Bardejov in Slovakia to select suitable Gypsy families: ‘They photographed the families, obtained all the necessary information and arranged the method

66 67

Ibid. NA Praha, AÚV KSČ f. 02/2, sv. 331, a.j. 422/10: Politické byro Ústrˇedního výboru KSČ: Plnění usnesení ÚV KSČ o práci mezi cikánským obyvatelstvem, 14 December 1961.

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Figure 5.2. Exhibition of photographs by Eva Davidová entitled Gypsies yesterday, today and tomorrow, Košice, Czechoslovakia, 1962. Photographer: Eva Davidová. From the Gypsy Lore Society Collections, University of Liverpool Special Collections and Archives.

and the date of the transfer.’68 In 1966, the Gypsy Committee for eastern Slovakia commissioned the local museum in Košice to produce a set of documentary photographs as a ‘historical document and as technical guidance when liquidating the settlements, and as proof that government funds are being used properly’.69 National Committee reports frequently contained hand-drawn plans of Gypsy settlements, such as the one produced by the Michalovce National Committee for the planned liquidation of the Čolaková settlement, with individual houses represented by small boxes, each marked down for demolition at a certain date.70 These reports continually emphasised the non-stop stream of cultural activities, 68 69

70

Report cited in Guy, ‘The Attempt of Socialist Czechoslovakia’, 280. ŠObA Košice, f. Vsl. KNV, 1960–1969, Komisia Vsl. KNV pre cigánské obyvateľstvo (KCO), kart. 10, sp. 84: Návrh na presun finančných prostriedkov do Východoslovenského múzea v Košiciach pre zabezbečenie fotodokumentácie osad vo Vsl. Kraji, 16 May 1966. ŠObA Košice, f. Vsl. KNV, Komisia Vsl. KCO, kart. 4, sp. 31: Komisia pre riešenie otázok spoluobčanov cig. Pôvodu pri rade ONV v Michalovciach: Plan likvidacie cig. Čolákovej osade v Michalovciach, 29 November 1964.

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public health programmes, and building work that National Committees were supporting in the settlements.71 Yet in practice, resettlement was not implemented according to plan. Initially Roma in rural Slovakia greeted the programme with enthusiasm. In Spišská Nová Ves, a small town in north-eastern Slovakia, the district National Committee reported ‘crowds of Gypsies (40 to 50 people)’ visiting the secretary of the Gypsy Committee every day in the early months of 1966. But local officials complained that the situation was ‘utterly confused’.72 Research carried out by Will Guy in the 1970s and confirmed by the archives of the Eastern Slovak Gypsy Committee revealed ‘urgent and recurring problems – often related to difficulties in obtaining and procuring accommodation’.73 In private, members of the national Gypsy Committee in Prague recognised that housing shortages and the system for allocating apartments put National Committees in charge of re-housing Roma in an impossible situation. Housing was divided into state-owned, company-owned, cooperative, and private sectors. One official summed up the problem: empty flats in the state housing fund were ‘mostly slated for demolition’, cooperatives were not able to build enough flats to meet the demand, and although they had little information about the ‘number of works flats, we’ll be lucky if we can get one flat in a hundred for a gypsy family’.74 Self-help seemed the only solution, yet subsidising the construction of family houses was deemed too costly. Within months, the resettlement programme seemed to be collapsing in chaos. Harassed regional officials were filing exasperated reports to Prague. The chairman of the Gypsy Committee in eastern Slovakia, with the largest number of Gypsy settlements, reported that Roma were taking matters into their own hands by demolishing their huts and presenting themselves at the nearest National Committee, claiming they had nowhere to live.75 Officials also worried that the original idea of paying compensation in cash to Roma for the ‘liquidation’ of their houses would encourage speculation and thus suggested that future payments should be made into blocked accounts that could be used only to buy building materials and furniture.76 On the other hand, there were also reports that

71 72 73 74 75

See the ten cartons of reports in the archives of the Eastern Slovak Gypsy Committee, f. Vsl. KNV (1960–1969), KCO, ŠObA Košice. Report cited in Guy, ‘The Attempt of Socialist Czechoslovakia’, 278. Guy, ‘The Attempt of Socialist Czechoslovakia’, 278. ABS, f. H 1–4, inv. j. 562, sv. 1: Zápis z jednání Vládního výboru pro otázky cikánského obyvatelstva dne 16.6.1966. 76 Ibid. Ibid.

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local National Committees were using the Resettlement Programme as licence to evict Roma from their homes. The ethnographer Eva Davidová warned the Central Committee in a letter dated January 1966 that ‘incorrect’ approaches to resettlement on the part of local National Committees were spreading panic among Gypsies in eastern Slovakia.77 This particularly concerned Vlach Roma who had recently been banned from travelling. A government official had threatened one ‘formerly nomadic’ Vlach family, now living in a large family house near Prešov, that he would ‘send them to the Czech lands – “to the Sudetenland” – as the Gypsies still call it’.78 Terrified, the family had decided to sell their television and all their furniture. Davidová claimed that Roma from other areas in eastern Slovakia had also reported ‘similar fears of “forced” movement’.79 Complaints that reached officials working for the Committee to Solve the Questions of the Gypsy Population in Košice, the region with the largest Roma population in the country, provide an insight into the ways in which individuals negotiated resettlement and administrative categories of ‘Gypsiness’. Roma judged too assimilated were not eligible for the scheme, for example. Thus a worker from Košice was refused housing assistance under the scheme when he moved with his family to Pardubice. Mr V. was deemed so assimilated that he no longer counted as a Gypsy: ‘He is a fully civilised citizen and therefore this case cannot be classified as a Gypsy problem.’ As a good worker, party member, and trade union member, the council claimed, Mr V. had moved to the Czech lands ‘simply because he liked it there’ and had been unable to build a house in his native district near Košice on ‘health grounds’ because of its proximity to the Eastern Slovak Steelworks. ‘If we had more Gypsies like him,’ the official concluded rather tautologically, ‘we would be solving the problems of other people than the Gypsies.’80 Conflicts also emerged when officials attempted to prevent Romani families from living near each other.81 The 1965 government resolution had claimed that ‘dispersing’ the Gypsy population would overcome their isolation from society by breaking up ‘disorderly’ Gypsy families. 77

78 80

81

ŠObA Košice, f. Vsl KNV (1960–1969) KCO, kart. 9, sp. 26. Eva Turčínová-Davidová to ÚV KSČ: Upozornění na některé nesprávnosti současného rˇešení cikánské otázky v praxi (námět). 79 Ibid. Ibid. ŠoBA Košice, f. Vsl. KNV, 1960–1969, KCO kart. 19. Complaint letter from JV., 7 March 1967, and reply from the Commission for the Gypsy Population, 10 March 1967. ŠOBA Košice, f. Vsl. KNV, 1960–1969, Komisia Vsl. KNV pre cigánske obyvateľstvo, č. kart. 19: Vládní výbor pro otázky cikánského obyvatelstva, ‘Dopis AA., Sečovce, okres Trebišov’22 August 1967.

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For Romani communities, however, this could represent the loss of deeply important social and emotional connections. Mr A., for example, was refused permission to buy a house on the main street in a village in the Magyar-speaking borderlands of south-eastern Slovakia because local officials claimed this would result in an ‘undesirable concentration of Gypsies’. This referred to the fact that five Roma families were already living on the street where the man wished to buy a house. The council was adamant that no more ‘large Gypsy families’ should move into this street, where the houses were ‘already marked down for liquidation’. Nor was Andrej A. allowed to move in with his brother or buy a house from him: ‘The local national committee gave your brother permission [to buy a house] on the condition that he would live properly, like other people, not so that another 10 people should move in with him.’ Mr A. was told that he could buy a house elsewhere in the village but not on the main street where his brother lived. ‘I didn’t make the law,’ the committee secretary wrote to the man, ‘but we have to make sure that we don’t end up with big concentrations of gypsy citizens. Our task is to disperse them.’82 Roma often wanted to move to a particular town not only because employment prospects and living conditions were better, but because they had relatives living there.83 Where government officials saw an ‘undesirable concentration’ of Gypsies, men like Mr A. saw an extended family, able to provide invaluable support networks in everyday life. This was also illustrated by the case of Mr B., who sold his home to the Rožnˇava National Committee after a state-owned forestry company in Bohemia recruited him as a contract labourer. The man stayed on after the contract expired, even though he had only a temporary residence permit. He was finally awarded permanent residence status in the area after finding a job with the State Forestry Administration, which provided him with a company flat. However, after two months he stopped going to work, claiming his family allowances had not been paid. In response, his employer claimed Mr B. had lost his legal right to benefits because he had so often been absent from work. For the next two months the man did not go to work at all, and the company evicted him from his apartment. The man then moved in with his extended family in a nearby town, and officials claimed he was living off the proceeds of the sale of his house in Slovakia. Using the excuse that neither Mr B. nor his twenty-six family members had permanent 82

83

ŠOBA Košice, f. Vsl. KNV, 1960–1969, Komisia Vsl. KNV pre cigánske obyvateľstvo, č. kart. 19, Vsl. KNV v Košiciach, Komisia pre cigánske obyvateľstvo, ‘O.A., Stˇažnostˇ na MsNV’ 5 September 1967. Guy, ‘The Attempt of Socialist Czechoslovakia’, 311.

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residence rights in the district, the local National Committee paid for their railway tickets and sent them back to Rožnˇava. A recently widowed woman from Ľubeník was refused a state-owned flat in autumn 1968 on the grounds that she and her husband had already benefitted from the resettlement scheme three years earlier. Officials claimed that the family was ‘disorderly’ (neporiadný) and always causing fights: ‘Last year they beat up a policeman so badly that he had to go to hospital. They walk around with razorblades in their pockets.’84 Yet the reasons for the family’s ‘disorderly’ conduct seemed clearer when the report continued: ‘The citizens of Ľubeník want to kick them out of the municipality and have already gone after them with petrol, saying they were going to set them alight. They were only stopped when the National Committee Chairman intervened.’ The state had purchased the woman’s house in 1965 and allocated land on which to build a new home, allowing them to use material from the old house, ‘even though it was already state property’. After the family rejected the plot, the National Committee ‘allocated the land to a white citizen [emphasis added]’. Officials claimed the woman’s husband had sold the building materials and ‘drank the money’ he got for his house, but then contradicted this assertion by acknowledging that the widow had used at least some of the proceeds to help her sons build their own houses in the same municipality. ‘She writes that she’s living in a wooden hut? Well, she doesn’t have to live there . . . Her son has a big house nearby with an empty room . . . Not one of them wants to take in their own mother. I don’t know who is supposed to help her if her own sons won’t.’85 Local officials were frequently unwilling to grant permission to Roma to build houses in the main village. One female claimant was finally allocated a plot of land after a two-year battle between the regional, district, and local National Committees responsible for her case. Demand for building plots massively outstripped supply in Naciná Ves near Michalovce, but the Košice Gypsy Commission judged Mrs T. as ‘a person of gypsy origin living at a very proper (slušný) level’ and accused local officials of foot-dragging: ‘This is a premeditated and unjustified refusal to provide assistance for individual housing construction which – aside from the fact that, in this case, it also helps solve the gypsy problem – is one of the main forms of housing construction in Slovakia and is

84 85

ŠOBA Košice, f. Vsl. KNV, 1960–1969, Komisia Vsl. KNV pre cigánske obyvateľstvo, č. kart. 19, Vsl. KNV v Košiciach, Komisia pre cigánske obyvateľstvo. ŠOBA Košice, f. Vsl. KNV, 1960–1969, Komisia Vsl. KNV pre cigánske obyvateľstvo, č. kart. 19, Vsl. KNV v Košiciach, Komisia pre cigánske obyvateľstvo: ONV Rožnˇava: Objasnenie situácie MS v Ľubeník, 27 September 1968.

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thus supported by the state.’ Finally the Naciná Ves MNV found a solution, granting Mrs T. and her husband the right to build a family home on a piece of land apparently expropriated from a Jewish family. Officials described the land as ‘an abandoned plot: the owner is in Israel, or perhaps is no longer alive’.86 A dispute among the tenants of an apartment block in Košice showed how rumours about the ‘dispersal’ of Gypsies by government decree could be used in personal feuds among neighbours. In early 1966 Ján S., a tenant in the block, lodged a complaint against a Roma family for violating the principles of socialist coexistence by spreading ‘dirt’ around the whole house, screaming, and abusing the other inhabitants. Appealing directly to the Government Resolution of 1965, Comrade S. claimed that the authorities had ‘no right’ to move a Gypsy family into the block because ‘the directives say that gypsy families have to be dispersed to big blocks on the edge of towns. Now they make up almost half of the people living in our block’.87 After investigating the complaint, the local government Gypsy Committee reported that this Roma family were definitely not ‘in the category of backward Gypsies’, as an official visit had revealed that ‘their flat was kept in order, the parents are employed and the children go to school.’88 Apart from some dust, the female committee secretary noted, ‘there was no dirt on the stairs or in the courtyard as comrade S. wrote in his complaint.’ The real problem, she continued, was the ‘other tenants’ general hostility to the gypsies, despite the fact that there are far worse white families living in the block, where the head of the family is constantly drunk and rowdy’.89 Conflicts over resettlement also revealed the thriving second economy – usually labelled by officials as ‘speculation’ or ‘parasitism’ – that existed in parallel with the official socialist economy in rural Slovakia. ‘Speculation’ conjured up visions of capitalist exploitation or the thievery and shady deals stereotypically associated with Gypsies in folk tradition, but the reality was often more prosaic. Mrs L., a middle-aged Roma woman from Prešov, was accused of ‘speculation’ by the Košice local council after it was discovered that she owned three small properties in Prešov: one house which she part-owned with a relative, another house which she had bought illegally and which remained registered in the 86

87

88

ŠOBA Košice, f. Vsl. KNV, 1960–1969, Komisia Vsl. KNV pre cigánske obyvateľstvo, č. kart. 19, Vsl. KNV v Košiciach, Komisia pre cigánske obyvateľstvo: Mária T., Nacina Ves – stˇažnostˇ ve veci stavebného pozemku, 26 January 1968. ŠOBA Košice, f. Vsl. KNV, 1960–1969, Komisia Vsl. KNV pre cigánske obyvateľstvo, kart. 9, sp. 57, Komisia Vsl. KNV pre cigánske obyvateľstvo: Súdruh J.S.– Stˇažnostˇ, February 1966. 89 Ibid. Ibid.

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previous owner’s name, and an empty plot of land. Mrs L. was unmasked as a ‘speculator’ after she complained to her local Communist Party representative that the local council had stopped her from buying a house from another resident. When the KSS asked for an explanation, the council explained that the woman had been evicted from her previous home when it was ‘liquidated’. Having received her compensation, the woman then refused to buy the three-room house that she was offered by the council, claiming that she no longer wished to live with her partner. Suspecting that ‘speculation’ was her real motive, the council in turn refused to allow Mrs L. to buy the bigger house that she had chosen herself. The council believed that the enterprising woman was planning to sell part of this new house to ‘another Gypsy’. Further investigations dredged up more details about Mrs L.’s apparently shady and speculative past. It emerged that she had been prosecuted on six occasions for ‘infringing the principles of socialist coexistence’ and ‘illegal trading’. Her sister-in-law testified to the police that she, her husband, and Mrs L. herself had ‘travelled through the villages during the summer and autumn of 1965, when religious pilgrimages and other celebrations were taking place, selling sweets and small factory-made goods supplied by Mrs L.’s lover. They also sold such goods around Giraltovce and Bardejov.’ Finally, the local council passed judgement on Mrs L.’s case: ‘I do not see this as a gypsy problem, in the sense that she is a fully civilised person, and uses her [gypsy] origin in a calculated way.’90 In this case, a person of Gypsy origin had managed to speculate her way to ‘civilisation’. Within a few years, the government quietly wound up the resettlement scheme. Conceived as a way of providing ‘adaptable’ Gypsies with employment and a home in a different part of the country, the scheme could not overcome the broader structural problems of regional inequality. In many cases, Slovak Gypsies were offered homes in rural parts of Bohemia and Moravia, which were suffering from shortages in the agricultural labour force due to poor working conditions and low wages. As Will Guy wrote, ‘Gypsies, therefore, were expected to take up the jobs and houses of Czechs who had left the farms for the factories but understandably the Gypsies, too, preferred the better pay of urban areas – a fact which central government and local authorities seemed unable

90

ŠOBA Košice, f. Vsl. KNV, 1960–1969, Komisia Vsl. KNV pre cigánske obyvateľstvo, č. kart. 19, Vsl. KNV v Košiciach, Komisia pre cigánske obyvateľstvo, ‘Vec: I.L., vyjadrenie k stˇažnosti’ 8 March 1968, also Rada MsNV v Prešove, Uznesenie z 92. schôdze, 13.1.1968 ‘K stˇažnosti I.L. proti MsNV Prešov vo veci kúpy domu’, and MsNV v Prešove, Odbor pre vnútorné veci, 24 January 1968, ‘I.L., Prešov: priestupková činnostˇ.’

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to appreciate.’ Evaluating the programme in 1969, Labour Ministry officials noted that ‘gypsy families mainly want to live in towns, where the housing situation is also most critical.’91 In the longer term, a 1967 reform of Czechoslovak agriculture would provide greater opportunities for rural Slovak Roma by allowing collective farms to set up in business as subcontractors for construction work, recruiting gangs of labourers to travel on contract work all over the republic. Will Guy suggested the cooperatives had a significant effect on the Gypsy Question, for not only did many Roma join co-op units – which were compensated for long hours and difficult working conditions by extremely high piece-rate work and bonuses – but the Roma unions formed in 1968 were also permitted to operate a similar cooperative scheme.92

Child Protection, Eugenics, and Sterilisation The failure of the resettlement scheme leads to one of the most controversial chapters in the history of Roma under state socialism: the revival of eugenics as a social policy measure aimed at ‘deviant’ Gypsies. The history of sterilisation in the Third Reich, where Gypsies had been targeted on racial grounds, cast a long shadow over debates about regulating the fertility of Roma women.93 For a regime committed to eliminating discrimination on the basis of race, the notion that a eugenics policy should target – or be seen to target – an ethnic group was anathema. There were, however, older national traditions of supporting eugenic measures as a solution to social problems. Eugenic research was institutionalised in Prague as early as 1913, and Czech scientists were at the forefront of eugenics in East Central Europe during the 1920s.94 A Czechoslovak Institute for National Eugenics was established in 1924, and a Czech Eugenics Society was revived after the liberation and shut down in 1952.95 Eugenic ideas, however, continued to 91 92 93

94

95

NA Praha, MPSV, inv. č. 8820, 1969, uncatalogued: MPSV, Odbor sociálních služeb: Zpráva o současném stavu rˇešení otázek cikánského obyvatelstva v ČSR, 2 December 1969. Will Guy, The Attempt of Socialist Czechoslovakia, 310, 312. Hansjörg Riechert, Im Schatten von Auschwitz: Die nationalsozialistische Sterilisationspolitik gegenüber Sinti und Roma (Münster and New York: Waxmann, 1995); Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986). Marius Turda (ed.), The History of East-Central European Eugenics, 1900-1945: Sources and Commentaries (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Jan Janko, ‘K eugenickému hnutí v českých zemích’, Dějiny věd a techniky, 30 (1997), 4. Jan Janko and Emilie Těšínská (eds.), Technokracie v Českých zemích (1900 – 1950) (Prague: Archiv AV ČR a Institut základů vzdělanosti, společné pracoviště a AV ČR, Studie z dějin techniky, sv. 3, 1999).

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influence policies on social welfare and public health.96 Personal connections played a role here: the anthropologist Helena Malá, who conducted research on Roma children in the 1960s, was the daughter of Jirˇí Malý, a leading anthropologist and eugenicist during the First Republic. The connections between older traditions of anthropology and eugenics were in evidence in a large research project launched by Helena Malá on the physical anthropology and biology of Roma children at the Charles University in Prague in 1961.97 Focused overwhelmingly on the physical and psychological development of Roma children, these studies revived older traditions of explaining Romani cultural and social identities in terms of biological difference.98 Similarly, after the Law on the Permanent Settlement of Nomads was adopted in 1958, a doctoral student at the Comenius University in Bratislava conducted an anthropological study of one hundred young men enrolled in a special course for ‘recruits of gypsy origin’ during their compulsory military service. This study aimed to measure the legal category of ‘formerly nomadic person’ against the anthropological characteristics of Vlach Roma.99 Later the results of this study were published as a popular textbook entitled The Gypsies Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.100 The educational theories of the Soviet pedagogue I. A. Kairov, who focused on genetic factors as well as the social environment, also influenced Czechoslovak debates. In the Soviet Union, eugenic ideas continued to influence social policy, notably Stalin-era policies on abortion.101 In 1965 a debate about eugenics and heredity among prominent

96

97 98

99 100 101

Janko, ‘K eugenickému hnutí’, 4; see also Marius Turda and Paul Weindling, Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe (Budapest: CEU Press, 2007); Marius Turda, Christian Promitzer, and Sevasti Trubeta (eds.), Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe to 1945 (Budapest: CEU Press, 2011). Jaroslav Suchý, Vývojová antropologie obyvatelstva ČSR (Prague: Sborník Pedagogické Fakulty UK Praha, 1972). Helena Malá, ‘Současný stav antropologického výzkumu cikánských dětí v ČSSR,’, Čs. Paed., 9, (1977); Jaroslav Suchý, Jak se mění člověk.: Základy vývojové antropologie (Prague: Socialistická Akademie, 1972); Helena Malá and Jaroslav Suchý, Speciální príprava učitelů pro práci s cikánskými školními dětmi (Prague: Socialistická Akademie, 1979). Josef Novaček, ‘Potrˇebují naší pomoci’ (‘They need our help’), Lidová armada, 19, (1962), 1354–1363. Josef Novaček, Cikáni včera, dnes a zítra (Prague: Socialistická Akademie, 1968). Nikolai Kremenstov, ‘Eugenics in Russia and the Soviet Union,’, in Alison Bashford and Phillippa Levine, (eds.), Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (Oxford: Oxford University Press:, 2010); Mark B Adams (ed.), The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil and Russia (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

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Czech biologists, geneticists, paediatricians, and members of the State Population Commission and the Czechoslovak Women’s Union was published in Věda a život (Science and Life), a popular science journal.102 The possibility of sterilising women with hereditary diseases and ‘feebleminded’ women was raised, and although few of the scientists supported the idea, this debate shows that at least the idea was being discussed in public. A historian of policy towards the disabled in Communist Czechoslovakia suggests that this debate was inspired by a crisis in the underfunded, overstretched system of institutional care for orphans, pensioners, and the disabled and more broadly, by the ideological dogma of the 1950s that the ‘problem’ of the mentally and physically handicapped would simply disappear under socialism.103 The idea of offering material incentives to Romani women to undergo sterilisation emerged in the context of broader changes in family planning and population policy in Czechoslovakia. Sterilisation was not encouraged as a method of birth control on the grounds that it was ‘unnatural’ with a potentially negative impact on a woman’s personality, notes the sociologist Alena Heitlinger, but it was permitted for women with medical problems and those past their prime reproductive years (thirty-five and over). Abortion was decriminalised in December 1957 but remained a medicalised and arduous process. An estimated one in three pregnancies was aborted in Czechoslovakia, a much lower figure than in the Soviet Union (where the annual number of abortions substantially exceeded that of live births), but also in Hungary, where legal abortions also exceeded births from 1959 to 1973.104 Czech-produced contraceptive pills and intrauterine devices (IUDs) became available in the mid-1960s but were subjected to periodic shortages, like other consumer goods.105 Moreover, research by the State Population Commission in the 1960s on the sexual life of young married couples showed that more than half the women and a quarter of the men considered their sex education insufficient. By 1977 a survey showed that 30 per cent of women in the cities and 45 per cent in rural areas had no knowledge of contraception at all; half of Slovak women aged eighteen to forty-four used coitus interruptus as the main method

102 103

104 105

‘Diskuse o problémech lidské genetiky a eugeniky’, Věda a život, 3 (1965), 129–150. Boris Titzl, ‘Politika totalitního (totalitárního) režimu vůči zdravotně postiženým občanům”, in Helena Nosková et al. (eds.), K problémům menšin v Československu v letech 1945–1989, Sborník studií (Prague: ÚSD AV ČR, 2005), 21–55. Alena Heitlinger, Reproduction, Medicine and the Socialist State (London, Macmillan, 1987), 152. Heitlinger, Reproduction, Medicine and the Socialist State 135.

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of birth control.106 Such reports suggest that the attitudes towards contraception and sexuality that officials criticised among the Roma were widespread among the majority population, especially in rural and religious areas. Public debates about motherhood and women’s status in the decade of reform were shaken up further by a controversial 1963 study by child psychologists and pediatricians that sharply criticised the effects of institutional child care, especially children’s homes and week-nurseries, on the psychological well-being of children.107 These studies also pointed out that Roma children were over-represented in orphanages and children’s homes. State provision of child protection had expanded massively after 1948, while fostering was practically abolished, with the result that most children taken into care were placed in state-run institutions. Moreover, the vast expansion of family and child benefits and institutionalised welfare – from kindergartens and crèches to orphanages and asylums – had provided a whole range of opportunities for women to share the burden of responsibility for their families with the state. In response to these wider debates, officials in the KSČ Presidium instructed the Central Council of Trade Unions (ÚRO) to draft a regulation imposing harsher penalties on parents who neglected the interests of their children in the context of a larger review of policy towards the Gypsy population in June 1965.108 The ensuing Law on Child Neglect (Zákon o některých důsledcích zanedbávání péče o děti) enabled National Committees to stop child benefit payments in cases of prolonged truancy or if the child’s guardians were suspected of using the money for the ‘wrong’ reasons.109 Internal reports by trade unions and government officials made clear that the ‘gypsy population’ was the main target of the law, although like the 1958 Law on the Permanent Settlement of Nomadic Persons, the published text made no explicit reference to ethnicity. An internal ÚRO report of August 1965 described the law as ‘a tool to improve school attendance and general upbringing, especially 106 107

108

109

Both cited in Heitlinger, Reproduction, 136–137. Josef Langmeier, and Zdeněk Matějček, Psychická deprivace v dětství (Prague: Státní pedagogické nakladatelství, 1963); on the longer history of debates about children, the nation, and the family, see Tara Zahra, The Lost Children.: Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); and Michal Shapira, The War Inside.: Psychoanalysis, Total War and the Making of the Democratic Self in Postwar Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). NA Praha, AÚV KSČ f. 02/1, sv. 110, a.j. 114, bod. 4. Prˇedsedníctvo ÚV KSČ: Kontrolní zpráva o plnění usnesení ÚV KSČ o práci mezi cikánským obyvatelstvem v ČSSR, 4 June 1965. Zákon č. 117 ze dne 15. prosince 1966 o některých důsledcích zanedbávání péče o děti.

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among the gypsy population’.110 Government reports to the Committee for the Gypsy Population claimed that truancy was ‘most common’ among the Gypsy population, ‘even though these children are the ones who need continuous, intensive education and upbringing more than any others’.111 Officials alleged that Roma were ‘speculating’ with child benefits and hoped the law would prevent this practice by allowing National Committees to make payments in kind rather than cash, while punishing parents who abandoned their infants in state homes.112 In 1966, the State Agency for Social Security (Státní úrˇad sociálního zabezpečení, SÚSZ) suggested that IUDs could be distributed free of charge to Roma who fell into the category of ‘socially weak’ citizens. The suggestion was included in a report on the contribution of the social security agencies to ‘solving the Gypsy Question’. The SÚSZ asserted that during the 1950s, ‘gypsies often resisted desperately when their children were taken away to institutions. Today the situation has been reversed: often they themselves ask these institutions to look after their children.’ Repeating the conclusions frequently made by medical doctors, social hygienists, and pedagogues, the SÚSZ claimed that Roma poverty was caused by deficient ‘socio-psychological ideas about good housekeeping, and the continuation of (deformed) ideas from their traditionally nomadic, or at least unstable, lifestyle’.113 Citing a recent State Population Commission proposal to distribute IUDs free of charge to ‘socially weak’ citizens, the SÚSZ specified that the Gypsy population – ‘which certainly falls within this [weak] social group’ should also receive free contraception. But when the Government Gypsy Committee discussed the SÚSZ report, members concluded that it would be premature to speak of providing certain forms of contraception specifically to Roma. One official claimed it would encourage black-market trading. More intrusive interventions were demanded in an April 1967 proposal on ‘regulating the fertility’ of Roma in eastern Slovakia, submitted by the government Gypsy Committee in Košice.114 Basing their arguments on 110

111 112 113 114

ŠObA Košice, f. Vsl. KNV, 1960–1969, KCO, kart. 8, sp. 92: ÚRO: Návrh zákonného opatrˇení prˇedsedníctvo Národního shromaždění o některých důsledcích prˇi neplnění povinné školní docházky – prˇípomínkové rˇízení, 5 August 1965; emphasis added. ŠObA Košice, f. Vsl. KNV, Komisia Vsl. KNV pre cigánske obyvateľstvo, kart. 8, sp. 9: Zmocenec rady Vsl. KNV pre riešenie otázek obč. cig. pôvodov, 26 August 1965. ABS, f. H 1–4, inv. j. 762, sv. 1, fol. 5-16, Zápis z jednání Vládního výboru pro otázky cikánského obyvatelstva dne 28. brˇezna 1966. ŠObA Košice, f. Vsl. KNV, kart. 9, sp. 43: Státní úrˇad sociálního zabezpečení: Podíl orgánů sociálního zabezpečení na rˇešení cikánské otázky, 28 February 1966. ŠObA Košice, f. Vsl. KNV, kart. 15, sp. 83: Komisia Vsl. KNV pre cigánske obyvateľstvo: Podklady k rokovaniu o populácii cigánskeho obyvateľstva vo Východnoslovenskom kraji a návrhy na reguláciu pôrodnosti, 19 April 1967.

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population quality rather than quantity, officials argued that the Gypsy population was growing faster than the majority, especially in Categories II and III. The report claimed that ‘undesirable’ population growth was most visible among alcoholics, the mentally retarded, tuberculosis carriers, recidivists, underage girls, parasites, and Category III families who were using their children ‘primarily as a source of income’. Proposals included compulsory gynaecological examinations of teenage Roma girls in the settlements every two months, followed by the compulsory fitting of IUDs, cost-free abortions for Gypsy women after their third child, placing all disabled children in institutions, and compulsory abortions for all ‘diseased’ (infected with tuberculosis or sexually transmitted diseases) Gypsy women with four or more children. Such proposals were not confined to confidential government reports. In October 1967 the chairman of the Košice Gypsy Committee told Obrana Lidu – the army newspaper – that a ‘degenerate’ population of ‘rowdies, recidivists, vagrants and prostitutes’ was emerging from Slovakia’s ‘gypsy hovels’. The solution? At least in part, ‘planned parenthood’ – including ‘regular examinations of Gypsy girls from the age of 12 or 13’. Was it humane, the newspaper asked, ‘to allow psychologically damaged people to conceive degenerate offspring without love?’115 In a report on ‘limiting the undesirable population amongst Gypsies’, Slovak Health Ministry officials explicitly suggested that a ‘more flexible’ policy on sterilisation could help limit ‘undesirable’ reproduction among ‘asocials and those with a lower mental level, when all other methods of persuasion have been unsuccessful’.116 Teenage mothers and women with many children were singled out as factors contributing to the Roma birth rate rising at twice that of the ‘average Slovak’. The report alleged that Roma women rarely used contraception, that abortion was potentially harmful to a woman’s health, and that sterilisation offered the ‘radical’ solution that was ‘urgently’ needed. Although controversial in a socialist state committed to guaranteeing the racial and ethnic equality of its citizens, proposals to regulate the fertility of Roma women deemed ‘asocial’ were later included into the first draft of a Czech Labour Ministry report on Roma in late 1969. In 1969, officials at the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs drafted a report on the implementation of Gypsy population policy 115 116

‘O cigánoch s porozumením, ale nie sentimentálne,’ Obrana lidu, 14 October 1967, no. 41, p. 9. ŠObA Košice, f. Vsl KNV v Košiciach, KCO, kart. 19, sp. 95: Povereníctvo SNR pre zdravotníctvo: Správa o probléme obmedzovania nežiaducej populácie u cigánského obyvateľstva – Materiál na rokovanie Komisie Predsedníctvo SNR pre otázky cigánskeho obyvateľstva na Slovensku (Bratislava, November 1968).

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that included statements about high birth rates among ‘socially pathological’ Roma creating ‘negative effects, including a deterioriation in the quality of the gypsy population itself and of the population as a whole (regarding the proportion of the gypsies in relation to the total population) and the deterioration of the social, economic, and cultural level of gypsy families themselves’.117 The Labour Ministry report asked if ‘society should have to support large families who do not provide their children with security or a satisfactory upbringing’ and whether ‘it would not be more effective for society to provide a financial allowance or material incentive for the use of contraception or sterilisation’. This proposal to offer material incentives for sterilisation was the most controversial aspect of the report, which was circulated to representatives of the trade unions, government ministries, the Academy of Sciences, and social organisations, including the Unions of Gypsies-Roma. In their responses, officials recognised that coercive sterilisation was an infringement of the civil rights of Roma citizens, although this was not necessarily seen as a reason for dismissing the idea. The Trade Unions representative recommended deleting references to sterilisation because ‘the gypsies are extremely sensitive about such things, not to mention that sterilization is tightly regulated under current legislation, which means that the desired results would still not be achieved.’118 Officials at the Ministry of Health warned that ‘limiting population growth amongst socially pathological groups of Gypsies is an intervention into citizens’ rights with far-reaching consequences, especially in political terms’, especially at a moment when the new Union of Gypsies-Roma was calling for recognition of Roma as a national minority ‘with all the rights that such a status entails’.119 Thus the Health Ministry argued that the decision to limit the fertility of ‘socially weak and psychologically defective gypsy families should be issued by the highest state authorities in the form of relevant legal norms’. Eugenic measures to limit population growth amongst Roma could be introduced only if this did not entail ‘an unjustified intervention into

117

118

119

NA Praha, Ministerstvo práci a socialní věci, f. MPSV 1969–1970, inv. č. 8820, uncatalogued: Zpráva o současném stavu rˇešení otázek cikánského obyvatelstva v ČSR, 2 December 1969; emphasis added. NA Praha, Ministerstvo práci a socialní věci, f. MPSV 1969–1970, inv. č. 8820, uncatalogued: ROH to MPSV, Zpráva o současném stavu rˇešení otázek cikánského obyvatelstva v ČSR. NA Praha, Ministerstvo práci a socialní věci, f. MPSV 1969–1970, inv. č. 8820, uncatalogued: Comments from Ministry of Health on Zpráva o současném stavu rˇešení otázek cikánského obyvatelstva v ČSR.

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citizens’ rights’, the Ministry of Justice agreed.120 Yet in support of a proposed revision to the Act on Health Care, officials from the legal department suggested the Danish sterilisation law of 1935 as a model, since it provided state authorities with ‘the right to submit a request for sterilization of a person of unsound mind if it is in the public interest’. Labour Ministry officials also supported a revision of the Act on Health Care to permit ‘voluntary sterilization in socially pathological gypsy families with the possibility of offering material incentives to women and men when such an intervention is desirable for society as a whole’.121 References to improving ‘the quality of the population’ in ‘the interests of society’ were also made by Labour Ministry officials in a proposal to distribute contraception to Roma women in the form of ‘social benefits’. In addition to legislative measures, ministry officials emphasised that local health care workers should be instructed to persuade Roma women to apply for sterilisation. The timing of the Labour Ministry report was important, since it was drafted at a moment when the liberalisation of the Prague Spring meant the report was circulated to activists outside the official structures of power. Milena Hübschmannová and Eva Davidová received the report in their new capacity as researchers at the Academy of Sciences. Their reply noted that the report did not define the term ‘social pathology’, that ‘social pathology’ could not be equated with mental handicap (debilita), and that in any case society had no right to limit population growth, even amongst the mentally ill. Framing their criticism carefully, Hübschmannová and Davidová took issue with the subjective interpretation of ‘social pathology’ that would render any possible sterilisation decree a means of intervening in the reproductive rights of any Roma woman. They also called for ‘Roma’ to be used instead of ‘gypsy’ or at least for ‘gypsy’ to be written with a capital G to underline that the term referred to an ethnic group.122 Subsequent revisions to the Labour Ministry report suggest that officials took some of this criticism seriously. Sterilisation was deleted from the final version submitted to the Central Committee in August 1970 but not the references to the ‘population explosion’, the 120

121

122

NA Praha, Ministerstvo práci a socialní věci, f. MPSV 1969–1970, inv. č. 8820, uncatalogued: Response of Ministerstvo spravedlnosti – rˇeditel legislativního odboru to Zpráva o současném stavu rˇešení otázek cikánského obyvatelstva. NA Praha, Ministerstvo práci a socialní věci, f. MPSV 1969–1970, inv. č. 8820, uncatalogued. Comments from Department for the Elderly, Invalids and Institutional Care on Zpráva o současném stavu rˇešení otázek cikánského obyvatelstva. NA Praha, Ministerstvo práci a socialní věci, f. MPSV 1969–1970, inv. č. 8820, uncatalogued: Československá akademie věd – sociologický ústav – reply based on the material from Milena Hübschmannová and Eva Turčínová-Davidová to Zpráva o současném stavu rˇešení otázek cikánského obyvatelstva

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‘deterioration’ in population quality, or the proposal to offer ‘financial and material incentives for families to use contraception in their own interest and the interest of society’.123

Towards 1968: The Politics of Marginality By the late 1960s, Czechoslovak society was shaken to the core by a mass movement to democratise socialism in a Communist regime that had been one of the most conservative in the Soviet bloc. The next chapter will explore the carnivalesque months of the Prague Spring and what this meant for Roma. Before this, however, it is important to counter the narratives of medicalisation and pathologisation of Roma with another story. The influence of New Left movements on students and other activists in Czechoslovakia during the 1960s, coming from Western Europe as well as the United States and postcolonial countries, would redefine the politics of the Gypsy Question and community activism with Roma after 1968. The loosening of restrictions on foreign travel created opportunities for Czechoslovak students to experience life outside the socialist bloc. Visitors from the West, meanwhile, could visit Czechoslovakia in even greater numbers. This enabled Roma activists to make contact with the emerging communities of Gypsy pressure groups in Western Europe, as well as reigniting an interest in Roma as a marginalised group in socialist society. Literární Noviny, the most outspoken cultural journal in Czechoslovakia in this period, published a number of critical pieces about the status of Romani citizens during the 1960s. In October 1965 the journal devoted an entire issue to debates about Roma. On the front page, the text of the Government Decree on the Gypsy Question was reproduced in full. Karol Sidon, a young writer and later Charter 77 signatory and rabbi, published a long report about rural Roma in eastern Slovakia that referred to ‘blacks and whites’ in a provocative allusion to the racially segregated American South.124 The article, which also made reference to Western popular culture, for instance by comparing a young Roma woman to a character in Fellini’s Eight and a Half, deliberately criticised the gap between official rhetoric and social reality. Less than a year later, an article by Milena Hübschmannová in the same journal – simply entitled ‘Fellow Citizens’ (Spoluobčane) – alleged that the enormous 123

124

NA Praha, AÚV KSČ, f. 02/7, sv. 32, a.j. 58, bod. 2: Býro ÚV KSČ pro rˇízení stranické práci v Českých zemích: Zpráva o současném stavu rˇešení otázek cikánského obyvatelstva v České socialistické republice, 20 August 1970. Reportáž Daniely Sykorové a Karola Sidona o životě cikanského obyvatelstva na východě republiky, Literární noviny 30 October 1965, 1–9.

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difficulties faced by Roma seeking adequate housing were mainly due to racial discrimination. The ‘pejorative undertone’ that accompanied the official label ‘citizen of gypsy origin’, noted Hübschmannová, made a mockery of state policy towards Roma, ‘as if we wanted to save the Gypsies, simply by not calling them Gypsies’.125 In 1967 an article in Literární noviny pointed to the total absence of official interest in the Romani language: ‘At a time when there is such a huge discussion about the Gypsy Question, Gypsy illiteracy, the dispersal of the Gypsies, and the fact that there will be a million Gypsies in our country by the end of the millennium etc’, Literární noviny found it astonishing that the most recent conversational handbook for the Gypsy language available in Czechoslovakia dated from 1908. One of a series by František Vymazal, this book ‘conjugated verbs by referring to the model to steal and used criminal as an example when declining nouns’. Literární noviny asked its readers to compare this with a small report in Slovak Pravda, which notes that the Enlightenment Club in Bardejov would publish a Gypsy-Slovak and a SlovakGypsy dictionary with 4000 entries, and with tips on reading and writing – if there were at least 700 orders, and not only 120, as there have been so far. And thus you can draw a conclusion: whether the people who are making such a fuss about the uplift of the Gypsy population or who are making decisions on their behalf – from teachers to publicists, employees of the social organisations or the state administration – do not need such a dictionary because they have no interest in it, or whether the knowledge they have gleaned from Vymazal’s handbook is enough for them.126

Creating a Romani cultural identity based on the Romani language would become one of the main demands of the Romani unions set up from 1969–1973 by activists such as Gustáv Karika. Meanwhile, the language of citizenship appeared again in a piece that Milena Hübschmannová wrote about Veľká Ida, a Roma settlement on the periphery of the Eastern Slovak Steelworks, a showpiece industrial development near Košice. Hübschmannová compared the comfortable life of Mr X, an average Czech citizen, with that of a Rom, Mr Horvát, living in a dilapidated wooden settlement hut. Challenging her readers to imagine themselves in the position of a Roma citizen whose tiny house had recently collapsed, she asked, ‘How would a non-Gypsy behave? Write a letter to the authorities. How would he (Mr. Horvát) manage? He learnt how to read and write in the army, but would he know what an official letter was? Would he know to whom he should write? A non-Gypsy would have his house insured, but who would insure a 125 126

Milena Hübschmannová, ‘Spoluobčane’, Literární noviny (5 March 1966), 10–11. Jeroným Baloun, ‘Cikánsky nesnadno’, Literární noviny (29 April 1967), 2.

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Gypsy shack? . . . You would know you have a right to compensation. If you had any problems you would turn to the ROH (trade union) committee, the KSČ, the legal department, the social department. Then you would write to the newspaper, the radio, the television.’ Concluding, Hübschmannová warned, ‘You are Mr. X, you have your name, your profession, your social position, which you rely upon, you are a citizen . . . No-one just calls you “that Czech!” . . . but for “us” Mr. Horvát is only a Gypsy. A Gypsy from a gypsy settlement.’127 A photograph by Josef Koudelka, who would later achieve global recognition for his iconic photos of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, appeared alongside Milena Hübschmannová’s article about Veľká Ida. The image of a man in a white shirt and broad-brimmed hat, holding a tiny child on his shoulder against a stark, bare horizon, presented the world of rural Roma as a symbol of alienation from a dystopic industrial modernity. This was reflected in the language employed by Hübschmannová, which described the factory towering over the Roma settlement as ‘incomprehensible . . . nauseating, fascinating, redeeming, terrifying’.128 Josef Koudelka’s photographic series Gypsies encapsulates a new humanitarian sensibility towards the marginal subjects of socialism. As a young documentary photographer, Josef Koudelka travelled through eastern Slovakia during the 1960s. From intimate portraits of grieving families at home by an open coffin to a haunting image of a young man in a suit, handcuffed and escorted by police from his isolated village while a crowd of onlookers stands silent, Koudelka’s Gypsies cycle interpreted poverty and social isolation in a completely different light to official narratives of backwardness. Exhibited in the foyer of a small Prague theatre in the summer of 1967, the Gypsies cycle left Czechoslovakia when Koudelka emigrated the following year. As the anonymous Prague photographer who documented the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia on the night of 21 August 1968, Koudelka was soon working for the Magnum agency. His photographs of the invasion – a wristwatch ticking against an empty street, women and children motionless with horror, crowds of unarmed demonstrators confronting Soviet tanks – were circulated around the globe and universalised the invasion of Czechoslovakia as an assault on the ideals of revolutionary socialism.129 The Gypsies cycle was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1975 and published by 127 128 129

Milena Hübschmannová, ‘Veľká Ida’, Literární noviny (8 July 1967), 2–3. Hübschmannová, ‘Veľká Ida’. Eric Hobsbawm, Marc Weitzmann, and Magnum Photos, 1968: Magnum Throughout the World (Paris: Hazan, 1998).

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Robert Delpire.130 The visual aesthetic borrowed from the realism of the documentary tradition and ethnographic photography. But rather than victims of history, Roma were presented as transcendental and timeless, emblematic of universal themes of human alienation, exploitation, and suffering. Against the rhetoric of care deployed by the socialist state, Koudelka’s photography looked forward to a new language of humanitarian compassion, which would envelop the Roma in the decades following the Prague Spring.

130

Josef Koudelka (Afterword by Willy Guy), Gypsies (New York: Aperture/MOMA, 1975).

6

Prague Spring for Roma!

Springtime in Prague in 1968 saw Czechoslovakia on the verge of a revolution. As mass demonstrations filled the streets and parks of the capital city, a small group of Roma met in Bratislava to draft a declaration calling for a Románo kultúrno jekhtániben, a Romani Cultural Union.1 One year later, Czech and Slovak activists were finally given permission to establish collective organisations for ‘Gypsies-Roma’ under the National Front. This was unprecedented in Czechoslovakia and indeed within the Eastern bloc. But if the Prague Spring is an iconic event in global histories of 1968, the story of Romani activism in this momentous period is practically unknown and even more rarely integrated into larger studies of the era. The classic study of the Czechoslovak revolution by the Canadian historian Gordon Skilling, published in 1976, dismissed the Gypsies as ‘culturally backward and unorganized’.2 This formulation reflected popular (and academic) attitudes towards Roma not only in East Central Europe but also in the West during this period. However, the archives of the Czech and Slovak Unions of Gypsies-Roma tell a different story. For Roma activists such as Anton Facuna, the Prague Spring was less an experiment in building a civil society based on individual rights and freedoms than an attempt to win collective social and cultural rights as a nationality. Over the next ten years, Eastern European Roma would move to the forefront of a new international movement seeking the recognition of a Romani nation. The Prague Spring has entered into histories of human rights as the moment when the Left in Europe lost faith in revolutionary socialism and was forced to look for alternative forms of utopian politics. In this narrative, the defeat of Czechoslovak dreams of ‘socialism with a human face’ by Soviet tanks in August 1968 inspired the emergence of dissident 1 2

SNA Bratislava, f. Zväz Cigánov-Rómov (ZCR) 1968–1973, kart. 1, Zakladatelia Zväzu Cigánov-Rómov na Slovensku, November 1969. Harold Gordon Skilling, Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976).

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groups such as the Charter 77 movement led by Czech playwright Václav Havel, who, in turn, helped to create human rights as a utopian politics of morality during the 1970s. Thus the Prague Spring was often folded into an understanding of Czech dissidents such as Havel as spokesmen for ‘civil society’ in the West. To some degree, this interpretation overlaps with the argument that the Prague Spring represented a revival of ‘civil society’ emanating from Czech national traditions of democracy. This idea was put forward by Czech émigré historians in the West after 1968 and revived in post-socialist Czech historiography that sought to recover stories of popular resistance against the ‘totalitarian’ Communist regime. ‘Civil society’ (občanská společnost) was not, however, a term that appeared frequently in the pamphlets and petitions produced by the Czech and Slovak Roma Unions. Instead, Roma activists appealed for the rights of Roma in the language of citizenship. This was articulated clearly in the first petition sent by Anton Facuna to the Slovak authorities on 5 April 1968: ‘We want more than simply to be citizens with state citizenship, we want our ČSSR to be our homeland in every respect; we want to be proud of our socialist homeland.’3 Romani Union leaders were less the children of Marx and Coca-Cola, as the 1968 generation was famously described, than the offspring of Gottwald and Kofola.4 The distinction between ‘state citizenship’ and national belonging in Facuna’s appeal for a Romani Cultural Union reflected the long-standing tension between constitutional rights and national identity in East Central Europe. In that sense, the Prague Spring did perhaps revive pre-socialist traditions of Czechoslovak democracy, although not as a civil society based on individual rights. Rather, the appeals made by Roma as well as Slovaks and Hungarians reflected collectivist understandings of a democracy in which citizens accessed their rights as members of a national community. In the wake of the Soviet invasion, the Czechoslovak constitution was revised to create a federal republic that provided greater autonomy to Slovakia. The Czechoslovak federal constitution of 1969 did not, however, recognise Roma as a nationality. Since openly calling for collective rights to Romani language and culture was politically risky in the uncertain atmosphere following the Soviet invasion, the Unions of Gypsies-Roma that existed from 1969 until 1973 pursued a cautious strategy of ‘self-help’

3 4

ŠObA Košice, f. Vsl. KNV, 1960–1969, KCO, kart. 18, sp. 44: Anton Facuna: Návrh na zriadenie Zväzu čsl. Cigánov, 5 April 1968. Klement Gottwald was general secretary and then chairman of the Czechoslovak Communist Party until 1953; Kofola was a carbonated soft drink manufactured in Czechoslovakia from the 1960s as an alternative to Coca-Cola.

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(svépomoc). They organised music festivals, tried to set up an all-Roma housing cooperative, and advocated for the rights of their members (officially, seven thousand and fifteen thousand in the Czech and Slovak Unions, respectively, in 1973). They also led the first attempts to claim recognition and restitution for the racial persecution of Czech and Slovak Roma – including deportation, mass killings, internment, forced labour, and medical experiments – during World War II.

Battling for Romani Nationhood In February 1968, Anton Facuna met privately with a small group of Slovak Roma in Bratislava and without waiting for official permission set up a Preparatory Committee for a Romani Cultural Union. Exactly ten years earlier, the Central Committee of the KSČ had rejected their appeal for a Romani collective organisation. But the pace of reform in Czechoslovakia now gave Facuna reason to believe that this time they might succeed. Under Alexander Dubček, who replaced the hardline Antonín Novotný as general secretary of the KSČ in January, the Communist leadership was beginning to thrash out the details of a new Action Programme. This lengthy and eclectic document was supposed to lay the foundations for a new socialist society, one which was democratic and conformed to Czechoslovak conditions. A new constitution was to guarantee rights of association and to ensure that societal interests could influence politics through freely expressed public opinion, including freedom of the press and interest organisations.5 Censorship was abolished in early March. Women, students, former political prisoners, social democrats, Catholics, and writers held meetings and demonstrations as they set up committees and pressure groups, either within the mass organisations or outside the official structures of the National Front. Out in the streets, thousands of people began to take part in public demonstrations. The Prague Spring was under way, but what would it mean for Roma? The first demand of the Slovak Roma activists was for legal recognition of ‘Gypsies-Roma’ as ‘a minority nationality with all the rights and responsibilities laid down in the constitution’.6 On 5 April 1968 they sent their appeal, typed on a few sheets of thin paper, to the local 5 6

Kieran Williams, The Prague Spring and Its Aftermath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). SNA Bratislava, f. ÚV KSS – Predsedníctvo, kart. 1341, a.j. 720/13: Zásadnutie Predsedníctva 21 December 1972: Správa o situácii a činnosti Zväzu Cigánov-Romov na Slovensko a jeho účelového zariadenia Bútiker.

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Committees for the Gypsy Population in Slovakia. The petition linked the Romani claim to nationhood to an appeal for civil rights for Roma as protection against arbitrary administrative measures imposed by the state. ‘Previous measures concerning the so-called ‘Gypsy Question’ since 1945, even if the proposals and regulations were well-meaning, have been implemented incorrectly.’7 Previous policies had not fulfilled the conditions of ‘socialist democracy’ for the Roma but had rather ‘deepened the isolation, ignorance, and mistrust’ between Romani communities and the majority society. The Romani language, claimed Facuna, lay at the heart of claims for nationhood: ‘We have our own ancient tongue – language – perhaps only in dialects, but we understand each other across the whole world; we have our songs, our dances, our stories, and our unwritten laws – even if not all of us still know them.’ Romani-language newspapers and magazines and a Romani Cultural Union within the National Front would ensure that Romani voices were heard in central and local government decisions affecting Roma and enable them to secure state funding for community self-help programmes. Deliberately echoing official rhetoric about ‘re-education’ of socialist citizens, the petition claimed, ‘We are demanding that we Gypsies help each other to reach the level of the rest of the population, socially, culturally, and even politically.’ In June 1968, the Government Committee for the Gypsy Population in Košice – a region home to the largest Roma population in Czechoslovakia – decided to support their request and recommended the Central Committee in Bratislava to do the same.8 The Slovak Roma appeal for nationhood drew on the ideal of a historically defined national culture that had been the dream of nationalists in East Central Europe since the age of imperial Austria. The idea of a Romani Cultural Union that would train Roma as socialist citizens partly echoed attempts by Soviet Roma to build a Romani national identity in tune with Bolshevik ideals of citizenship during the 1920s. But the opportunities for international exchange opened up by the Prague Spring now brought Roma from Czechoslovakia into contact with competing conceptions of Roma and Gypsy identity, above all through their interaction with emerging pressure groups in Western countries such as Britain and France. In the summer of 1968, a young British man called Grattan Puxon visited the fledgling Roma Union in 7 8

ŠObA Košice, f. Vsl. KNV, 1960–1969, KCO, kart. 18, sp. 44: Anton Facuna: Návrh na zriadenie Zväzu čsl. Cigánov, 5 April 1968. Anna Jurová, Vývoj romskej problematiky na Slovensku po roku 1945 (Košice: Goldpress, 1993), 91–92.

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Bratislava. Puxon claimed that his aim was to ‘link up’ the Czechoslovak Roma with the ‘emerging international movement’. He recalled ‘long hours’ of conversation about their ‘hopes under the government of Alexander Dubchek [sic]. Facuna told me that he had wanted Roma to take a real part in the Communist revolution since joining the wartime partisans. Both he and [Ján] Cibula had been warned that their nationalist views could lead to arrest.’9 Puxon was taken to see a metal-working cooperative run by Hungarian-speaking Roma near Bratislava and recalled the enthusiasm with which they spoke of the pro-communist demonstrations in Czechoslovakia after the liberation.10 The contact with Puxon connected the Czechoslovak Roma to the small but fastgrowing number of Gypsy and traveller activists and pressure groups in Britain, Ireland, France, Germany, and Scandinavia. Yet Western Gypsy activists, deriving their repertoires of action from the subcultures and protest movements of the New Left and the civil rights and Black Power movements, were frequently talking at cross-purposes when they met with Roma socialised in Communist regimes. The activists whom Grattan Puxon met in Bratislava were not the long-haired university students who would soon become the conventional faces of the Prague Spring in Czech historiography. Whether workers, professionals, or intellectuals, the founders of the first Romani Unions in Czechoslovakia had come of age in the early 1950s.11 With personal memories of the persecution suffered by Roma during the war, they had been socialised under the egalitarianism and conformity of the early welfare dictatorship. The brusque, comradely tone of their fragmentary personal correspondence attests to their attitude towards collective organising. In July Anton Facuna wrote to Elena Lacková and peremptorily instructed her to organise the Roma in Prešov. ‘We count on your cooperation’, wrote Facuna, ‘and we decided that you should become a member of the central preparatory committee of the Union of Gypsies-Roma.’ Facuna told Lacková to select ten to twelve ‘good, honourable workers, male and female’, from the local ‘GypsyRoma intelligentsia’ for the Prešov district union. Democratic centralism was the order of the day: ‘You should explain to them what it is all about . . . Around the beginning of August the Preparatory Committee will organise a plenary session in Bratislava, where the temporary statutes 9

10 11

Grattan Puxon, ‘The Romani Movement: Rebirth and the First World Romani Congress in Retrospect’, in Thomas Acton (ed.), Scholarship and the Gypsy Struggle: Commitment in Romani Studies (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2000), 92–113. Interview with Grattan Puxon, Colchester, November 2006. Nina Pavelčíková, Romové v Českých zemích v letech 1945–1989 (Prague: Úrˇad dokumentace a vyšetrˇování zločinů komunismu, 2004), 104 ff.

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will be adopted and a further plan of work. We will send you the programme with the invitation.’12 However, the plenary session that Facuna had optimistically planned for August 1968 in Bratislava never materialised. In late July Alexander Dubček was summoned to a bilateral meeting with Brezhnev at Čierná nad Tisou. Less than a month later, the Prague Spring would be brought to a violent end by the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops. Just before midnight on 20 August 1968, everything changed. Warsaw Pact troops from the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria invaded Czechoslovakia.13 Under cover of darkness, Prague was occupied in the early hours of 21 August, with tanks rolling incongruously towards Prague castle and past the elegant Secessionist buildings on Václavské náměstí. Elite Soviet forces were flown into Prague’s Ružýn airport, and within a few hours the main political, administrative, and communications buildings were occupied. Around 7:30 AM the first clash with Czechoslovak citizens took place at the Czechoslovak Radio on Vinohradská ulice, where several civilians were killed by gunfire. One of the few Communist regimes with no Soviet troops stationed on its territory since World War II, Czechoslovakia would now have a permanent Soviet military presence until the end of the Communist regime. For Roma seeking to organise in the wake of the Soviet invasion, the months that followed were full of uncertainty. Their first priority was to get Roma recognised in the new constitutional law on nationalities in September 1968. This law was a result of the decision to federalise the unitary Czechoslovak state in response to Slovak demands for autonomy during the Prague Spring. While the nationalities law was being drafted, Anton Facuna yet again asked the chairman of the Government Committee for the Gypsy Population to champion nationality rights for the Gypsies.14 Here Facuna failed, and his weak political position was demonstrated by his lack of access to the relevant decision-making bodies. Even a well-connected ally of the Roma, the demographer Vladimír Srb, was unable to gain recognition for the smaller nations in the new law. When Srb, who was head of the Demographic Institute at the State Statistical Office, read a draft of the law in Rudé právo, he was furious that it employed such a narrow definition of ‘nationality’. In a letter to the Government Drafting Committee, Dr Srb complained both 12 13

14

MRK Brno, f. Elena Lacková: Letter from Anton Facuna to Elena Lacková, 18 July 1968. For relevant documents, see Jaromír Navrátil et al., The Prague Spring 1968: A National Security Archive Documents Reader (trans. by Mark Kramer, Joy Moss, and Ruth Tosek; preface by Václav Havel) (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1998). MRK Brno, f. Svaz Cikánů-Romů: Letter from Dr Vladimír Srb to Anton Facuna, 10 October 1968.

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as a private citizen and in his official capacity as the state’s leading demographer that the law privileged some nationalities over others, denying the ‘unprivileged nationalities (the Lusatian Serbs, the Romanians, the Gypsies etc)’ the right to have ‘their own organisations, books, or newspapers’.15 While the nationalities law was being drafted, Anton Facuna yet again asked the chairman of the Government Committee for the Gypsy Population to champion nationality rights for the Gypsies.16 The 1968 nationalities law defined only the Hungarians, Germans, Poles, and Ukrainians as nationality groups ‘because only they are homogeneous, and culturally and ethnically conscious’.17 Moreover, the establishment of the federal state introduced a new regulation on citizenship that would have consequences for Roma in the years to come. All Czechoslovak citizens gained dual nationality: as members of the federation and of one of the two republics. The republic-level nationality of citizens born before 1954 was determined by place of birth. For people born after 1954, the principle of jus sanguinis (citizenship of the parents) was used. Republic-level nationality had few practical implications – it did not appear on any identity documents, and all rights (including the right to education, social benefits, housing, and voting) were established according to one’s permanent residence.18 However, the law would be called into effect after the split of Czechoslovakia in 1993, when the Czech Republic adopted a restrictive law on citizenship based on ‘nationality’ which effectively denied citizenship rights to thousands of Slovak Roma. On 25 October 1968 Facuna received a telephone call from the Interior Ministry informing him that Roma would not be recognised as a nationality, and his projected Czechoslovak Roma Union would have to split into separate Czech and Slovak branches.19 Deeply disappointed, Facuna feared that Roma Unions established at the national level would lose influence over federal policy towards Roma. He also retreated from his pleas for nationality status, distancing himself in a private letter from his earlier demands for cultural rights: ‘Why such rights all of a 15 16 17

18 19

MRK Brno, f. Svaz Cikánů-Romů: Letter from Dr Vladimír Srb to Anton Facuna, 10 October 1968. Ibid. Dôvodová správa vlády ČSSR k návrhu ústavného zákona o postavení národností v ČSSR, 26.9.1968, in Jozef Žatkuliak, Federalizácia československého štátu 1968–70. Vznik česko-slovenskej federácie roku 1968 (Brno: Doplněk, 1966), Dokument 41, 273–275. Jirˇína Šiklová and Marta Miklušáková, ‘Denying Citizenship to the Czech Roma’, East European Constitutional Review, 7:2 (1998), 58–64. MRK Brno, f. Svaz Cikánů-Romů: Letter from Dr Vladimír Srb to Anton Facuna, 26 October 1968.

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sudden? . . . We gypsies-Roma don’t want gypsy schools or our language being used for official business. We can’t force anyone who works in the state administration to learn the languages of other nationalities, we don’t have the moral right. We recognise only two nations, the Czechs and the Slovaks. We think that the official language should only be Czech or Slovak.’20 Instead, Facuna and Srb now directed their energies towards the creation of a Romani Cultural Union. Anxiously, Srb and Facuna waited to see if the Interior Ministry would approve the statutes of the Roma Unions. Their application was lying under piles of similar requests at the Interior Ministry in Bratislava. In early December Srb wrote to Facuna of his impatience: ‘I’d hoped to give you some good news by Christmas, but so far nothing.’21 Awareness of their vulnerable position, commented the young British sociologist Will Guy after directly observing the work of the Roma Unions, ‘helps to explain the extreme caution with which Gypsies criticised the questionable 1958 interpretation of Marxist-Leninist nationality in their case and the assimilatory practice that followed, and indeed their general strategy of ingratiation’.22 Nonetheless, Roma did voice criticism, at least in the earliest days of the unions. On 10 December 1968, Miroslav Holomek observed in his draft programme for the Czech Roma Union that the refusal to recognise Roma as a national minority was based on ‘fear of the rights which would have to be granted to the Gypsies’.23 On the contrary, argued Holomek, acknowledging the ‘specificity and difference of the Gypsies’ as a social and cultural group speaking the Gypsy language would not ‘isolate’ Roma as the KSČ claimed but raise ‘awarenesss of equality and the necessity of coexistence between all social groups in the ČSR’. Holomek claimed that the three hundred thousand Roma in the country ‘must transform themselves from passive objects, who are only manipulated, into conscious and active subjects who do not want to lag behind the cultural and social development of others’.24 In December 1968, the Slovak Roma Union bulletin again reiterated its support for socialism and the ‘post-January politics of our Communist

20 21 22 23 24

MRK Brno, f. Svaz Cikánů-Romů: Letter from Dr Vladimír Srb to Anton Facuna, 26 October 1968. MRK Brno, f. Svaz Cikánů-Romů: Letter from Dr Vladimír Srb to Anton Facuna, 6 December 1968. Will Guy, ‘The Attempt of Socialist Czechoslovakia to Assimilate Its Gypsy Population’ (Bristol: PhD dissertation, University of Bristol, 1977), 381. MRK Brno, f. Miroslava Holomka: Návrh programu rˇešení problematiky cikánů, Prˇípravný výbor svazu cikánů pro Čechu a Moravu, Brno, 10 December 1968. Ibid.

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Party as the guiding force in our ČSSR’.25 Describing the trust placed by the party in Roma as a ‘historic opportunity’, the bulletin declared, ‘We must request the cancellation of all directives, resolutions and decrees issued between 1955–1967 which are in conflict with the constitution of the ČSSR. Especially decree no. 502 / 1965.’ This decree – on the Resettlement of the Gypsy Population – violated Article 31 of the constitution guaranteeing freedom of movement and residence. ‘This decree is unconstitutional and therefore invalid . . . [the state] cannot plan where Roma should live, work, and permanently settle.’ National Committees must realise that Gypsies-Roma are also citizens of this or that village, town, district and state. FREEDOM of movement cannot be limited!! We do not mean permitting nomadism, we are against the nomadic way of life of Gypsies-Roma, but nonetheless, every person has the right to marry and have a house wherever he wishes, if he has reasons for doing so, as long as he has committed no crime that results in the loss of his civil rights. This right cannot be limited by any kind of decree adopted by the cabinet behind the backs of parliament and the constitution. This decree was not even published in the Collection of Laws!26

Citizens’ complaints about limitations on internal freedom of movement and the cumbersome system of residence permits had been a feature of Soviet rights talk during the 1960s.27 In the German Democratic Republic, meanwhile, the right to freedom of movement had taken on a sharp new edge after the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Facuna, however, framed the Gypsy resettlement programme as a discriminatory measure against a particular group that violated the universal rights to freedom of movement and residence enjoyed by all socialist citizens. Such open criticism of government policy would become increasingly difficult during the years that followed, as thousands of party functionaries, government officials, intellectuals, and scientists were purged from their positions in a process euphemistically termed ‘normalisation’, after Gustáv Husák replaced Dubček as general secretary of the Communist Party in April 1969.28 At least one prominent Roma activist, the Slovak

25

26 27

28

ŠOBA Košice, f. Vsl. KNV (1960–1969), Komisia Vsl. KNV pre cigánske obyvateľstvo, kart. 19, sp. 110, Zväz Cigánov-Romov na Slovensku / Románo kultúrno jekhetániben, Ústredný výbor v Bratislave, Zpravodaj č. 2/1968, 27 December 1968. Ibid. Benjamin Nathans, ‘Soviet Rights-Talk in the Post-Stalin Era’, in Stefan-Ludiwg Hoffmann (ed.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 166–190. Oldrˇich Tůma, Srpen’69: edice dokumentů (Prague: Maxdorf, 1996); Václav Kural et al., Československu roku 1968 Díl I, Obrodný proces (Prague: Parta, 1993).

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medical doctor Ján Cibuľa, joined those who fled the country. Cibuľa settled in Bern, Switzerland, where he established a private medical practice and continued his political activities, becoming the first president of the International Romani Union several years later.29 Nonetheless, the social aftershocks of the Prague Spring could not be rolled back immediately, and, crucially for the Roma, the new Czechoslovak leadership swiftly installed by Moscow did not see Gypsy organising as an immediate political threat. Thus Czech and Slovak Roma were still granted permission to set up their organisations in the spring of 1969, and for a few brief but productive years, these unions gained the status of official mass cultural organisations under the National Front. Románo kultúrno jekhtániben: The Romani Cultural Unions (1969–1973) In Spring 1969 the Czech and Slovak Unions of Gypsies-Roma were finally given permission to start organising social and cultural activities among the Roma.30 Affiliation with the National Front entitled the unions to ‘political representation, to government funds and also to the right to engage in a certain amount of political activity – such as drumming up the Gypsy vote for elections to the National Assembly’.31 The unions were organised in a hierarchy of central, regional, district, and local committees. Unusually, each union was also provided with an economic organisation – Névodrom (Romani: New Road) in the Czech lands, Bútiker (Romani: Labour) in Slovakia – consisting of ‘a nation-wide network of cooperative production networks, supplying gangs of contract workers to hard-pressed industrial enterprises’.32 The aim was to enable the Gypsy Unions to become self-sufficient, with the profits from the economic branches eventually replacing National Front funds. Névodrom was supposed to ‘assist the Roma in the construction of family houses, flats and other civic amenities, and to maintain them’, to ‘support traditional Roma crafts – as blacksmiths for practical and decorative purposes, metal-workers, lock-smiths, tin-smiths 29

30

31 32

Bernhard Schär, ‘Nicht mehr Zigeuner, sondern Roma! Emanzipation, Forschung und Strategien der Repräsentation einer “Roma-Nation”’, Historische Anthropologie, 16:2 (2008), 205–226. The archive of the Slovak Romani Union is in the Slovak National Archive, Bratislava, Slovakia; the Czech Romani Union archive is in the Moravian Provincial Archive, Brno, Czech Republic; additional materials are archived in the Museum of Romani Culture, Brno, which itself was set up by the founding members of the Czech Roma Union. Guy, ‘The Attempt of Socialist Czechoslovakia’, 379. Guy, ‘The Attempt of Socialist Czechoslovakia’, 379–380.

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Figure 6.1. Founding congress of the Czech Union of Gypsies-Roma (Svaz Cikánů-Romů, SCR), 29 August 1969, Brno. Ing. Miroslav Holomek elected president of the SCR. From the collections of the Museum of Romani Culture. Photographer: Andrˇej Pešta.

and kettle-smiths’, to provide apprenticeships for young Roma in these traditional crafts, and to carry out ‘heavy digging and other building work, maintenance and cleaning work’ for National Committees and other organisations.33 Bútiker stated that its aim was to support all Romani traditional crafts: welding, blacksmithing, basket-making, brick-making, and house-building, as well as collecting medicinal plants and scrap.34 Membership in the unions was voluntary, but experienced activists such as Elena Lacková worried about reaching out to the poorest Roma. Members were required to pay membership fees and fill out questionnaires when they signed up. At the founding congress of the Slovak Roma Union, Lacková warned, ‘You know the mentality of the people. We make promises, we ask them to join the Union, but they say, first do something for us, then we will give you those ten crowns. We are the 33 34

MZA Brno, Svaz Cikánů-Romů v ČSR – ústrˇední výbor Brno, f. G434, Statut podniku Névodrom prˇi ÚV SCR ČSR. SNA Bratislava, f. ZCR, kart 1.

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weakest social group.’35 In some branches at least, Slovak Union activists seem to have co-opted Roma workers at the workplace into becoming members. The Czech Romani Union publicised its activities through articles in Rudé právo and other newspapers. A young woman from Cheb in the Czech borderlands, who read about the union in Zemědělské noviny, wrote to offer her help: ‘I am glad that our small nation is trying to develop to the level of other nations, even if it will take a few decades! I would like to help, as much as I am able. I’m 26 years old, I’ve got two children and I’m at home, so I’d have enough time. I have 8 years of elementary education, I know that’s very little, but at least I’d like to help a bit at the beginning. Maybe it won’t matter that I’m a woman.’36 According to the records of the Slovak Romani Union, the organisation had recruited 13,817 members by November 1971 or just less than 10 per cent of the 151,743 people registered as Roma in the official 1970 census. There were 435 local union branches. The highest levels of organisation were in areas with large Roma populations: Prešov, Košice, and Rimavská Sobota, where nearly 30 per cent of the local Roma were members of the union.37 Already in February 1969 Anton Facuna reported that he was receiving five to fifteen letters daily, ‘requesting assistance with legal protection, housing problems, violations of their rights, asking for help with employment and social support’.38 The gulf between the Romani intelligentsia and their potential constituency, many of whom could not afford the ten crowns union membership fee, was linked to larger questions of ethnic identity and ‘passing’ among assimilated Roma. Many of the Roma who formed the core of the union leadership had ‘passed’ as Czech or Slovak workers or intelligentsia during the KSČ assimilation drive. Performing ‘Gypsiness’, for others such as the violinist Rinaldo Oláh, steeped in the centuries-old culture of Romani musician families from the Slovak-Hungarian borderlands playing at gadžo weddings, baptisms, and funerals, was a central aspect of their personal and professional identities. A Polish sociologist, who conducted research in a regional Roma Union Committee in a small Slovak town near the Polish border, observed the sudden ‘appearance’ of

35

36 37 38

SNA BA, f. ZCR, kart 1, Stenografický protokol ze zakladajúceho zjazdu Sväzu CigánovRomov, konaného 27. apríla 1969 v kaviarni Družba v Bratislave-Krasnˇanech – Speech of E. Lacková MZA, ÚV SCR, f. G343, kart. 1, Letter from Božena D. to Czech Romani Union. SNA Bratislava, f. ZCR, kart. 4 inv. č. 9, Predsedníctvo 1972: Základné údaje o členoch a člen. príspev. (30.11.1971). MRK Brno, f. Miroslava Holomka, Zväz Cigánov-Romov na Slovensku / Románo kultúrno jekhetániben, Ústredný výbor v Bratislave, Zpravodaj č. 1/1969 (Predseda ÚV Anton Facuna), Bratislava, 10 February 1969.

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many ‘hidden’ Gypsies who were influential party and state officials.39 ‘These previously invisible Roma were very attractive as potential allies to many of the urban Gypsies whose positions within the community were ambiguous.’ Urban integrated Roma lost legitimacy with rural communities because they no longer followed taboos, such as washing male and female clothing separately, or did not respect customary behaviour when visiting family in rural areas, such as the rule that women were supposed to eat after men when others apart from the familja were present. Migration to cities, new forms of employment, and upward social mobility cut off the intelligentsia from their links with extended Romani networks, according to Kaminski.40 The story of Jusef, a district chairman of a Roma Union in Slovakia, was emblematic. Born to a Roma couple from eastern Slovakia, who had been Communist ‘idealists pure and simple’, Jusef also married a Slovak Romani woman, joined the Communist Party, and trained as a mechanic. In the mid-1950s he was given a permanent administrative position with the Veterans’ Union and then a full-time post in the local Party Propaganda Department. Jusef’s wife took on his old administrative job, guaranteeing the family’s economic security. All this time Jusef’s ‘gypsy origins’ were secondary to his work as a Communist. In 1969 Jusef suddenly appeared ‘ideally qualified’ for a position in the Roma Union, being ‘not only a Gypsy member of the intelligentsia and a loyal Party member, but also having, from his numerous lecture-tours, a wideranging familiarity with outlying rural districts. Jusef, not particularly interested in the job per se (he had never stressed his ethnicity) accepted the Party’s request.’ The position of district chairman brought advantages: a high salary, the use of an official vehicle, and a new, comfortable flat. Kaminski noted that Jusef was also responsible for appointing union staff: ‘His wife was installed as head of the Financial Section, and his eldest son as a Foreman in the [Union’s] Co-operative. Suddenly we see the classic pattern of nepotism, of kinship-based cooperative exploitation of economic niches.’41 Being Roma, meant many different things to the hundreds of communities across Czechoslovakia. To the outside world, men like Facuna or the Holomek family in Moravia presented themselves as Czech or Slovak Roma. Between themselves, Roma differentiated maintained complex affiliations and distances within and among communities. Traditional elites often looked down on the poor settlement Gypsies. In March 39 40

Ignacy-Marek Kaminski, The State of Ambiguity: Studies of Gypsy Refugees (Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg, 1980). 41 Kaminski, The State of Ambiguity, 220 f. Ibid.

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1968 a Roma musician and co-founder of the Preparatory Commission for the Slovak Roma Union complained to the party newspaper in eastern Slovakia about the paper’s biased reporting on Roma. The man was deeply annoyed by the reporters’ suggestion that all Roma, including elite musicians such as himself, were like these poor settlement Gypsies. ‘I am a citizen of gypsy origin. I speak the gypsy language,’ he wrote, and reminded Východoslovenský noviny that the Gypsy ‘family’ was divided into three clans (fajty / rody): ‘proud’ professional musicians (barikane in Romani), workers, and ‘citizens who cause serious problems’ (degeš) or in Slovak, ‘good-for-nothings’ (naničhodníci). To discipline the degeš (Romani: dirty, polluted) Roma, the writer suggested a raft of draconian measures: placing the children in care and the elderly in retirement homes to prevent Gypsies living parasitically on child benefits and pensions, compulsory contraception for all girls older than fourteen ‘to stop them getting pregnant for at least ten years’, and strict surveillance of all ‘good-for-nothing’ Gypsy families by the police and the state.42 The lack of trust seems to have been mutual. British sociologist Will Guy, who knew many union officials personally, noted: ‘City and settlement Gypsies alike were quick to detect the disparity between the trappings of power of Union officers and their evident inability to provide practical assistance where it was needed and often believed that the main purpose of those accepting office was to enrich themselves with the government funds destined for their poorer fellow-Gypsies.’43

Collective Rights and the Politics of Numbers While the socialist state saw assimilation as the path to citizenship for Czechoslovak Roma, the Romani Unions and their supporters focused instead on nationhood as the key to creating fully integrated Romani citizens. Milena Hübschmannová, an increasingly outspoken advocate for Roma nationality rights, captured the dilemma of assimilation and self-identification in a provocative memorandum published in the bulletin of the Czech Union, Romano ľil. No Roma would publicly identify as such until they were recognised as a nationality, she argued, and until derogatory labels such as ‘gypsies’, ‘Gypsies’, ‘citizens of gypsy origin’,

42

43

ŠObA Košice, f. Vsl. KNV, 1960–1969, Komisia Vsl. KNV pre cigánske obyvateľstvo, kart. 18, sp. 50: Letter from Roma citizen to Východoslovenské Noviny, copied by the newspaper to Chairman of the Government Committee for the Gypsy Population, KNV Košice. Guy, ‘The Attempt of Socialist Czechoslovakia’, 384.

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and ‘Gypsies-Roma’ were replaced by the term Romové (Roma). Since Roma would never fulfil the ‘objective’ Marxist-Leninist criteria of nationhood, Hübschmannová suggested instead that Marxist-Leninist nationality policy should itself be reinterpreted to accommodate Roma. Placing Romanes at the heart of Romani ethnic identity, the memorandum argued that granting Roma collective rights to their culture and language in education and public life would in turn solve the problem of social integration. It claimed that the perennial ‘problem’ of poor school results among Romani children was entirely due to the fact that Romanes was not used in elementary schools. Moreover, the ubiquitous official language about ‘civilizing’ Roma was being used to mask the harsh reality of resettlement, sterilisation, and ‘other “civilized” interventions into family life’. Respect for Romani ethnic identity, in Hübschmannová’s opinion, was the only way of supporting the social integration of Roma.44 As a fluent speaker of Romanes, but not ethnically Romani, Milena Hübschmannová was able to use her uniquely liminal position to criticise government policy with an openness that the Roma Union leaders would have considered too risky. In 1968 Hübschmannová and ethnographer Eva Davidová had been appointed by the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences to lead the first programme of sociological research on Roma in the socialist state.45 As a result they had gained access to confidential ministerial documents proposing the sterilisation of Romani women as a solution to alleged problems of social degeneracy. In November 1968, Hübschmannová and Davidová wrote to government officials in charge of national questions, criticising the official interpretation of the Gypsy Question as a social question only, and arguing that the socialist state ought to expand its definition of ‘nationality’ from the old concept of ‘national minority’ to include ‘ethnic groups’.46 These experiences, combined with many years of studying and communicating with Roma in Czechoslovakia and abroad, resulted

44

45 46

MRK Brno, f. SCR, Románo ľil: Zpravodaj Ústrˇední výbor Svazu Romů ČSR, č. 2, 1970, pp. 11–15: Memorandum Svazu Cikánů-Romů v ČSR k základným otázkém romské / cikánské / problematiky a vymezení společenského postavení Romů / Cikánů /. Stanovisko zpracováno a projednáno společensko-vědní komisi ÚV Svazu CikánůRomů a projednáno a schváleno prˇedsednictvem ÚV Svazu Cikánů-Romů dne 17.4.1970. Michael Vorˇíšek, The Reform Generation: 1960s Czechoslovak Sociology from a Comparative Perspective (Prague: Kalich, 2012). Archive of the Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic, f. SocÚ ČSAV, kart. 3, inv. č. 48: Milena Hübschmannová and Eva Turčínová, Vyjádrˇení k návrhu usnesení vlády o prˇevodu působnosti Vládního výboru pro otázky cikánského obyvatelstva na Ministerstvo práce a sociálních věci (15 November 1968), cited in Michael Vorˇíšek, The Reform Generation, 199.

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in Hübschmannová embracing a strong belief in Romani cultural nationalism. She elaborated these views in an outspoken article in the leading journal of sociology entitled ‘What Is This So-Called Gypsy Question?’ Criticising the assimilation policy for reifying the link between social deviance and Romani identity, Hübschmannová declared that the official practice of registering only ‘socially unadaptable’ people as Gypsies was excluding integrated Roma from the official statistics.47 The tension between external ascription of national identity by government census officials or other agents of the state and self-identification with a particular nation had been at the crux of nation-building movements in Europe since the nineteenth century and became a central question for the Roma Unions over the next few years. Roma leaders also privately debated the difficulties of encouraging Roma to self-identify as a nationality. Behind closed doors, veteran activist Tomáš Holomek raised the questions of skin colour, lifestyle, mixed marriages, and language, warning that as a result of mixed marriages and increasing living standards Romani culture, customs, and language could disappear within thirty years.48 ‘How on earth do we stand a chance?’ asked a young Roma activist at a union meeting. There was no other group like the Roma in the world, he continued: ‘For example, we don’t have a territory.’49 Miroslav Holomek pointed out that the party was surely afraid of the potential ‘international consequences’ of recognising Roma nationhood. Economic factors also played a role, he added. ‘Nationality recognition means expanded rights.’ Speaking as an old party member, Holomek recommended carrying out an informal survey among the members of the Politburo. ‘We must take stock of our strength,’ he observed. ‘If we were to insist on a political demand, our Union could be closed down. I’m convinced that our organisation wasn’t recognised on the basis of any theoretical perspective, but above all because we could help to solve a problem that they didn’t know how to manage.’50 To track down integrated Roma who had vanished from the statistics, union leaders reached out to the Federal Office of Statistics, with the result that a special register of the ‘Roma population’ was carried out at

47 48 49 50

Milena Hübschmannová, ‘Co je tzv. cikánská otázka?’ Sociologický časopis, 6:2 (1970), 106–120. MZA, ÚV SCR, f. G343, kart. 2: Zápis – prˇedsednictva UV SCR, Brno, 17 April 1970. MZA, ÚV SCR, f. G343, kart. 2: Minutes of Social Science Commission [1970, undated]. Ibid.

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the same time as the general population census in 1970. Unlike previous measures, this register did not distinguish between ‘assimilated’ and ‘unadaptable’ Roma. Census officials were told to make their own judgements about who was Roma. Use of the Romani language was the main criterion. ‘In families whose members are presumed to be of Gypsy origin, [the census official] should inquire whether the gypsy language (Romani) (‘cikánština (romština)’) was the mother tongue of the adult members of the family or their parents or grandparents.’ But officials were also instructed to consider physical characteristics and lifestyle. The guidelines reinforced racial and cultural stereotypes: Roma were described as having mainly ‘dark skin, hair and eyes, and shorter stature’; typically living in ‘multigenerational families with a lot of children’; and having minimum household facilities, low employment rates, and substandard knowledge of the surrounding language, whether Czech, Slovak, or Hungarian. Although officials were told to rely on their own observations, they were also permitted to tap into ‘local knowledge’, in other words by asking National Committees and neighbours to define who was a Gypsy.51 Census officials were keenly aware that many Roma would not wish to self-identify, particularly the ‘Romani intelligentsia’, whom both Unions of Roma are interested in locating at the moment.52 Given that Roma were all too aware of the nightmarish uses of population registers and police records in the past, it is not hard to imagine the anxiety that such inquisitive census officials might have provoked. Demographers at the Federal Statistical Office were particularly concerned to identify the ‘Roma intelligentsia’, noting that such people ‘do not identify themselves as Roma, and consider themselves to be fully integrated into the majority population’.53 The politics of the census and other forms of external ascription of national identity have been thoroughly explored by historians of nationalism and nation-building.54 Since 1965, the Czechoslovak state had been collecting records of ‘integrated, semi-integrated and unadaptable’ Gypsies. Roma who were judged fully ‘assimilated’ were no longer included in the official statistics on the Gypsy population, with the result that the state institutionalised a cognitive link between ‘asociality’ and Romani ethnic identity through the collection of such data.55 51 52 54 55

Federální Statistický Úrˇad, Zprávy a Rozbory, Romské obyvatelstvo podle sčítání lidu, domů a bytů 1.12.1970 (Prague: 15 October 1971). 53 Ibid. Ibid. David Kertzel and Dominique Arel, Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Věra Sokolová, Cultural Politics of Ethnicity: Discourses on Roma in Communist Czechoslovakia (Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2008).

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The 1970 census counted nearly 220,000 Roma in Czechoslovakia, of whom 160,000 were registered in Slovakia. Demographers admitted the fuzziness of the categories on which the register was based – ‘GypsiesRoma’ were defined partly anthropologically, partly ‘socially-ethnically’ – but claimed these figures represented ‘100% Gypsies-Roma, integrated and semi-integrated’, but not ‘half-Gypsies’.56 Genocide, Racial Discrimination, and Reparations Claiming recognition for Roma as victims of racial persecution in the wartime Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the Slovak Republic was the most politically sensitive task attempted by the Romani Unions. Their activities included documenting memories of internment or deportation and seeking to help survivors claim compensation as victims of fascism. The Czech Union set up a Commission for Former Prisoners of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. This commission attempted to gain recognition for Roma as victims of racial persecution by asking the Defence Ministry and Military History Institute to issue Roma with certificates under Law 255/1946, which defined fascist persecution for the purpose of awarding compensation to the victims.57 Compensation to victims of fascism in Czechoslovakia was paid in the form of social benefits, such as pensions, rather than the restitution of personal property (the model of compensation in West Germany, for example). The ideal recipient of compensation was the ‘anti-fascist fighter’ who had battled Nazism, not the ‘victim’ of persecution that was central to West German discourses of Wiedergutmachung. Law No. 255/1946 defined fascist persecution on ‘political, national, racial, or religious’ grounds for the purpose of awarding compensation to people whose ‘personal freedom had been restricted by imprisonment, internment, deportation, or otherwise, as a result of antifascist struggle or political activity aimed directly at Nazi or fascist occupiers, their helpers, or traitors to the Czech or Slovak nation’ for a period of at least three months. Pensions for former political prisoners were increased in 1968. Responsibility for deciding on who counted as a victim of fascism lay with the Union of Anti-Fascist Fighters (Svaz Protifašistických Bojovníků), while the Ministry of National Defence was responsible for issuing certificates under Law 255/1946. In 1969 the Romani Union newsletter published a feature explaining what victims of fascist 56 57

‘K integrace cikánského obyvatelstva v ČSSR’, Demografie, 21:4 (1979), 321–341. MZA Brno, f. SCR: Ústrˇední výbor Svazu Cikánů-Romů ČSR: Zápis o jednání ÚV SCR ČSR na VHÚ v Praze, 28 September 1971.

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persecution needed to do to request a certificate. Two years later, an internal report claimed that ‘some of our citizens already submitted their requests in 1968 or 1969, but have so far received no response.’58 While official narratives of the Occupation in postwar Czechoslovakia did not generally recognise persecution on the grounds of race, in the West, too, public consciousness of the genocide of Roma during World War II was slow to develop. Lawyers in the Federal Republic of Germany claimed for years that Roma were not persecuted on the grounds of race but rather because they were ‘asocial’ or criminals, presenting a major obstacle to Roma seeking compensation through the courts. Only as a result of sustained lobbying by Sinti activists did the Federal Supreme Court conclude in May 1962 that the registration and examination of Gypsies by race scientists in the Third Reich qualified as racial persecution administered by a National Socialist organisation at the instigation of the state. A year later, the court ruled that the 1940 deportations of Roma to Poland had been partly racially motivated, which was sufficient to qualify victims for compensation under the Federal Compensation Law.59 Young Roma in Czechoslovakia, like their Jewish counterparts, grew up conscious of the stigma associated with the label ‘citizen of Gypsy (or Jewish) origin’ and searched for ways of understanding everyday discrimination against cikáni. The parallels between Roma and Jewish memories of genocide were striking but so too were the differences. Jews were recognised only as general victims of fascism or active anti-fascists in official narratives of the Occupation. An official tourist guide to the former ghetto of Terezín / Theresienstadt referred in the 1980s to ‘360,000 Czech citizens killed by the Nazis’ without mentioning that nearly all of them were Jews.60 Historians are now beginning to explore the alternative memories that nonetheless flourished amongst the Jewish community, who were sometimes able to create memorial projects countering the official narrative. Thus during the 1950s the main project of the Jewish Museum in Prague was the creation of a Memorial to the Victims of Nazi Persecution in the disused Pinkas Synagogue, which listed the names of Czech Jews killed by the Nazis in black paint on the whitewashed walls.61 Jewish youth groups in Prague during the 1960s, as Alena Heitlinger has shown, increasingly sought to understand 58 59 60 61

Ibid. Julia von dem Knesebeck, The Roma Struggle for Compensation in Postwar Germany (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2011). Cited in Alena Heitlinger, ‘Politicizing Jewish Memory in Postwar Czechoslovakia’, East European Jewish Affairs, 35: 2 (December 2005), 135–153. Heitlinger, ‘Politicizing Jewish Memory’.

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their identity as the children of assimilated parents who were frequently reluctant to reveal their family histories.62 Yet the creation of a Jewish state and the politics of anti-Zionism in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet bloc more widely meant that Jewish activism was viewed as a threat to national security to a much greater degree than Gypsy mobilisation. The StB monitored Jewish activism, and an official anti-Zionist campaign was launched in the wake of the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. The Jewish presence in Czechoslovakia during the 1960s was viewed by the state as a political threat in a way that Roma were not.63 Documenting the memories of survivors was a central part of the work of the Romani Unions. Unlike Jews, Roma did not have communal places of worship that could serve as sites of memory. Romani memories of persecution were transmitted through the generations orally through songs and stories. But Romani activists also believed in the importance of written documentation, commemoration, and compensation. The Slovak Romani Union, for instance, distributed questionnaires to its members that asked about their participation in the wartime resistance (odboj) or internment in concentration camps.64 At least 150 completed questionnaires were received by the Central Committee. The majority concerned Roma who had been imprisoned at the ‘Gypsy camp’ near the munitions factory in Dubnice nad Váhom during the war. Asked to provide a ‘brief description of resistance activities’, a typical reply was, ‘Arrested as an unreliable Gypsy by the fascist regime’. Others claimed, ‘I was a person of an inferior race, as Hitler described citizens of gypsy origin. I worked under very difficult conditions on the construction of the hydropower plant on the Váh at Dubnice nad Váhom’, and one woman wrote, ‘My husband came under suspicion only because he was a gypsy and dangerous for the fascist regime.’65 The unions’ efforts to document wartime persecution coincided with the efforts of a small number of professional historians who began to research the history of Roma in the Protectorate during this period. Historians Ctibor Nečas, Vlasta Kladivová, and Bartolomej Daniel were working on a history of Czech Roma during the war in time for the thirtieth anniversary of the liquidation of the Gypsy camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau 62 63

64 65

Alena Heitlinger, ‘Jewish youth activism and institutional responses in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s’, East European Jewish Affairs, 32:2 (2002), 25–42. For an argument about ‘Jewish danger’, see Jacob Ari Labendz, ‘Lectures, murder and a phony terrorist: managing “Jewish power and danger” in 1960s Communist Czechoslovakia’, East European Jewish Affairs, 44:1 (2014), 84–108. SNA Bratislava, f. ZCR, kart. 28, inv. č. 55: ÚV ZCR: Dotazniky (Odboj). SNA Bratislava, f. ZCR, kart. 28, inv. č. 55: ÚV ZCR: Dotazniky (Odboj).ÚV ZCR: Dotazniky (Odboj), kart. 28, inv. č. 55, f. ZCR, SNA Bratislava.

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in 1974.66 In September 1971 Antonín Daniel and other Czech Roma officials asked researchers at the Military History Institute (Vojenský Historický Ústav, VHÚ) for assistance in ‘finding evidence to prove the racial persecution of Gypsies on the territory of the ČSR’. The SCR suggested issuing its own certificates to members in the same way as the Central Council of Jewish Religious Communities, whose recipients then used these certificates to apply for the Ministry of National Defence certificates.67 Anna Danielová, the secretary of the commission for Romani victims within the Czech Romani Union, reported that the SPB and VHÚ refused to acknowledge that that Roma had been racially persecuted. During the fascist occupation our kinsmen were imprisoned in concentration camps on racial grounds, many of them died as a result of the physical and mental hardships, only a very few returned home. Most of them (the survivors) have had their health destroyed, they need constant medical treatment, and many of them have already died. In order to qualify for early retirement or disability pensions, they need a certificate proving that they were political prisoners according to Article 8 of Law 255/1946 Sb.68

In response to Roma claims, officials argued that Gypsies were persecuted because they were criminals and not on racial grounds, apparently referring to documents issued by the International Tracing Service at Bad Arolsen which described Gypsies as, ‘Asocial, workshy, saboteurs – black triangles’ (‘Asocial [sic], Berufscheu, Berufsbrechr – Schwarzer Winkel – t.zn. nežádoucí, štítící se práce, sabotér – černý trojúhelník’). In her report, Anna Danielová claimed to have told officials, ‘Gypsies were not deported to concentration camps as undesirable elements, but for racial reasons. Why else were small children deported, women and old people? And they were mass actions!’ Furthermore, Danielová reported: I was asked if I had been imprisoned myself, and if I remembered everything that had happened 28 years ago. I responded precisely, explaining how everything happened, the exact dates of the transports, which Gypsy settlements were liquidated, from where the Gypsies were deported en masse (Oslavany, Kostivárna, Brno, Uherčice, Ivan, Svatoborˇice, Čeložnice, Kyjov, Strážnice, Petrov, Vizovice, Uherské Hradiště – mainly southern Moravia). The main 66 67

68

SNA Bratislava, f. ZCR, kart. 28, inv. č. 56, sp. ČSVA: Medziodborový team pre rómsku problematiku. MZA Brno, f. ÚV SCR: Zápis o jednání s prˇedstaviteli Ústrˇedního výboru Cikánů Romů ČSR, konaného dne 29.9.1971 na Komisi MNO pro vydávání osvědčení podle zákona č. 255/ 1946 Sb. MZA Brno, f. ÚV SCR: Zápis o jednání s prˇedstaviteli Ústrˇedního výboru Cikánů Romů ČSR, konaného dne 29.9.1971 na Komisi MNO pro vydávání osvědčení podle zákona č. 255/ 1946 Sb.

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concentration point in Brno was at the slaughterhouse . . . In Jihlava, Olomouc, Ostrava, Prague, and so on. In Slovakia it was the villages at the border between Moravia and Slovakia, and western Slovakia.69

Pressure from Romani activists and individual claims from victims of Nazi persecution eventually pushed the Czechoslovak Union of AntiFascist Fighters to move halfway to recognising Roma as a special category of victim. Following the October 1969 agreement between the ČSSR and the Federal Republic of Germany on compensating victims of pseudo-medical experiments (Entschädigung für Opfer von Menschenversuchen), the SPFB asked the Romani Unions to review around 80 claims submitted by Roma, out of a total of 1,255 applications processed.70 The Slovak Roma Union was also asked to review claims for compensation ‘for pseudo-medical experiments, carried out by Nazi doctors in concentration camps, which also affected your kinsmen’.71 Normally such claims were processed on three levels, first by so-called camp commissions (former prisoners of the concentration camps where claimants alleged the experiments had been carried out), then by expert commissions created by the SPB that were supposed to check the veracity of the claim and the medical status of the claimant, and finally by a commission under the federal SPB that decided on the amount of the compensation. The SPB followed International Red Cross practice in recognising so-called atypical experiments as well as those previously recognised by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal. From a sample of applications in the SPFB archive, it appears that few claims from Roma were upheld.72

Self-Help Deprived of a legal right to nationhood, the Romani Unions turned instead to community self-help, using their economic cooperatives to assist in alternative strategies of nation-building. The fact that Roma were permitted to set up cooperatives was unusual for a membership 69 70

71

72

MZA Brno, f. ÚV SCR: Zpráva o jednáních na Svazu protifašistických bojovníků a Vojenského hist. ústavu v Praze, 23.4.1971; emphasis added. Informační zpráva o současném stavu problematiky odškod Úování oběti zločiných lékarˇských pokusů na čs. vězních v nacistických koncentračních táborech, FMF, NA, cited in Tomáš Jelínek and Jaroslav Kučera, ‘Ohnmächtige Zaungäste: Die Entschädigung von tschechoslowakischen NS-Verfolgten’, in Hans-Günter Hockerts, Claudia Moisiel, and Tobias Winstel (eds.), Grenzen der Wiedergutmachung: die Entschädigung für NS-Verfolgte in West- und Osteuropa (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), 821. SNA Bratislava, f. Zväz Cigánov-Romov, kart. 28, inv. č. 55: Protifašist. odboj korešpondencia. Dr Jaromir Benda, Federálný výbor Československého zväzu protifašistických bojovnikov, 19.4.1972. NA Praha, Svaz protifašistických bojovníků – ústrˇední výbor, f. 1063.

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organisation within the National Front. It tapped into the socialist ethos of civic volunteering as a means of solving social problems for which the state had insufficient resources. ‘Self-help’ was a key principle of the statewide Initiative Z (Akce Z) that mobilised citizens to contribute their unpaid labour to the improvement of towns and villages by helping to build public amenities such as playgrounds or fire stations. The Union cooperatives were supposed to support ‘traditional’ Romani crafts, but union leaders also tried to use Névodrom and Bútiker to solve more pressing problems. The economic cooperatives soon attracted accusations of nepotism and corruption. However, the strategy of community self-help under the radar of the state was one that Romani activists and their supporters would pursue throughout the years of normalisation. Housing remained one of the most pressing problems confronting Roma in Czechoslovakia at the turn of the 1970s, and this was an issue to which entrepreneurial Slovak activists turned their attention. The failure of the state resettlement programme was one of the major complaints of Slovak Roma, and the first bulletin of the Romani Cultural Union had explicitly pointed out that some local National Committees had evicted Roma from their settlements and bulldozed their houses before finding them anywhere else to live.73 The Slovak Roma leadership held serious discussions about ways of alleviating the housing problems of the Slovak Roma, which one delegate described as ‘catastrophic’. Gustáv Karika, who had been trained as a Roma activist by the Information Ministry in the early 1950s, became the first director of Bútiker and saw the cooperative as a way of helping Roma to solve their own problems. The cooperative purchased a brickworks in Markušovice and set up a housing cooperative in Sabinov in 1971 with the aim of building fourteen houses. According to the union records, 276 members registered to join the housing cooperative. Bútiker offered technical assistance to its members. Later that year, Bútiker approached the Slovak Construction Ministry with plans for an ‘experimental’ two-room house as a temporary solution to housing Roma families. However, when Roma leaders proposed a more radical plan of setting up a statewide Roma housing cooperative, they were rebuffed.74 In November 1972, activists appealed to the Slovak Union of Housing Cooperatives for permission to set up all-Roma cooperatives around the

73

74

MRK Brno, f. Miroslava Holomka, Zväz Cigánov-Romov na Slovensku / Románo kultúrno jekhetániben, Ústredný výbor v Bratislave, Zpravodaj č. 1/1969 (Predseda ÚV Anton Facuna), Bratislava 10 February 1969. SNA Bratislava, f. ZCR, kart. 28, inv. č. 55. Letter from ZCR to Slovenský zväz bytových družstiev, 13 December 1971.

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country to circumvent the institutionalised and societal discrimination that was preventing Roma from buying land or obtaining building permits. They claimed that negative attitudes among the majority population – often fuelled by media reports – as well as antisocial behaviour among some Roma were an obstacle for other Roma to solve their own housing problems. But the request was refused, and the Roma were told that they should set up small cooperatives locally on a case-by-case basis. Letters to the union from Roma citizens highlighted the range of responses to these self-help initiatives. One fifteen-year-old Roma boy at a technical high school in Humenné, eastern Slovakia, wrote to the ZCR with his ‘personal opinions’ about the fact that ‘80 % of the time we are hated in our society.’ The full proposal, which ran to thirteen points, ran thus: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Establish a town (for the Roma). Build at least one big factory to employ at least 6,000 people. Build schools, hospitals, doctors’ surgeries, etc. Establish an international society for all Roma living in the world. Establish our own scientific institute based on the Z.R. (Roma Union). Help all students through the Z.R., also financially, on the condition that after finishing school they work for the Z.R. Regularly publish a magazine for the Z.R. Create various groups (dance, folklore). Run evening classes for citizens of the Z.R. Set up a People’s Militia in the town from the Z.R. Ensure our civic representatives are present whenever our future is being discussed by the municipalities or the government. Ensure strict discipline in companies, factories, and other workplaces, because only then can we expect better results. Ensure only educated people with lots of experience are put in responsible positions.

Vincent Danihel, the cultural secretary of the union, replied to the boy: ‘We Roma cannot isolate ourselves from other citizens. . . . You are a high school pupil and later you will understand these things.’ Danihel added that ‘this answer should not discourage you. The re-education of our kinsmen depends on you, and it is clear from your letter that you will continue to help the Union with your ideas and initiatives for a long time to come.’75

75

SNA Bratislava, f. ZCR, Kart 4, Letter from Anton G. to Slovak Roma Union.

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Other letters, however, were full of frustration at the perceived gulf between privileged union leaders and the limitations of life in small-town Slovakia. Thus one handwritten complaint grumbled that Elena Lacková had broken her promise of buying musical instruments for a local band: Us lads from prešov would like to have what they have in the villages and the towns. You see us youth want to live like the others live. Only no-one’s looking out for us. Because Mrs. Ilonka Lacková doesn’t care at all, 2 years ago we went to Mrs. Lacková, so that she could help us with something. We asked for some musical instruments from her. But now after 2 years she told us that she’s not giving them to us. Nothing, no musical instruments, no room. And the fact that she promised us them (the musical instruments) didn’t matter to her at all. And so the lads decided to write to you. . . . Won’t you be so nice as to buy us at least a couple of things.76

This particular complaint was sent to the headquarters of the Slovak Roma Union just a couple of weeks after the organisation staged a twoday cultural festival called Days of the Roma in Bratislava in August 1972. Featuring Roma folk music, big-beat (rock ‘n’ roll) bands such as the popular Roma Štár band from Prague, and the Soviet Romani theatre group Romen, the festival was viewed by the organisers as a huge success but sparked the ire of the KSS Politburo, which saw it as a dangerous manifestation of the ‘incorrect nationalistic tendencies’ of the Slovak Roma leadership.

Minority Rights in a New Key: Romani Politics, East and West The Roma Unions in Czechoslovakia were products of the Prague Spring, but activists were also connected to the social mobilisation of Roma, Sinti, and Gypsies in other European societies during the long 1960s. Transnational histories of 1968 in Europe have traced the connections between activists between Eastern and Western Europe and the solidarities – as well as the misunderstanding – that arose as a result of these circulations. The personal contacts between activists in Czechoslovakia and abroad during the summer of 1968 would have a significant influence on the development of the Gypsy Question during the era of ‘normalisation’. Czech and Roma activists travelled to India, the United Kingdom, and France during 1969. A colour postcard of Westminster Abbey, filed in the archives of the Czech Roma Union, shows that Eva Davidová visited London in 1969, sending an affectionate note to her 76

SNA Bratislava, f. ZCR, kart. 27, inv. č. 53: Žiadosť, 22 August 1972.

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colleagues in Brno: ‘Mirka, Tomy, Toníku, Rudo and all of you, warmest greetings from England, right now from London, where I’ve got in touch with the “Gypsy Council” and Grattan Puxon (together with Willy Guy). I’ll bring you some magazines and other interesting materials (what’s new? I’ll be back around 22 July). Tumari [Romani: yours] EVA D.’77 From this time onwards, a small number of Czechoslovak activists were in touch with Gypsy Unions and pressure groups in the West, where an international Gypsy movement was slowly emerging. Histories of the movement, mostly written by activists themselves, claim that it originated with the creation of the Comité International Tsigane in Montreuil, France, in 1965.78 The movement was small, involving only a handful of activists in each country, but transnational in the sense that campaigners deliberately sought both to build links between national organisations and to create international institutions. These efforts culminated in the First World Romani Congress, held in London in April 1971, and the creation of an International Romani Union in 1978. Roma from Eastern Europe – particularly Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia – played leading roles in the international movement. Although the Romani movement mobilised around common goals – such as lobbying the United Nations for recognition of the Roma as a national minority – it was also split over core issues, such as understandings of Romani identity, social integration, and the role of Romani elites.79 The suggestion that a theoretical analysis of the Roma might ‘enrich’ Marxist-Leninist nationality policy, put forward by the SCR in April 1970, was truly a question for the times, touching not only the Roma of Czechoslovakia but also national minorities across the globe, especially those with no territory to call their own. That the Czech Roma Union should have appealed in its 1970 memorandum to the Soviet Union as a model for Roma nationality policy appears, at first sight, an anachronistic throwback to the lip service paid to ‘Stalinist nationality policy’ during the 1950s. At the turn of the 1960s, the alternatives were remarkably limited. As highlighted in the Introduction to this book, the international system for the protection of minority rights under the League of Nations, established in 1918, had been dismantled after World War II. Postwar 77 78

79

MZA Brno, f. SCR ÚV, kart. 1: Postcard from Eva Davidová to Svaz Romů v ČSR, 14 July 1969. Thomas Acton, Gypsy politics and social change: The development of ethnic ideology and pressure politics among British Gypsies from Victorian reformism to Romany nationalism (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974). See also articles in Roma, the journal of the International Romani Union published in Chandigarh, India. Ilona Klimová-Alexander, The Romani Voice in World Politics: The United Nations and Non-State Actors (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).

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reconstruction had been legitimised by appeals to individual human rights and, in the case of the former colonial world, national self-determination. Amidst the social protests of the 1960s, however, numerous movements for regional, ethnic, and national autonomy had emerged around the world across a whole range of political systems and social conditions. This apparent revival of ‘ethnic’ particularism called into question not only the viability of multinational states but also the limits of ‘national self-determination’ – especially the assumption that modernisation would ensure that the boundaries of the nation would eventually become coterminous with those of the state – which had been the underlying principle of postwar and particularly post-colonial state-building. In 1967, the UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities announced that a new analysis of ‘the concept of minority’ in international law was needed, ‘taking into account ethnic, religious and linguistic factors and considering the position of ethnic, religious and linguistic groups in the multinational society’.80 By calling for an investigation of the implementation of Article 27 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, the UN Sub-Commission resolution launched a long drawn-out reconsideration of the place of minority rights within international law.81 In 1971 the Sub-Commission appointed Professor Francesco Caportorti as special rapporteur for the minorities issue. To recapitulate, the founding texts of the postwar international human rights order, the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, were based on the principle of non-discrimination and the universal human rights of individuals, rather than the protection of the collective rights of groups.82 The rights of minorities were generally considered subordinate to the interests of states, as demonstrated by the highly assimilationist ILO Convention on Indigenous and Tribal Populations (1957), which was based on the assumption that ‘integration into the dominant national society offered the best chance for indigenous groups to be a part of the development process of the countries in which they live.’83 The Caportorti Report,

80 81 82

83

Patrick Thornberry, International Law and the Rights of Minorities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 151. Ibid. Patrick Thornberry, ‘In the strong-room of vocabulary’, in Peter Cumper and Steven Wheatley (eds.), Minority Rights in the ‘New’ Europe (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1999), 1–14. Monika Ludescher, ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Territories and Natural Resources’, in René Kuppe and Richard Potz (eds.), Law and Anthropology: International Yearbook for Legal Anthropology Vol. 11 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1999), 158.

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finally submitted in 1977, opened up discussion on the minorities issue for the first time in the postwar era.84 At the same time, the British activist Grattan Puxon and other members of the new Gypsy pressure groups in Western Europe were lobbying the Council of Europe to adopt a resolution on the Roma of Europe. As a result, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted a recommendation on the ‘situation of Gypsies and other travellers in Europe’ in September 1969. This recommendation noted that the ‘situation of the Gypsy population in Europe is severely affected by the rapid changes in modern society, which are depriving the Gypsies and other travellers of many opportunities to carry on with their traditional trades and professions, and worsening their handicaps with regard to literacy and educational and professional training.’ The recommendation also noted that ‘discrimination’ against the Gypsies as ‘an ethnic group’ was incompatible with the ‘ideals underlying the European Convention on Human Rights and the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights’.85 For Roma living in the Eastern European socialist countries, however, the link between ‘Gypsies’ and ‘travellers’ contained in the Council of Europe recommendation was anathema. Not only had many Roma in Eastern Europe – especially in the Danubian lands formerly under Hungarian and Ottoman rule – been settled for centuries, but more recent anti-nomadism campaigns had intensified the tendency to see itinerancy as identical with ‘backwardness’. This was especially true for the integrated Roma from settled communities who were at the forefront of political activism, at least in Czechoslovakia. Although the Council of Europe recommendation referred to ‘the situation of Gypsies and other travellers in Europe’, its real target was the Roma of the West. When the huge political changes of the late 1960s enabled the Roma from East and West to make contacts across the Iron Curtain, these conflicts over the nature of Roma identity emerged more clearly in face-to-face confrontations between Roma activists from different parts of Europe. The First World Romani Congress, held in Britain in April 1971, provided Czech Roma with their first opportunity to travel abroad as official representatives of Czechoslovakia. Although a small group of Czech Roma had taken part in the Roma pilgrimage to Sainte-Marie de la Mer in southern France, the London visit was the first official trip abroad. As mentioned previously, Czechoslovak activists had made 84 85

Thornberry, International Law and the Rights of Minorities, 152. Recommendation 563 (1969) of the Consultative Assembly on the situation of Gypsies and other travellers in Europe.

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contact with Gypsy groups abroad in summer 1968. This enabled the Comité Internationale Tsigane to invite the Czech and Slovak Roma Unions to London for the First World Romani Congress. None of the Slovak Roma were permitted to attend the congress, but the request from the Czech Roma leadership was approved at the end of March by the Central Committee Foreign Affairs Department: ‘We consider that it would be correct to accept this invitation and send a delegation to the congress. It concerns an international organisation, which is trying to solve the gypsy question in a progressive way in every area: politicaleconomic, social, educational and cultural, as well as through consultative status with UNESCO.’ The report continued that all the Czech delegates were considered ‘reliable’ and could be expected to ‘publicise and support socialist political and social-humanistic ideas, draw attention to the difference between the position of the Gypsies-Roma in the capitalist countries and in our country, and refer to the various possibilities for education and social-political engagement (membership of Unions of Gypsies-Roma and their functions in representative bodies including the Federal Assembly) and to their equal standing in all areas of life of the ČSSR’.86 Three Roma delegates from Brno therefore attended the First World Romani Congress, which was held in the village of Orpington on the outskirts of London. The congress participants also travelled to Walsall, where they demonstrated outside the police station to protest the recent deaths of three Gypsy children, who had perished in a fire after a police raid on a caravan site. A festival of music and dance on Hampstead Heath was the final event on the programme. Photographs of the congress, later published in the Czech Union’s newsletter, showed the Czechoslovak delegates dressed in smart dark suits, a noticeable contrast to the rather shabbier, hirsute British delegates. In a report filed in the archives of the Czech Union, the delegates recorded their disgust at the social conditions of Roma in the West. They reported with dismay that ‘the Roma, particularly in England, are nomadic. They have no employment whatsoever and are restricted to staying in a certain place in their Karavany (mobile homes connected to a car).’ Elaborating further on the life of the English Roma, the report explained: ‘They travel collectively – at least 15 – 20 Karavany. They can get material goods to a limited extent, typically for a capitalist system, but they can never get political 86

NA Praha, f. KSČ ÚV 02/4 – Sekretariát 1966–1971, Sv 65, a.j. 117/13. Pro schůzi sekretariátu Ústrˇedního výboru KSČ – k bodu 13 – Vyslání delegace ÚV Svazu CikánůRomů ČSR na světový kongres Cikánů do Londýna. Prˇedkládá – s. L. Procházka, s. P. Auersperg, 26. brˇezna 1971.

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rights and the other social achievements and advantages provided by a socialist state. They are not engaged in political and public life.’ Moreover, ‘most English Roma live in their caravans close to rubbish dumps and other waste, without social assistance, without any kind of communication with civilisation.’ Only private associations provided any kind of social assistance: ‘Charity and again charity’.87 During their visit to an unofficial caravan site in Walsall, an industrial town in the West Midlands, where three children had recently died in a caravan fire during an eviction by the local council and police, the delegates burnt a tent and made speeches at the site to commemorate the deaths of the children. According to an article written by a British participant afterwards, ‘The delegates were so moved by the tales of harassment that they spontaneously decided to go to the local police station and make a protest. This was followed by the pinning on the door of the Town Hall of a request to the mayor of Walsall to provide a proper site. After having tea with some local Gypsies, the delegates returned to Kent.’88 In their report, the Czechoslovak delegates declared that the ‘brutal acts of the Birmingham police’ confirmed the ‘depths of the discrimination against the Roma, the way in which citizens’ rights are trampled upon in democratic states, the denial of the principles of humanism, and puts the state [the U.K.] which should and must be a model of democracy for the capitalist countries into a very bad light’.89 Particularly shocking for the Czechoslovak Roma was the recent British Caravan Sites Act (1968), which required local governments to provide adequate numbers of licensed caravan sites for Gypsies and travellers. The act had been viewed as a triumph by British activists, as it removed the restrictions on travelling imposed by previous British legislation.90 For British Gypsies, travelling was an integral part of Gypsy identity. Self-identified Roma in Czechoslovakia and other Central European countries, however, viewed ‘nomadism’ very differently. The Czech delegates to the World Romani Congress noted in horror that under the 1968 Caravan Sites Act, ‘the Roma should be restricted to certain places, reserved for their KARAVANY. Our delegation and the delegations from

87 88 89 90

MRK Brno, f. Miroslav Holomek, Report of Delegation of Central Committee of Czech Union of Gypsies-Roma to World Romani Congress, London, April 1971. Donald S. Kenrick, ‘The World Romani Congress – April 1971’, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society III, 50:3–4 (July–October 1971), 101–108. MRK Brno, f. Miroslav Holomek, Report of Delegation of Central Committee of Czech Union of Gypsies-Roma to World Romani Congress (London, April 1971). The Town and Country Planning Act 1947, the Highways Act 1959, and the Caravan Sites and Control of Development Act 1960, which had removed many of the stopping places available to previous generations.

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socialist states did not agree with this proposal, because it is clearly a case of overt discrimination against the Roma in England.’91 This attitude partly reflected recent social changes in Czechoslovakia and partly longterm historical trends. Since 1959, nomadism had been illegal in Czechoslovakia, and the police, together with local governments, had waged an often-violent campaign against Roma who continued to travel in family groups. However, many Central European Roma – especially those in the Hungarian lands of the Habsburg Empire (contemporary Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania) – had been settled for centuries. Only certain Romani groups – notably the Vlach or Olah Roma – had travelled as a way of life. The Czech Roma leadership’s report on the World Romani Congress must clearly be read with caution. The delegates to the congress were closely supervised by the Czechoslovak authorities through the embassy in London and required to submit a report on their activities to party and state authorities. Tomáš Holomek noted afterwards that ‘only we could act as representatives [of the Czechoslovak Roma] and do political work in the capitalist world. Our embassy, as well as the Central Committee of the KSČ and the National Front recognised that we did a bit of useful work.’ As Antonín Daniel explained, ‘We were supposed to convince the Roma in the West, that the socialist system is opposed to capitalist states. To struggle for the rights and freedoms of the Roma in the West too. For example, in London there were Roma from Hungary, from Yugoslavia, from the Soviet Union, from Bulgaria.’ Ladislav Demeter claimed that the Czechoslovak delegation had agreed on their strategy with Roma from the other socialist states: ‘Before our presentation at the Congress we made an agreement with the Roma from the socialist countries.’ Afterwards the Czechoslovak Roma had apparently been praised by the Czechoslovak embassy in London. Both Demeter and Daniel reported that the embassy staff had been ‘very positive’ about the delegation’s performance at the World Romani Congress.92 As long-serving party activists, the Roma Union leaders seem to have viewed their participation at the World Romani Congress partly as a means of fulfilling their duty to the KSČ. At the same time, the delegates also viewed international contacts with the Romani movement abroad as a means of creating solidarity among the Roma at home. Internationalism, according to Daniel’s interpretation, would provide a way of generating solidarity among the Roma across national boundaries. ‘From this 91 92

MRK Brno, f. Holomek, Report of Delegation. MZA Brno, f. SCR, kart. 2, Zápis z mimorˇádného zasedání prˇed.UVSCR, 1.2.1972 v Praze.

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international perspective, it’s not simply a matter of indifference to me that the Roma in Slovakia live badly, for example.’ Tomáš Holomek agreed: ‘We must continue to make international contacts with Roma in the socialist and the capitalist countries, and in the capitalist states we must disseminate our progressive thinking . . . to expand the politics both of our party and of the capitalist states, and that is not a trivial thing.’93

Conclusion The Roma Unions survived for just four years, before being forced into ‘voluntary’ liquidation. Publications such as the Roma memorandum in Románo Lil or Milena Hübschmannová’s article ‘What Is This So-Called Gypsy Question?’ caused party officials to worry about Gypsy nationalism. In September 1970 the Department for the Management of Party Affairs, the unit in charge of ‘normalizing’ post-1968 political life in the Czech lands by purging unreliable members from the KSČ, warned in an internal report that ‘the Gypsy intelligentsia, supported by outsiders, is starting to pursue aims that are not in the Union programmes, specifically demands for Gypsies-Roma to be recognised as a nationality.’94 The report advised the KSČ Presidium to ‘apply pressure’ to ensure that ‘partisan scientific research is not translated into political practice, thus supporting incorrect ideas’.95 Anton Facuna was removed from his post as chairman of the Slovak Roma Union in spring 1970 on charges of embezzling union funds.96 A party cell was created within the ZCR and a new Presidium appointed. The KSS carefully screened the new chairman and Presidium, ensuring that seven out of eleven appointees were Communist Party members. At the end of 1972 the KSS Secretariat instructed the National Front to investigate the Slovak Roma Union and its cooperative, Bútiker, for

93 94

95 96

MZA Brno, f. SCR, kart. 2, Zápis z mimorˇádného zasedání prˇed.UVSCR, 1.2.1972 v Praze. NA Praha, f. KSČ AÚV 02/7, sv. 32, a.j. 58, bod. 2, 20 August 1970. Byro Ústrˇedního výboru KSČ pro rˇízení stranické práce v českých zemích. Zpráva o současném stavu rˇešení otázek cikánského obyvatelstva v České socialistické republice. Prˇíloha II, Stanovisko oddělení státních orgánů a společenských organizací byra ÚV KSČ ke zprávě prˇedsedy vlády ČSR o současném stavu rˇešení cikánského obyvatelstva v ČSR. (L. Procházka). Ibid. SNA Bratislava, f. ÚV KSS – Sekretariát, f. 04/a.j. 58, 26.1.1971 (2.2.1971), fasc. 1181/ 12, kart. 331, ‘Informatívna správa o činnosti Zväzu Romov na Slovensku; návrh na vytvorenie straníckej skupiny a schválenie vedúceho tajomníka ÚV Zväzu Romov na Slovensku.’ Predkladá: s. Futej.

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corruption.97 Managers of Bútiker were accused of corruption, violating regulations on accounting and the Labour Code, and operating a wage policy that was ‘dubious, if not bordering on criminality’. Bútiker was accused of luring Gypsies away from their jobs in industry, construction, or services by offers of higher salaries, thereby violating the principles of socialist remuneration. The cooperative was accused of harbouring ‘speculators’ who had previously worked in agricultural cooperatives and the economic organisations attached to sports clubs. Promises of material and financial assistance – such as social benefits, building permits, and subsidies for building private houses – were allegedly being used to tempt Roma into becoming ZCR members. The KSS claimed that the ZCR leadership was simply bribing the Roma to boost its legitimacy among the Gypsy population, many of whom would otherwise refuse to accept advice ‘from their own kinsmen’.98 The ZCR was accused of deviating from its statutes by ‘presenting itself as the representatives of all Gypsies, including those who are not Union members, which is in conflict with the Marxist-Leninist principles of our cultural-social organisations’. Concretely, the ZCR was accused of meddling in areas which were the exclusive competence of the state administration, by negotiating with the local authorities about the sale of ‘Gypsy shacks’, providing social and financial assistance to Roma, and intervening in criminal cases involving Roma defendants. For example, the ZCR tried to ‘act as a substitute for the National Committees’ to get higher compensation for Roma whose shacks were going to be demolished.99 The concluding report of the KSS Party Presidium on the Slovak Roma Union stated that the Roma had ‘shown more interest in economic enterprise than anything else, and that most of the ZCR members were at a low political and cultural level, which rendered them incapable of running such an Union’.100 Both Bútiker and its Czech equivalent, Névodrom, were criticised for misusing National Front funds – supposed to support ‘traditional gypsy crafts (coppersmiths, blacksmiths, pottery)’ – to ‘conduct entrepreneurial activities for socialist 97

98

99

100

SNA Bratislava, f. ÚV KSS – Sekretariát, Zasadnutie 17.10.1972, kr. 372, fasc. 68118 (f. 04, a.j. 33), Návrh na zloženie pracovnej skupiny pre posúdenie politickej sitúacie a činnosť Zväzu Cigánov-Rómov na Slovensku a jeho učelového zariadenia ‘Butiker.’ SNA Bratislava, f. ÚV KSS Predsedníctvo – kr. 1335, j. 566/3, Zasadnutie Predsedníctvo 14.11.1972, Sučasný stav a perspektíva riešenia zvyšovania kultúrnej a sociálnej úrovne cigánskych obyvateľov (predkladá s. Colotka, S. Krocsány, 6.11.1972). NA Praha, AÚV KSČ, f. 02/1 – Prˇedsednictvo 1971–1976 sv. 74, a.j. 71/9. Usnesení 67. schůze prˇedsednictva ÚV KSČ ze dne 23. brˇezna 1973 (Zpráva o situaci a činnosti Svazu Cikánů-Romů v ČSR a Zväzu Cigánov-Romov na Slovensku. Prˇedkládá: s. F. Ondrˇich, s. T. Trávníček, 14.3.1973). Ibid.

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economic organisations’, frequently by ‘selling labour force’ – in other words, hiring out Roma construction workers on an informal basis for short-term work in state companies. In late February 1973 officials in the KSS Presidium pulled the Slovak Romani Union out of the National Front.101 One month later the KSČ Presidium in Prague agreed to close down both unions. Party members within each organisation were informed that ‘the voluntary termination of their activities’ was imminent. Union leaders were thus forced to present the closure of the organisations as their own decision. The final party report on the Roma Unions stated that they ‘originated in the crisis period of 1968–1989 as an expression of earlier attempts to gain recognition as a nationality for ethnic groups of gypsies, with the aim of becoming their political representatives’. However, the report continued, the state authorities had disagreed with this approach, permitting Unions of Gypsies-Roma only to operate as ‘social organisations with a cultural and educational mission, in order to raise the low social and cultural level of the gypsy population’. The liquidation of the Roma Unions marked the end of legal collective organising for Roma in socialist Czechoslovakia.

101

SNA Bratislava, f. ÚV KSS – Predsedníctvo – č. krabice 1341, j. 720/13 Zásadnutie Predsedníctva 3.1.1973 (21.12.1972) Správa o situácii a činnosti Zväzu Cigánov-Romov na Slovensku a jeho účelového zariadenia Bútiker.

7

The 1970s Human Rights, Minority Rights, Roma Rights?

In 1978, a young journalist named Anna Klempárová travelled from eastern Slovakia to Geneva to attend the Second World Romani Congress, organised by the International Romani Union (IRU) with support from the World Council of Churches and the Indian government. At the congress, the IRU appealed to the United Nations to recognise Roma as a nation. Leading Communist officials were enraged to discover that a ‘Gypsy citizen’ had attended an international event at which the socialist countries were accused of discrimination against their Gypsy populations.1 The State Security (ŠtB) opened a file on Klempárová under the code name ROMA (somewhat ironically, given the official insistence on using the derogatory term ‘Gypsy’).2 Official outrage was magnified by the publication of a 1978 essay by the dissident Charter 77 movement, alleging that official discrimination against Roma in socialist Czechoslovakia was tantamount to genocide. Klempárová’s journey to Geneva was exceptional, but it also opens up a larger question: how does the question of minority rights – and especially rights for Roma – fit into the recently established narrative of the 1970s as a ‘breakthrough decade’ for human rights?3 This chapter asks how Romani activists from Czechoslovakia turned to the quintessentially liberal ideology of human rights during the 1970s as a means of gaining collective recognition as a nationality at a moment when Roma and Sinti civil rights movements were emerging in Western Europe. 1

2 3

SNA Bratislava, f. ÚV KSS – Sekretariát, Zasadnutie 26.6.1978 (4.7.1978), kr. 514, fasc. 1112/8: Kontrolná správa o plnení uznesení straníckých orgánov a štatných orgánov prijatých k riešeniu problémov zaostalej časti cigánskej obyvateľov v SSR, Informácia o II. Svetovom kongrese Cigánov. Archiv Ústavu pamäti národa, Bratislava, inv. č. 10554: KS ZNB Správa štátnej bezpečnosti, Košice, Návrh na založenie spis preverovanej osoby krycieho mena “ROMA”, 13 April 1981. See, in particular, the essay by Jan Eckel, ‘The Rebirth of Politics from the Spirit of Morality: Explaining the Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s’, in Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn (eds.), The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); for a fuller study, see Jan Eckel, Die Ambivalenz des Guten: Menschenrechte in der internationale Politik seit den 1940ern (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014).

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215

The history of post-1968 Czechoslovakia has played a significant role in recent scholarship on human rights. The defeat of the Prague Spring and the emergence of Charter 77, led by the eloquent playwright Václav Havel, are seen by Samuel Moyn as critical turning points in the global loss of faith in socialism and the rise of humanitarian morality as an alternative path to social justice and freedom.4 The 1975 Helsinki Final Act, which obliged Eastern European regimes to ratify the United Nations human rights covenants, also features in these narratives as the trigger for the transnational mobilisation of human rights monitors in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and the United States.5 Yet these narratives are based on an interpretation of Czech dissident groups such as Charter 77 as ‘human rights’ movements in the contemporary sense, an interpretation that this chapter will challenge. During this period, the Czech dissident movement Charter 77 internationalised the Gypsy Question by criticising socialist policies towards Roma in the language of human rights. At the same time, human rights advocates in Western Europe – such as the Society for Threatened Peoples in West Germany and the Minority Rights Group in Great Britain – adopted Roma living in state socialist countries as an object of humanitarian concern.6 But the Helsinki narrative that views Charter 77 as a uniform ‘dissident movement’ using the language of human rights tells only part of the story. Rights talk enabled oppositional movements to gain an audience abroad, but as Jonathan Bolton recently argued, rather than ‘speaking of human rights (or even, in the language of the Final Act, the “human dignity” from which these rights derived), Czech dissidents were generally more at home with a vocabulary of alienation, crisis, subjectivity, and authenticity.’7 The philosophical roots of Czech dissent were located in revisionist Marxism, phenomenology and existentialism, often embedded in larger theories of history.8 The importance of history also raises another question that is neglected by accounts of Czech dissent in the

4 5

6 7 8

Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Sarah Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Daniel C. Thomas, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise of Communism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). For further discussion of the league, see Lora Wildenthal, The Language of Human Rights in West Germany (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Jonathan Bolton, Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, the Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 26–27. Bolton, Worlds of Dissent; Michael Gubser, The Far Reaches: Phenomenology, Ethics, and Social Renewal in Central Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), especially chapters 6–8.

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Helsinki narrative: the turn to human rights in Czech dissent was accompanied by a revival of discourses of the nation, and the visions of community constructed by Czech dissidents were far from the ‘post-national civil society’ that contemporary Western observers of Charter 77 imagined.9 This chapter takes the critique of the Helsinki narrative in a new direction by taking the Charter 77 essay on the situation of the Gypsies-Roma as a starting point for asking how alternative social movements of social workers and cultural activists – who did not belong to the narrow circle of internationally recognised dissidents – mobilised around ideals of community and solidarity in support of Roma rights during the 1970s and 1980s.10 They Have Never Had It So Good In contrast to the crises experienced in Western Europe, the 1970s in the Eastern bloc were in many ways a decade of peace and security.11 In Czechoslovakia, the ‘normalization’ of socialist rule that followed the Soviet invasion in August 1968 was accompanied by a further expansion of social and economic rights for workers and especially for women and children.12 By the 1970s Czechoslovakia was one of the most egalitarian welfare states in the socialist bloc. At the same time, however, the proSoviet leadership under Slovak First Secretary Gustáv Husák instigated massive purges of ‘politically unreliable’ individuals from the Communist Party and all positions of authority on the basis of the euphemistically titled document Lessons from the Crisis Period.13 The expansion of social welfare was used by the KSČ regime to legitimise continuing restrictions 9

10

11

12

13

Michal Kopeček, ‘Human Rights Facing a National Past: Dissident “Civic Patriotism” and the Return of History in East Central Europe, 1968–1989’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 38:4 (2012). Miroslav Vaněk (ed.), Obyčejní lidé . . .? Pohled do života tzv. mlčící většiny: Životopisná vyprávění prˇíslušniků dělnických profesí a inteligence (Prague: Academia, 2008); Miroslav Vaněk and Lenka Krátká (eds.), Príběhy (ne)obyčejných profesí: Česká společnost v období tzv. normalizace a transformace (Prague: Karolinum, 2014); Miroslav Vaněk et al. (eds.), Ostrůvky svobody: Kulturní a občanské activity mladé generace v 80. letech v Československu (Prague: ÚSD, 2002); Milan Otáhal, Opoziční proudy v české společnosti 1969–1989 (Prague: ÚSD, 2011). Stephen Kotkin, ‘The Kiss of Debt: The East Bloc Goes Borrowing’, in Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel J. Sargent (eds.), The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Tomasz Inglot, Welfare States in East Central Europe, 1919–2004 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Lenka Kalinová, Společenské proměny v čase socialistického experimentu: K sociálním dějinám v letech 1945–1969 (Prague: Academia, 2007). Poučení z krizového vývoje ve straně a společnosti po XIII. sjezdu KSČ: rezoluce o aktuálních otázkách jednoty strany schválená na plenárním zasedání ÚV KSČ v prosinci 1970 (Prague: Odd. propagandy a agitace ÚV KSČ, 1971).

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on its citizens’ civil and political rights. Socialist legality was revived as a weapon in the regime’s struggle against citizens who did not conform to the political and moral rules of normalisation. Rather than overt violence, a rhetorical emphasis on law and order was used to justify the criminalisation of political opponents of the regime, as well as anyone judged to be shirking work or their civic duties, as ‘parasites’ or ‘disturbers of the peace’.14 In this context, people who openly expressed criticism of the regime were vilified in the press as enemies of the people, subject to surveillance and harassment by the State Security, and forced out of their jobs. Yet at the same time, as Peter Bugge has recently noted, ‘references to “law and order” had a central legitimizing function in the social discourse of the Husák regime, and . . . the resulting need to translate policies of repression into legal measures inhibited the authorities in their assertion of power and created an ambiguous window of opportunity for independent social activism.’15 The most famous parable of the social contract between the regime and its citizens based on guarantees of material security in exchange for outward conformity was Václav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless, describing the ordinary Czech greengrocer who without thinking hangs a sign outside his shop every day bearing the slogan ‘Workers of the World Unite!’ Yet as Paulina Bren has eloquently demonstrated, the experience of the greengrocer – and not dissidents such as Havel – was the most salient for the majority of Czechoslovaks during the 1970s and 1980s.16 This was true not only of Czechoslovakia but also of other regimes, especially the German Democratic Republic and Hungary. The late socialist state and its citizens shared a mutual interest in safeguarding ‘the right to peace’ and a quiet life in the domestic, as well as the public spheres.17 Roma were singled out for special measures in the expanded welfare state. Responsibility for the ‘Gypsy population’ was placed in a tiny Unit for the Gypsy Population and Unadaptable Citizens (neprˇizpůsobené občany) within the Department of Social Welfare at the Federal Ministry

14

15 16 17

For a discussion of the regime’s legitimacy during normalisation, partly maintained through appeals to ‘peace and quiet’, see Michal Pullmann, Konec experimentu: Prˇestavba a pád komunismu v Československu (Prague: Scriptorium, 2011). Peter Bugge, ‘Normalization and the Limits of the Law: The Case of the Czech Jazz Section,’ East European Politics and Societies, 22 (2008), 282–318. Paulina Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). Paul Betts, Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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of Labour and Social Affairs.18 National Committees for the Gypsy population were re-established in the Czech and Slovak republics, now that Czechoslovakia had become a federal state. Accompanied by an ever-growing array of tables and statistics, the committee reports were filled with a constant litany of complaints about unhygienic housing, an explosive birth rate, crime, and low educational achievements of the ‘Gypsy population’.19 In 1972, the Slovak Communist Party reported that ninety thousand Slovak Gypsies were living in overcrowded, unhygienic settlements. Despite earlier attempts to ‘liquidate’ Gypsy slums and rural settlements, the report claimed that the situation was deteriorating, with an average of 9 people living in every ‘shack’ compared with 6.4 in 1964.20 The shift in policy towards Roma was symptomatic of the focus on ‘peace and security’ centred on guaranteeing citizens’ rights to a quiet life; instead of resettlement schemes to move Gypsies around the country, the socialist government now decided to build special estates in areas with large numbers of Roma. This new policy was linked to the large programmes of urban housing construction launched in the early 1970s, which have become synonymous with the panelák – the prefab housing blocks – that exemplied the Husák era. In towns where the Gypsy population was considered particularly problematic – such as Most in northern Bohemia and Košice in eastern Slovakia – local planners explicitly constructed model housing estates for Gypsies. The Czech borderlands – which had been the focus of the utopian projects of ethnic and social engineering since the end of World War II – were the first location for such a plan.

18

19

20

NA, Ministerstvo práce a sociálních věcí (MPSV), f. 997, inv. č. 8500/70 uncatalogued: Zpráva o současném stavu rˇešení otázek cikánského obyvatelstva v České socialistické republice – 5.6.1970 – pro schůzi prˇedsednictva vlády ČSR; SNA Bratislava, f. ÚV KSS Predsedníctvo – kr. 1335, j. 566/3, Zasadnutie Predsedníctvo 14.11.1972, Sučasný stav a perspektíva riešenia zvyšovania kultúrnej a sociálnej úrovne cigánskych obyvateľov. SNA Bratislava, f. ÚV KSS – Predsedníctvo – kart. 1402, a.j. 1452/13: Zásadnutie Predsedníctva 13.12.1974 (10.12.1974) Správa o plnení uzn. vlady SSR č 94/1972 a 377/1972 o riešení cig. otázky s osobitnými zameraním na Vsl. kraj a spresnenie koncepcie riešenia cig. otázky do roku 1980. ÚV KSS – Predsedníctvo – č. krabice 1382, j. 1214/13 Zásadnutie Predsedníctva 18.4.1974 (6.4.1974) Informácie o dynamika populačného vývoj cig. obyvateľstva v SSR a o vývoji a stave jasieľ a materských škôl a o opatreniach pre zlepšenie situácie – Inf. b.; ÚV KSS – Predsedníctvo – č. krabice 1487, j. 421/13 Zásadnutie Predsedníctva ÚV KSS 7.7.1977 (4.7.1977) Rozbor kriminality ciganských občanov s osobitným zreteľom na kriminalitu mladistvých z ich radov. SNA Bratislava, f. ÚV KSS Predsedníctvo – kr. 1335, j. 566/3, Zasadnutie Predsedníctvo 14.11.1972, Sučasný stav a perspektíva riešenia zvyšovania kultúrnej a sociálnej úrovne cigánskych obyvateľov.

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The decision to build a special Gypsy housing estate in Chanov – which soon inspired similar projects in the Slovak cities of Bardejov, Rimavská Sobota, and Košice – arose for the purpose of rehousing Gypsies from the old mining city of Most, which was demolished to make room for the expansion of an open-face mine in the brown coal fields of northern Bohemia. Located in the Czech borderlands (formerly Sudetenland), Most was ethnically cleansed of Jews and Germans during the Nazi occupation and postwar expulsions, and Eagle Glassheim sees in the city’s postwar history the lingering connections ‘between ethnic cleansing, social and demographic engineering, urban planning and renewal, and environmental exploitation’.21 The story of Most has become famous because the city authorities also decided to save the city’s church from destruction – by moving it approximately one kilometre from its original location. Much of the historic Old Town of Most was demolished in the late 1960s, and by 1975 the only remaining inhabitants of the decaying buildings that remained were a few hundred Roma families.22 The Most city council and government officials in the Czech Republic’s Gypsy Committee then drew up a controversial plan for rehousing Roma from the Old Town of Most in a model estate specifically for Gypsies on the outskirts of the New Town. An initial proposal from the city council to place the Gypsies in a special estate comprising lowerstandard housing (second- and third- category apartments) raised strong objections from the national Gypsy Committee. Resettling Gypsies was seen as a ‘very sensitive political matter’, and the committee chairman worried that creating an estate solely for Gypsies was analogous to the ‘bourgeois’ policy of relocating slums without getting rid of them.23 Other officials agreed that ‘concentrating’ Roma families was not an ideal solution, even if the new housing was of good quality, ‘because it is difficult to improve the socio-economic situation of families living in multi-storey blocks, as the most backward families will have a negative effect on the young, and on families living at a higher [cultural] level’.24 Nonetheless, the plan went ahead. To prevent the Chanov estate from further increasing ‘Gypsy backwardness’, the Most city council proposed a range of special measures to ensure that the Gypsies’ new environment

21 22 23 24

Eagle Glassheim, ‘Most, the Town That Moved: Coal, Communists and the “Gypsy Question” in Postwar Czechoslovakia,’, Environment and History, 13 (2007), 457. Ibid. NA, f. 997, kart. 54, MPSV Komise pro cikánské obyvatelstvo: Zápis z jednání Komise vlády Ćeské socialistické republiky pro otázky cikánského obyvatelstva dne 1. rˇíjna 1971. Ibid.

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would not only maintain social discipline but also play an active role in educating its inhabitants. The Chanov estate was conceived as a model settlement, with modern Category I housing units, a nursery and kindergarten, cultural centre, and police station, and ‘special measures’ targeting Gypsies’ perceived needs, such as a ban on selling strong alcohol (apart from the weaker sort of beer), reduced fees for preschool child care, and bonuses for teaching staff and social workers at the local school, who would be given training in the Gypsy language (cikánština). Courses in family planning, contraception, and sex education were to be organised for fourteen- and fifteen-year-old boys and girls.25 Targets for integrating Gypsies as model citizens in the New Town of Most were planned in detail: the socialisation of Roma children was to be achieved by ensuring the Chanov kindergarten was at full capacity by 1980, and by 1982 children graduating from the kindergarten were expected to master Czech and possess ‘normal hygienic habits’. Truancy was to be reduced to five hours per pupil by 1983 and to three hours by 1984. By 1985, every military service recruit should be literate, at least 50 per cent of Gypsy workers under the age of thirty should have completed at least one professional training course, young couples moving into their own flat should be able to furnish it from their own savings, 50 per cent of the estate’s caretakers (domovní důvěrník) should be Roma, and at least fifty families should have attained a level of ‘cultured living’ that would enable them to leave the estate and live elsewhere.26 In practice the construction of Chanov lagged behind schedule, and the estate did not achieve its goals.27 But the experiment was taken as a model in Slovakia, with similar plans discussed as a ‘solution’ to the integration of Roma in eastern Slovakia. In 1973, the Presidium of the Czechoslovak Communist Party noted that district National Committees in Bardejov, Košice, and Rimavská Sobota were ‘planning experimental special estates for Gypsies in the framework of mass housing programmes, with their own kindergartens and elementary schools. It is envisaged that only gypsy families who work properly and send their children to school regularly will be allowed to live in these special areas. At the same time, they are planning to employ the most capable Gypsies 25

26 27

NA, f. 997, kart. 60, MPSV Komise pro cikánské obyvatelstvo: Politicko organizační opatrˇení k prˇesídlění zbývajícího cikánského obyvatelstva ze staré části města do obytného strˇediska Most – Chanov – from ONV and Měst NV v Mostě, 12 November 1975. Ibid. Jaroslav Haušild, ‘Korˇeny chanovských problemů’, in Marek Jakoubek and Lenka Budilková (eds.), Romové a Cikáni. Neznámí a Známí: Interdisciplinární pohled (Voznice: Leda, 2008).

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as wardens and caretakers.’28 In Košice, an estate in the sprawling new paneláky built around the city was reserved for Gypsies, with the modern-sounding name of Luník IX. Responsible for implementing these integrationist measures were local agents of the state: the social workers, teachers, apartment caretakers, and policemen responsible for maintaining law and order who constituted one of the few fragile bridges between the late socialist regimes and their citizens. The tensions between state paternalism, popular demands for security, and the autonomy of ‘needy’ citizens were exemplified by the role of social workers, health experts, and doctors in implementating the informal practice of offering cash incentives to Roma women to undergo sterilisation. This policy originated in the context of a shift in the conception of social rights from citizenship based on equality of paid work to one based on ‘needs’ during the 1960s. A Ministry of Health decree on sterilisation, adopted on 12 December 1971, permitted sterilisation to be carried out by consent or by request of the person involved, as laid down in the 1966 Health Care Act.29 This decree introduced subjective as well as objective criteria for sterilisation; in other words, it allowed for a person to request a sterilisation procedure as a means of contraception under certain conditions. A commission was meant to decide in all cases. However, on 13 September 1973 the Ministry of Labour adopted a decree which provided for the possibility of district National Committees granting a one-off cash allowance to ‘citizens who have undergone a medical intervention under special regulations in the interest of a healthy population and overcoming adverse life conditions for the family’.30 (The Ministry of Health claimed that in 1989, social benefits were granted to 34,707 recipients and the one-off allowance to 803 women, of whom 419 were Romani.) In 1976, the Ministry of Labour published a handbook called Work with the Gypsy Population. In the chapter on health care, the handbook stated, ‘The opinion still prevails among the gypsy population that a woman is only a woman when she constantly gives birth 28

29

30

SNA Bratislava, f. ÚV KSS Predsedníctvo – kr. 1335, j. 566/3, Zasadnutie Predsedníctvo 14.11.1972, Sučasný stav a perspektíva riešenia zvyšovania kultúrnej a sociálnej úrovne cigánskych obyvateľov. The information in the following paragraph is partly based on the archives of the MPSV Government Committee (National Archives of the Czech Republic) and partly on the 2005 report of the Czech Ombudsman: Verˇejný ochrance práv, Záverečné stanovisko ve věci šetrˇení sterilizací prováděných v rozporu s právem a návrhy opatrˇení nápravě, www.ochrance.cz/dokumenty/dokument.php?doc=329. From the statement of the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs CSR to General Prosecutor, April 1990. Cited in Verˇejný ochrance práv, Záverečné stanovisko ve věci šetrˇení sterilizací prováděných v rozporu s právem a návrhy opatrˇení nápravě: From the statement of the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs CSR to General Prosecutor, April 1990.

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to children.’ The handbook warns that ‘it is necessary to explain to them’ that too many pregnancies can ‘weaken the organism and can have fatal consequences (such as weakening the uterine muscles, haemorrhages or even bleeding to death, embolism of the amniotic fluid and so on), leading to death’. The book then explained: For this reason, a woman can be sterilised on health grounds if she is younger than 35 years old, and has at least 4 children, or if she is older than 35 and has at least 3 children. In the relevant cases it is necessary to inform gypsy women and men about this possibility: however, it is always necessary to cooperate with the relevant gynaecologist, who should, on the recommendation of the social worker, invite the woman, and possibly her husband, to go through the question of fertility regulation and the possibility of sterilization with them. If sterilization is not only in the interests of the woman, but also in the interests of the quality of the population [emphasis added] the District National Committee can provide her with a contribution, based on the overall situation of the person, the length of time the woman is hospitalised, the amount of time the husband (father of the children) must take off work to care for the children and so on.31

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, reports from regional National Committees to the government Committees for the Gypsy Population regularly referred to social workers’ role in providing advice on contraception to Roma women.32 This practice was entwined with the bureaucratic classification of the Romani population, according to which only Roma deemed socially ‘unadaptable’ were counted as Gypsies. While this logic reflected the strongly integrationist approach of socialist government policy, these statistics were also used as prognoses for the future demographic development of the Roma minority. Fears about an apparent ‘population explosion’ of Gypsies were openly expressed in the media. Sterilisation of Roma women would appear in the first Charter 77 essay on the Gypsies-Roma, released in December 1978, which claimed that the policies of the socialist government were tantamount to genocide. In 1988 the level of financial compensation paid to a woman who underwent voluntary sterilisation was raised from Kč 2,000 to Kč 10,000, and the law was amended to enable the payment of grants to women who underwent sterilisation ‘in the interests of a healthy population’. The 1988 amendment to the regulation on sterilisation prompted two Czech dissidents, Ruben Pellar and Zbyněk Andrs, to conduct an investigation among Roma women sterilised between 1967 and 1989. The study 31

32

Cited in Czech Ombudsman report (2005): Verˇejný ochrance práv, Záverečné stanovisko ve věci šetrˇení sterilizací prováděných v rozporu s právem a návrhy opatrˇení nápravě, www.ochrance.cz/dokumenty/dokument.php?doc=329. NA Praha, f. Ministerstvo práce a sociálních věci – MPSV 1969–1970 inv č. 8820 – uncatalogued, NA.

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produced documentation on 123 women coercively sterilised in Slovakia between 1977 and 1989 and 156 women in the Czech lands – primarily as a result of monetary incentives. The authors found there had been a steady increase in sterilisations culminating in 1988 and 1989.33 Symbolically, the March 1989 issue of Mladý Svět, the main official youth magazine, featured a front page headline exclaiming, ‘There will be a million Roma living in the CSR in only thirty years time.’34 The same issue contained a letter from Ondrˇej Ginˇa, a Roma activist from Rokycany, protesting that financial incentives were being used to persuade Roma women to undergo sterilisation and that the women’s lack of education and poverty were being used to pressurise them into using sterilisation as a means of contraception without warning them of the consequences. Ginˇa claimed that non-Roma women faced no such pressure and that the high sums were evidence of the ‘strong interest in suppressing the fertility of the Roma’. Ginˇa concluded, ‘The population explosion of the Roma, the survival of old problems and the emergence of new ones in the solution of the so-called “Gypsy Question” testify to an inability to deal with a problem that could have already stopped being a problem a long time ago.’35 Rethinking Czech Dissent: Social Work, Autonomy, and Community The Charter 77 essay internationalising a critique of discrimination against Roma in the language of human rights can be seen as a turning point in the history of the Gypsy Question in socialist Czechoslovakia. The essay ‘On the Situation of the Gypsies in Czechoslovakia’ was one of the earliest released by the Charter 77 movement, which had been established in January 1977 with the mission of defending the civil and human rights of citizens and the principle of legality against politically motivated abuses by the Communist regime.36 Defining themselves as a 33

34 36

Ruben Pellar and Zbyněk Andrš, ‘Report on the Examination of the Issue of Sexual Sterilization of Romanies in Czechoslovakia’, Lau Mazirel Foundation, 1989; see Claude Cahn, Human Rights, State Sovereignty and Medical Ethics: Examining Struggles around Coercive Sterilisation of Romani Women (Leiden: Brill, 2014). 35 Mladý svět, 31:14 (21–27 March 1989). Ibid. Markéta Devátá, Jirˇí Suk, and Oldrˇich Tůma, Charta 77: Od obhajoby lidských práv k demokratické revoluci, 1977–1989 (Prague: Ústav pro soudobé dějiny, 2007); Petr Blažek (ed.), Tentokrát to bouchne: edice dokumentů k organizaci a ohlasům kampaně proti signatárˇům Charty 77 (leden-únor 1977) (Prague: Odbor ABS MV ČR, FF UK, 2007); H. Gordon Skilling, Charter 77 and Human Rights in Czechoslovakia (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1981); Vladimir Kusin, From Dubcek to Charter 77: A Study of “Normalization” in Czechoslovakia, 1968–1978 (Edinburgh: Q Press, 1978).

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“free, informal and open” association of people holding various convictions, beliefs, and professions, the Charter 77 movement was led by prominent political and cultural figures, including philosopher Jan Patočka, playwright Václav Havel, and former Foreign Minister Jirˇí Hájek.37 The essay on the Roma was part of a series of Charter 77 documents on politically sensitive social problems, including nuclear energy, prison conditions, censorship, freedom to travel abroad, discrimination in education, violations of social rights, and freedom of religion. Their aim was to provoke public discussion about problems that “normalization” was failing to solve, despite the regime’s success in raising living standards and levels of personal consumption, and thus to rouse society from the state of moral decay which – the dissidents believed – was deliberately cultivated by the regime to maintain control over the population.38 In December 1978, the Charter 77 essay about Roma, signed by Václav Havel and philosopher Ladislav Hejdánek, was circulated to party and state authorities as well as foreign print and broadcast media.39 Charter 77 appealed to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN International Covenants, and Czechoslovak law to denounce discrimination against Roma, whom it described as the most ‘disenfranchised’ (bezprávný) of all citizens of the republic. Thus the essay drew a parallel between anti-Gypsy sentiment among state and society and the older phenomenon of anti-Semitism, pointing to a whole range of discriminatory measures ranging from mass sedentarisation campaigns aimed at itinerant Roma in the 1950s, planned resettlement of rural Roma, and denial of their cultural and linguistic rights to the forcible removal of Romani children from their parents and coercive sterilisation of Romani women as part of a “planned administrative policy”. The regime’s efforts to eradicate the Roma minority through such assimilationist measures, Charter 77 claimed, would soon render Czechoslovakia vulnerable to charges of genocide. As a signatory of the Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Racial Discrimination, Czechoslovakia was obliged to report to the United Nations on its implementation of the convention. The Czechoslovak representative, Milena Srnská, claimed that a government resolution of 1972 provided 37

38 39

“Základní (konstitutivní) Prohlášení Charty 77 o prˇíčinách vzniku, smyslu a cílech Charty a metodách jejího působení”, in Blanka Císarˇovská and Vilém Prečan (eds.), Charta 77: Dokumenty 1977–1989 (Prague: Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, 2007), 1–5. Charter Document No. 21: Dr Ladislav Hejdánek, Marta Kubisová, and Dr Jaroslav Sabata, ‘Mission and Activities of Charter 77’ (19 October 1978). ‘Dokument o postavení romských spoluobčanů prˇedložený jako podklad verˇejné diskusi. Dokument č. 23’, in Císarˇovská and Prečan, Charta 77, 198–206.

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the necessary conditions for the integration of the Gypsies into Czechoslovak society. In April 1977, Czechoslovakia was asked to provide a detailed report on the measures taken by the government to protect the rights of the Gypsies.40 Rather than relying on civil disobedience campaigns based on public defiance of official laws or regulations and thus presupposing the existence of a state governed by the rule of law, Benjamin Nathans has remarked, dissidents in socialist states insisted on practices formally guaranteed by law but frequently disregarded for political reasons.41 However, the violations of the legal rights of Roma citizens were only one element of the Charter 77 essay, which presented the plight of the Roma as symptomatic of economic deterioration, bureaucratic centralism, a decline in moral values among the public, and the gap between official ideology and everyday life. The Charter 77 petition compared the suppression of Romani ethnic identity with discrimination against citizens for ‘expressing their convictions’. At an abstract level, the Charter 77 document represented the ‘so-called Gypsy Question’ as a ‘symbol of a deeper, general malaise of the whole society’.42 More specifically, it represented Roma as a bounded group whose ethnic identity was threatened by the assimilationist policy of the Communist regime and referred to the Union of Gypsies-Roma as an organisation which ‘tried for the first time in our country to ensure that its members were not passive objects of social welfare, but a voluntary front of self-aware and equal citizens’ striving to change their situation.43 Radio Free Europe and the BBC broadcast the Charter 77 petition on the Gypsies-Roma. On 20 December 1978 Radio Free Europe reported: The Czechoslovak dissident movement Charter 77 has accused the Prague government of discriminating against Gypsies. A Charter statement distributed to the western press says the rights of Czechoslovakia’s 300 000 Gypsies are “ignored completely”, despite constitutional guarantees of equality for all citizens. It says the Gypsies suffer bureaucratic harassment in their travels in

40 41 42

43

Open Society Archives, ‘Czechoslovakia Says Its Gypsies Are Integrating’ (Budapest: RFE Monitoring Report, April 1977). Benjamin Nathans, ‘The Dictatorship of Reason: Alexander Voľpin and the Idea of Rights under “Developed Socialism”’, Slavic Review, 66 (2007), 630–663. This claim triggered a series of partial investigations, but research into the scale of the alleged sterilisations remains inconclusive. In 2005 the Czech Ombudsman released the most comprehensive report to date on the sterilisations. ‘O postavení Cikánů-Romů v Československu’, Document 23, 13 December 1978, reprinted in Vilém Prečan, Charta 77, 1977–1989: Od morální k demokratické revoluci. Dokumentace (Bratislava: Čs. strˇedisko nezávislé literatury, Scheinfeld-Schwarzenberg a ARCHA, 1990).

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search of work. It claims that only 30 % of the Gypsy population is literate. And it says that Gypsy children are often separated from their parents and sent to special centres for the maladjusted. The Charter statement also denounces the alleged practice of sterilization among Gypsy women. It says the women are often offered money to volunteer for the operation and sterilization has become current practice in certain districts.44

Articles in The Observer and Le Monde reported on the Charter 77 text on 17 and 19 December.45 An English translation of the text appeared in the journal Labour Focus on Eastern Europe in the spring of 1979.46 The document was also discussed by the US Helsinki Commission, the federal agency established to monitor implementation of the Helsinki Accords in the Soviet bloc, and published in a collected volume of Charter 77 documents in 1982.47 However, the Charter 77 essay was not simply a product of dissidents such as Havel living in a ‘parallel polis’ outside the structures of the socialist state. Linking the dissidents in the Charter 77 movement and the Roma activists was a small group of social workers in Prague, mostly students who had been involved with the 1968 protests and who had since been unable to find employment. Leading this group was Zdeněk Pinc, a former student of Ján Patočka at the Philosophy Department of the Charles University who had been forced to leave his university position in 1973. During this period, the Charles University Faculty of Arts was a target for extensive purges due to its close association with student activism during the Prague Spring.48 A former party member, Pinc had been involved in student activism during the 1960s, for instance in the movement to establish independent ‘interest groups’ within the formal structures of the Czechoslovak Youth Union (ČSM) in 1967.49 He was also on the editorial boards of radical journals such as Literární Listy. As a student, Pinc was among the young Czechs who had been able to travel to the West after travel restrictions were loosened in the mid1960s and had been present at the famous visit of Rudi Dutschke to

44 45 46 47

48

49

Open Society Archives, Budapest: ‘Charter Text Denounces Regime Treatment of Gypsies’ (Munich: CND, 20 December 1978). Open Society Archives, Budapest, for press clippings. Labour Focus on Eastern Europe (March–April 1979). ‘Situation of the Gypsies in Czechoslovakia’, Document no. 23, in Human Rights in Czechoslovakia: The Documents of Charter ’77 (Washington, DC: Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, July 1982). Katka Volná and Jirˇí Holý (eds.), Tato fakulta buda rudá! Katedra české literatury Filozofické fakulty Karlovy university očima pamětníků a v dokumentech (Prague: Akropolis, 2009). Galia Golan, The Czechoslovak Reform Movement: Communism in Crisis, 1962–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 261.

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Prague at the end of April 1968.50 After losing his university position, Pinc started to work as a social worker in Prague, where large communities of Roma were living in the traditionally working-class quarters of Žižkov and Smíchov, occupying dilapidated tenement buildings dating from the late nineteenth century. Social work with ‘unadaptable citizens’ – officially defined as the Gypsies and those in post-penitentiary care – was an unattractive career to many people, another former social worker explained, but for these graduates offered the potential of socially useful work in a relatively ‘free’ environment. Another young woman, who was among the first to get involved in social work with Roma in Prague, had also studied sociology and philosophy but found it almost impossible to get a job after graduating in 1970, as she had been politically active in 1968. Together with a whole group of ‘really first-rate people’ she entered social work, which was an unpopular profession but which enabled them to create an autonomous community carrying out socially useful work.51 The fact that social work was seen as a necessary evil, undervalued and marginalised by the Ministry of Labour and the city council, was precisely what attracted the social workers. Indeed, it was the ambiguous, marginal institutional status of the social workers that enabled them to create a space for open discussion and feel that they were solving social problems on their own initiative. Social work was seen as a way of creating an alternative life (‘living on the other side of the river’, in the words of one former social worker) in a small community of freethinkers and kindred spirits. Through activities such as summer camps for Roma children in the decaying urban quarters of Žižkov and Smíchov, the social workers saw themselves as breaking down the barriers between the majority and minority. Community rather than an ideology of individual rights – both as a common identity among themselves and in their relations with their Roma ‘clients’ – seems to have formed the core of their understanding of social work. The Social workers viewed themselves as standing between the official world, characterised by deeply paternalistic and bureaucratic approaches to the Gypsy Question, and the authentic lives of Roma. Moreover, such experiences were strongly gendered. One social worker in Prague, writing in 1986, described the position of the kurátor as ‘completely isolated, like some kind of interpreter between the local institutions and 50

51

Jaroslav Pažout, ‘Reakce československých studentů v době Pražského jara na protestní hnutí na Západě’,in Zdeněk Karník and Michal Kopeček (eds.), Bolševismus, komunismus a radikální socialismus v Československu sv. II (Prague: Dokorˇán, 2004), 213–227. Interview with former social workers, Prague, November 2006.

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the gypsy community’. This ambiguous position was aggravated by the fact that ‘most social workers are women, and the woman is not taken very seriously in patriarchal gypsy families.’ As a result social workers did not remain in their positions for long, the social worker added, especially because the lack of resources and institutional support required the kurátor to invest a great deal of personal energy into the work: ‘Our success depends on our personal engagement.’52 The creation of autonomous communities, moreover, led the Prague social workers to seek new cultural approaches to inform their work. One former social worker explained that she and her colleagues were troubled by the total lack of any ‘methodology’ that could guide their work with the Roma. Working closely with Milena Hübschmannová, they therefore began to study Romani, to collaborate with ethnographers, and to conduct research among the Roma living in the capital city. For example, the social workers conducted research on Roma migration to Prague, which showed that migration was not ‘natural’ population movement but the result of semi-official recruitment policy in the construction sector. Roma labourers were recruited in Slovakia for work on construction in Prague, as this placed construction companies under no obligation to provide them with housing. Instead, the workers were housed in caravans (maringotky) which were not sufficient to house family members who migrated with them. These investigations provided alternative explanations for the persistence of Roma difference, which were generally classified in official discourse as symptoms of ‘Gypsy backwardness’ and the failure to implement the assimilation policy correctly. Social workers discovered, for example, that Roma migrants from Slovakia were afraid to sleep on the upper floors of apartment blocks, since they believed spirits (Romani: mulo / Czech: duchové) lived there. Thus they would destroy the flats so that they would be moved out. Reacting to what they perceived as the rigid social determinism and materialist bias of Communist policy towards the Roma, the social workers focused their attention on the question of Roma ethnicity, which they associated with ‘spiritual values’. The social workers collaborated with a small number of young ethnographers who were also starting to carry out fieldwork amongst Roma; these researchers also considered themselves to be nonconformists 52

Hana Frištenská, Správa sociálních služeb NVP, Praha, ‘Zkušenosti ze sociální práce mezi cikánským obyvatelstvem na obvodě Praha 7,’ pp. 128–135 in Materiály k problematice etnických skupin na území ČSSR, sv. 2, Cikáni v průmyslovém městě (problematika adaptace a asimilace) Část 1, č. 7, Zpravodaj koordinované sítě vědeckých informací pro etnografii a folkloristiku, Ústav pro etnografii a folkloristiku ČSAV, Oddělení etnických procesů, Praha 1986 – Určeno pro vnitrˇní potrˇebu.

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who did not ‘fit in’ to normal society.53 A new research project on ethnic groups, launched by the Ethnography Institute at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, allowed these researchers to produce a series of studies on ‘Gypsies in Industrial Towns (Problems of Adaptation and Assimilation)’. From this research emerged a more nuanced representation of the Roma communities who had migrated from Slovakia to Bohemia and Moravia after World War II. By studying these communities as rural to urban migrants, rather than simply as ‘backward Gypsies’, the researchers were able to show how family relations, customs, and values had been maintained or transformed in new surroundings. At the same time the tendency to describe Roma migrants from Slovakia as foreigners in the Czech lands highlighted the fact that forty years of Communist rule had not eradicated the perception of national difference between the two ‘brotherly nations’ of Czechs and Slovaks. Nonetheless, these ethnographic studies – particularly of Roma from the eastern Slovak town of Michalovce who had migrated to Kladno after 1945 – broke up the homogeneous image of ‘backwardness’ that had dogged official perceptions of the Roma for much of the socialist era.54 Amidst these networks of social workers and researchers, Milena Hübschmannová continued with her scholarship and activism. In 1976 she began to teach classes in Romani in Prague. These lessons also provided a place for social workers to meet and exchange views. Yet her determination to counter the social determinism of official policy led Milena Hübschmannová to believe that physical anthropology should be used to ‘prove’ that social exclusion was contingent on hereditary rather than acquired characteristics. Citing the disproportionately large number of Roma infants placed in institutions, Hübschmannová and the Prague social workers claimed the decision to remove an infant from her or his parents was often made on the basis of low birthweight. ‘Anthropological’ research (meaning in this case physical anthropology) that compared Roma and Indian infants would have shown the low birthweight of Roma babies to be the result of genetics rather than poor nutrition or parental neglect.55 The price of opposing the regime’s assimilation policy was, in this case, the espousal of a holistic view of Romani culture based

53 54

55

Interview with former social workers, Prague, April 2006. Materiály k problematice etnických skupin na území ČSSR, sv. 2, Cikáni v průmyslovém městě (problematika adaptace a asimilace) Část 1, č. 7, Zpravodaj koordinované sítě vědeckých informací pro etnografii a folkloristiku, Ústav pro etnografii a folkloristiku ČSAV, Oddělení etnických procesů, Praha 1986 – Určeno pro vnitrˇní potrˇebu. Interview with Milena Hübschmannová, Prague, January 2005.

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on the theory that the Indian origins of the Roma continued to influence their social customs in the twentieth century. According to one former social worker, the Charter 77 representative in charge of minority questions gathered much of the material used in the Charter 77 essay on the situation of the Gypsies-Roma from social workers with the Roma in Prague.56 Most claimed no involvement with the document, suggesting that a ‘small group’ of people around Zdeněk Pinc and Milena Hübschmannová had drafted the text. The social workers, pursuing their ‘alternative’ lives in the interstices of the socialist welfare state, thus acted as the bridge between the Charter 77 spokespeople such as Václav Havel and Ladislav Hejdanek, who signed the document, and the Roma. Dissidents’ attempts to internationalise the Gypsy Question led the State Security (StB) to monitor activists, and the Prague social workers found themselves under growing political pressure. According to one former social worker, after the Charter 77 document on the Roma was published, the social workers were put under pressure to join the party. Finding the atmosphere too unpleasant to work in, she left her position. Somewhat ironically, therefore, dissidents turned to the language of individual human rights to support their quest for authentic community within late socialist society. The turn towards human rights enabled dissidents to reach an international audience, although many social workers with Roma claimed no interest in such political activities, since they were rather seeking to pursue socially useful work in a relatively autonomous environment within the structures of the socialist state. In this sense, the experience of the social workers exemplifies the central paradox of late socialist society identified by Alexei Yurchak: for great numbers of Soviet citizens, ‘many of the fundamental values of socialist life (such as equality, community, selflessness, altruism, friendship, ethical relations, safety, education, work, creativity, and concern for the future) were of genuine importance, despite the fact that many of their everyday practices routinely transgressed, reinterpreted, or refused certain norms and rules represented in the official ideology of the socialist state.’57 However, a further irony would be revealed in the actions of Romani activists in the same period, who also turned to the language of individual human rights in support of a different sort of collective selfdetermination, namely, international recognition as a nationality at the United Nations. 56 57

Interview with former social worker, Prague, March 2007. Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 8.

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The International Romani Movement and Minority Rights in the Late 1970s Eastern European Roma played a leading role in the emerging international Romani movement that sought to claim recognition for Roma as a nation during the 1970s. Roma and Sinti grassroots movements emerged in many Western European countries during this decade, often as a result of coalitions between Roma and non-Roma activists politicised by the student, anti-war, civil rights, and New Left movements of the late 1960s. Roma, Sinti, and Gypsy civil rights movements in Britain and West Germany would become particularly important in terms of forging transnational networks with Roma and Sinti in socialist Eastern Europe. At the same time, however, this period witnessed splits in the international movement that slowed its momentum by the 1980s. Working within transnational networks representing a variety of (often competing) interests – including post-colonial humanitarianism, refugee rights, Holocaust recognition, and political nationalism – Romani activists nevertheless contributed to a revival of international debates about minority rights, a concept that had been largely discredited since the ‘strange triumph’ of the ideology of individual human rights in the decades following World War II. After the war, Czechoslovak politicians were at the forefront of attacks on the interwar minority rights regime, which Czech President Beneš viewed as the cause of the Munich crisis that led to the destruction of the republic. The Allies supported expulsion of the Czechoslovak Germans as the best way to secure the peace. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights contained no minority rights clause nor did the Genocide Convention make any mention of cultural genocide.58 Although the principle of national self-determination was belatedly recognised in the context of decolonisation, newly independent states in Africa and Asia feared the secessionist tendencies of minority groups and thus supported the Western view at the United Nations that the rights of minorities should be considered as subordinate to the interests of states and the imperative of territorial integrity.59 A similar logic was at work in international norms dealing with indigenous peoples, as demonstrated by the highly 58

59

For details, see Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting and Intent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); Normand and Zaidi, Human Rights at the UN, 249–260. Patrick Thornberry, ‘In the Strong-Room of Vocabulary’, in Peter Cumper and Steven Wheatley (eds.), Minority Rights in the ‘New’ Europe (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1999), 1–14; on self-determination and resistance to imperial rule, see Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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assimilationist ILO Convention on Indigenous and Tribal Populations of 1957. The minority clause of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights was the first step towards reviving the principle of minority rights in international human rights law. Internal Czechoslovak debates about minority rights were revived in the mid-1970s by the Helsinki Final Act, which referred to the rights of persons belonging to ‘national minorities’ but not to the collective rights of peoples or the right to self-determination. Western demands were mainly related to individual human rights such as family unification and the rights of journalists, which were hopefully to lead to the gradual liberalisation of authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe. The minority question was thus approached in a similar way as the issue of state borders, notes Peter Schlotter, with the aim of solving practical problems while maintaining the status quo in interstate relations.60 Despite the lack of international consensus on the place of minority rights within the UN human rights instruments, the topic of the treatment of ethnic minorities in Eastern Europe was nevertheless often included by contemporary commentators as an indicator of Communist regimes’ compliance with the ‘spirit of Helsinki’.61 That minority rights were viewed by numerous states as a threat to state sovereignty and the inviolability of territorial borders, on which the postwar international settlement depended, was recognised in the first major UN report on the implementation of Article 27: ‘Any international regime for the protection of members of minority groups arouses distrust and fear. It is first seen as a pretext for interference in the internal affairs of States (particularly where the minorities have ethnic or linguistic links with foreign States). Moreover, certain States regard the preservation of the identity of minorities as posing a threat to their unity and stability.’62 Within the developing bureaucracy of the European Economic Community (EEC), meanwhile, the question of ‘gypsies’ was first discussed during the 1970s in the context of an emerging European social policy and anti-poverty programmes rather than as a ‘nationality’ question.63 These programmes were influenced by the European Social Charter 60 61

62 63

Peter Schlotter, Die KSZE im Ost-West Konflikt: Wirkung einer internationalen Institution (Frankfurt: Campus, 1999), especially chapter 5. See, for example, the statement to the US Helsinki Commission (95th Congress) by James F. Brown, director of Radio Free Europe, on 9 May 1977, in Vojtech Mastny, Helsinki, Human Rights and European Security: Analysis and Documentation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986), Document 25, 106–114. Francesco Capotorti, Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Persons Belonging to Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities (UN Doc E/CN.4/Sub.2/384/Rev.1). Katrin Simhandl, Der Diskurs der EU-Institutionen über die Kategorien ‘Zigeuner’ und ‘Roma’: Die Erschliessung eines politischen Raumes über die Konzepte von ‘Antidiskriminierung’ und ‘sozialem Einschluss’ (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2007).

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adopted in 1961 by the Council of Europe, which guaranteed social and economic rights to citizens of its member states. Social and economic rights had been marginalised in the European Convention on Human Rights (1950), the founding postwar human rights text in Western Europe. As Marco Duranti has shown, the convention was adopted in a climate of anticommunism; the drafters of the convention included British and French conservative politicians who saw individual human rights (including the right to private property) as a defence against totalitarianism in the East and indeed their own collaborationist past under fascism.64 The emergence of a European social model was strongly linked to Christian Democratic parties and Catholic politicians in Italy and France such as Robert Schuman and Alcide De Gasperi, who were anticommunist but supported the expansion of a welfare state with corporatist elements, and based on the principle of subsidiarity. Representatives of new member states of the EEC, such as Ireland, lobbied the European Commission about the social status of travellers during the 1970s. However, the European institutions referred to Gypsies almost exclusively as a ‘socially defined’ group during this period. Before Czechoslovakia ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1976, the Foreign Ministry reassured the Communist Party Presidium that the 1968 nationalities law fully implemented Article 27 of the covenant on the rights of persons belonging to ‘ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities . . . to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, or to use their own language’.65 In 1968 a new federal constitution defined the republic as a ‘common state of the Czech and Slovak nations, together with the Hungarian, German, Polish and Ukrainian (Ruthenian) nationalities’. A separate law guaranteed the nationalities the ‘possibilities and means of all-round development’ in the spirit of socialist democracy and internationalism.66 Taking advantage of the Helsinki process, Hungarian dissidents in Slovakia created a Committee for the Protection of the Rights of the Hungarian Minority in 1978 – the year of the Belgrade review conference – which protested against new restrictions on Hungarian-language teaching in Slovak 64

65

66

Marco Duranti, ‘Curbing Labour’s Totalitarian Temptation: European Human Rights Law and British Postwar Politics’, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 3:3 (2012), 361–383. NA Praha, f. Prˇedsednictvo ÚV KSČ, 1971–1976, f. 02/1, Sv. 133, a.j. 134, 25.10.1974, Stanovisko oddělení ÚV KSČ k materiálu pro schůzi prˇedsednictva ÚV KSČ k bodu: Návrh na ratifikaci mezinárodních paktů o lidských právech. See also UN ICCPR Article 27. Jan Rychlík, ‘Normalizační podoba československé federace’, in Slovensko a režim normalizácie (Prešov: Vyd. Michala Vaška, 2003), 8–46.

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schools and universities.67 A critical report on the government’s failure to implement the 1968 nationalities law appeared the following year.68 Curtailment of Hungarian linguistic and cultural rights was officially presented as an emancipatory measure to raise the educational level of the Hungarian minority by promoting their knowledge of Slovak, although it was clear that the regime feared the Hungarian minority turning into a fifth column as the result of liberalisation in neighbouring Hungary and Hungarian intellectuals’ support for Charter 77.69 The exile journal Svědectví also published a study of the expulsion of the Czechoslovak Germans in 1978, sparking a debate on the theme among dissident circles and awakening the interest of the StB. The reawakening of debate about the expulsion of Czechoslovak Germans was linked to the revival of national discourses amongst Czech dissidents, often framed in terms of reclaiming a right to history. Czech historians such as Miroslav Hroch had begun to investigate the phenomenon of nationalism during the 1960s, although research on the national question in social science remained limited.70 In response to the communists’ appropriation of nationalist discourse to legitimise socialist rule, the founder of the Czech dissident movement, the philosopher Jan Patočka, wrote an influential critical essay about the Czech national character, which was followed some years later by the controversial Czechs in the Modern Era: An Attempt at Self-Reflection by the pseudonymous ‘Podiven’.71 Within these debates, Roma were rarely mentioned, and when they were, it was as a symbol of the corruption of national values by the corrosive influence of Communism. As Michal Kopeček has written, the left-wing human rights movements in the 1980s – which were influenced by post-national theories of civil society – tended to miss the extent to which Czech dissent was embedded in these particular national-historical contexts.72 67

68 69 70

71

72

Norbert Kmetˇ, ‘Opozícia a hnutie odporu na Slovensku 1968–1989’, in Petr Blažek (ed.), Opozice a odpor proti komunistickému režimu v Československu 1968–1989 (Prague: Dokorˇán, 2005), 47. Juraj Marušiak, ‘Maďarská menšina v slovenskej politike v rokoch normalizácie’, in Slovensko a režim normalizácie (Prešov: Vyd. Michala Vaška, 2003), 222–279. Ibid. Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Jan Patočka, Co jsou Češi? (Prague: Panorama, 1992); Podiven (Petr Pithart, Petr Prˇíhoda, and Milan Otáhal), Češi v dějinách nové doby 1848–1939 (Prague: Academia, 2003). Michal Kopeček, ‘Human Rights Facing a National Past: Dissident “Civic Patriotism” and the Return of History in East Central Europe, 1968–1989’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 38:4 (December 2012), 573–602.

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A similar tension emerged between Eastern and Western activists in the international Romani movement. Roma activists in Czechoslovakia looked abroad for inspiration during the 1970s, seeing in Hungary and Yugoslavia in particular an encouraging model for recognition of Roma as a nationality. In Hungary a consultative Gypsy Council was established in 1974 under the leadership of writer Menyhért Lakatos, but the experiment was short-lived. By the end of the decade the council no longer existed, and in 1979 Hungarian Roma were granted the status of an ethnic group, rather than a nationality. This had no legal consequences but paved the way for limited forms of autonomy during the 1980s. As a result of economic crisis and a lessening of ideological rigidity, the Hungarian government relaxed its policy of active assimilation. In 1985 a National Gypsy Council was established, and a National Gypsy Cultural Association one year later. Socialist Yugoslavia, too, seemed to be edging towards recognition of Romani cultural rights in the hierarchy of nationhood within the federal republic. The Linguist Milena Hübschmannová maintained informal contacts with Roma abroad, attracting attention from the secret police (StB). An internal report by the Slovak Communist Party noted in 1978 that Hübschmannová was a ‘former member of the Union of Gypsies-Roma, an ethnographer, who still works illegally for the Union to be re-established, five years after the Unions of Gypsies-Roma were closed down. In 1977 she was in Hungary, where she informed the Hungarian gypsiologists about preparations for a gypsy hymn and a unified gypsy language.’73 Beyond the borders of Czechoslovakia, meanwhile, Roma and Sinti civil rights movements were beginning to lobby the United Nations. Romani activists managed to secure a resolution on Roma from the Subcommission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities in August 1977, which appealed to those countries with a Gypsy population to accord them all the rights to which they were entitled under the Universal Declaration.74 The Caportorti report referred to the existence of the Roma as a minority living within the borders of many states. Activists in the international Romani movement cooperated with a sympathetic member of the UN Subcommission to take advantage of this moment. The UK delegate to the Subcommission, Benjamin Whitaker, was a British Labour MP who had a special interest in minority rights, 73

74

SNA Bratislava, f. ÚV KSS – Sekretariát, Zasadnutie 26.6.1978 (4.7.1978), kr. 514, fasc. 1112/8, Kontrolná správa o plnení uznesení straníckých orgánov a štatných orgánov prijatých k riešeniu problémov zaostalej časti cigánskej obyvateľov v SSR, Informácia o II. Svetovom kongrese Cigánov. Ilona Klimová-Alexander, The Romani Voice in World Politics: The United Nations and Non-State Actors (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).

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having founded an advocacy organisation in London called the Minority Rights Group. This organisation had commissioned a study called The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies from Grattan Puxon, the secretary general of the World Romani Congress, in 1973. Whitaker invited Puxon and other leading Romani activists, including Ján Cibuľa, to the Subcommission meeting in August 1977, where the Caportorti report was discussed.75 The Romani movement espoused a more radical programme of political nationalism in the late 1970s, claiming recognition as a nation of Indian origin. In 1978 activists created a new international organisation, the International Romani Union (IRU), and organised a second World Romani Congress in Geneva, which called upon the United Nations to ‘assist us to combat discrimination and repression’ and declared the Roma to be a ‘nationality of Indian origin’. Gaining recognition from the United Nations was a key aim of the IRU, and the second World Romani Congress was hosted in Geneva as a result of cooperation with the World Council of Churches as part of its mission to combat racial discrimination in Switzerland.76 This strategy was aided by a number of official representatives of India, both at state and federal level, as well as the efforts of a retired Indian diplomat, W. R. Rishi, who set up an Indian Institute for Romani Studies in his home town of Chandigarh after a visit to the first World Romani Congress convinced him that the Roma were emigrants from the area of Greater Punjab in the age before the Muslim invasions.77 Over the next three decades, many leading Romani activists in Europe would visit Rishi’s Romani Studies Institute in Chandigarh.78 In 1977 the Indian government successfully filed a resolution at the United Nations Economic and Social Council Sub-Commission on the ‘Promotion and Protection of Human Rights’ which recognised that the Romani people had ‘historic, cultural and linguistic ties of Indian origin’. Dr Ján Cibuľa, the Slovak Romani activist who had emigrated to Switzerland after the Prague Spring, was elected as the first president of the IRU. The Slovak Communist Party made a special report on the congress that highlighted Cibuľa’s identity as a Czechoslovak émigré and also noted that Anton Facuna, a Czechoslovak citizen who had been 75 76

77

78

Ibid., 40–41, 126–127. Thomas Acton and Ilona Klimová-Alexander, ‘The International Romani Union: An East European Answer to West European Questions? Shifts in the Focus of World Romani Congresses 1971–2000’, in Will Guy (ed.), Between Past and Future: The Roma of Central and Eastern Europe (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001). W. R. Rishi, Roma: The Panjabi Emigrants in Europe, Central and Middle Asia, the USSR and the Americas (Patiala: Punjabi University, 1976); Chaman Lal, Gipsies: Forgotten Children of India (Delhi: Publications Department, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1962). I am grateful to Professor Alok Jha for his help when visiting the archives of the institute in Chandigarh in December 2007.

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the first chairperson of the Slovak Union of Gypsies-Roma, had ‘done some very useful work’ for the new international organisation by drafting the statutes of the IRU.79 Human rights, however, remained a key aspect of the Communist regime’s interpretation of the second World Romani Congress. The Communist Party daily Rudé Právo ran an article about the WRC in May 1978 entitled ‘Where human rights are absent: The Roma in the capitalist states and the Geneva congress’.80 Rudé Právo presented the congress in classic ideological terms as a capitalist conspiracy to instrumentalise human rights in the battle to overthrow socialism, claiming that ‘in the capitalist countries the Gypsies are denied all human rights and are oppressed by racism, while the economic crisis condemns them to poverty.’ Seizing on the fact that a German newspaper, the Frankfurter Rundschau, had described Ján Cibuľa as a refugee from Czechoslovakia, Rudé Právo sarcastically noted that ‘the fact that Cibuľa could study medicine in Czechoslovakia prevented them from presenting him as a victim of socialism.’ In 1979 the International Romani Union was granted consultative status at the UN ECOSOC Sub-Commission on Human Rights, which political scientist Ilona Klimová-Alexander has noted was probably its most significant achievement. At the same time, Romani activists in West Germany were leading significant campaigns to gain recognition and compensation for Romani survivors as victims of Nazi persecution.81 The campaigns were organised by the Verband Deutscher Sinti in close cooperation with the Society for Threatened Peoples.82 Western European advocacy organisations, such as Tillman Zülch’s Society for Threatened Peoples in the Federal Republic of Germany or the London-based Minority Rights Group, also found in the Gypsies of Eastern Europe an object for their moral concern during the 1970s. Described as post-colonial humanitarians by Lora Wildenthal, such groups were sceptical of states’ claims to sovereignty, ‘posing their own counterclaims, such as morality, to authorise their interventions’.83 Targeting the German press and institutions such as churches, trade unions, universities, and political parties, they supported media 79

80 81 82 83

SNA Bratislava, f. ÚV KSS – Sekretariát, Zasadnutie 26.6.1978 (4.7.1978), kr. 514, fasc. 1112/8, Kontrolná správa o plnení uznesení straníckých orgánov a štatných orgánov prijatých k riešeniu problémov zaostalej časti cigánskej obyvateľov v SSR – príloha III: Informácia o II. Svetovom kongrese Cigánov. Ľudovít Sulč, ‘Kde chybějí lidská práva: Romové v kapitalistických zemích a ženevský sjezd’, Rudé právo (16 May 1978). Yaron Matras, I Met Lucky People: The Story of the Romani Gypsies (London: Allen Lane, 2014), 207. Lora Wildenthal, The Language of Human Rights in West Germany (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Ibid.

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campaigns to challenge the use of the word Zigeuner and introducing Sinti and Roma instead, emphasising ethnicity rather than lifestyle, as well as supporting public demonstrations and marches to former concentration camps, such as a rally in Bergen-Belsen in 1979 and a hunger strike in Dachau in 1980.84 The Association of German Sinti was renamed as the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma in 1980, and one year later – still in cooperation with the Society for Threatened Peoples – it hosted the third World Romani Congress in the West German town of Göttingen. In this context, the Czechoslovak secret police stepped up surveillance of Romani activists at home. Anna Klempárová, who was twenty-five when she travelled to Geneva to attend the second World Romani Congress, was investigated by the State Security to monitor her contacts with activists abroad. Born in 1952 in Slovenská Ves, eastern Slovakia, Klempárová came from a Romani family who integrated as socialist citizens while maintaining their cultural identity at home. Her father worked as a factory employee for the first part of the day and then as a musician.85 Klempárová studied for her degree in Bratislava, and a letter she wrote to the Slovak Gypsy Union in the early 1970s demonstrates her engagement with her Roma identity as a student.86 As a journalist working for a factory magazine in Košice, Klempárová recalled facing restrictions when she wanted to publish on Roma issues. She recalled her journey to Geneva as an experience that caused her for the first time to question socialism as a system, as well as being moved by the symbolism of delegates receiving a handful of Indian soil. The ŠtB investigation file must be read with caution, but there are frequent references to Koptová’s enthusiasm for learning English and her ‘mastery’ of at least three languages.87 Having kept Koptová under surveillance, and subjecting her to a series of interrogations about her contacts with Romani activists at home and abroad, the ŠtB concluded in late 1981 that she had learned her lesson and that as a ‘young person’ she deserved to have her file closed.88

84

85 86 87

88

Yaron Matras, ‘The Development of the Romani Civil Rights Movement in Germany 1945–1996’, in Susan Tebbutt (ed.), Sinti and Roma in German-Speaking Society and Literature (Oxford: Berghahn, 1998), 49–63. Interview with Anna Koptová (née Klempárová), Košice, 2006. SNA Bratislava, f. ZCR, kart. 27, Letter from Anna Klempárová. Archiv Ústavu pamäti národa, Bratislava, KS ZNB S ŠtB Košice, inv. č. 10554: Návrh na založenie spis preverovanej osoby krycieho mena “ROMA”, KS – ZNB, Správa štátnej bezpečnosti, Košice, 13 April 1981. Archiv Ústavu pamäti národa, Bratislava, KS ZNB S ŠtB Košice, inv. č. 10554: Návrh na založenie spis preverovanej osoby krycieho mena “ROMA”, KS – ZNB, Správa štátnej bezpečnosti, Košice, 13 April 1981.

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Before the third World Romani Congress was held in the West German city of Göttingen in 1981, the KSS reported that ‘there are grounds for suspecting that the Third Congress of Gypsies-Roma in the Federal Republic of Germany will be used against the ČSSR by centres of emigration in the capitalist lands as a means of exerting pressure and ideological-diversionary defamation. Therefore increased attention must be paid to the participation of our citizens in order that they do not damage our interests and become the object of enemy manipulation.’89 Preventive measures, such as refusing passport applications, were taken by the security services to stop the small number of Slovak Roma who received invitations to the congress from travelling to Germany.90 The Counter-Espionage Directorate for Protection of the Economy interpreted the actions of the second World Romani Congress in the language of ideological warfare, claiming that ‘the World congress of gypsies urged the members of national Unions and congress participants to attempt the infiltration of the state apparatus.’91 Particularly troubling was the fact that Roma workers in provincial Slovakia – and not only dissidents – seemed to be responding to this appeal.92 In Slovakia the state authorities were alerted to preparations for the third World Romani Congress in January 1981 when a Slovak Rom, a KSS party member who worked as a maintenance man in a housing cooperative, asked his district party committee in Lučenec, southern Slovakia, for help in preparing a speech at the congress about ‘the lives of gypsy fellow-citizens in his district’. According to the official report, the man had received an invitation to the ‘Third Roma Congress in the German Federal Republic’, which announced that three hundred people from twenty-eight countries in Europe, India, America, and Australia were expected to attend, including Indira Gandhi. The invitation referred to India’s contribution to the United Nations and the Roma in Europe and stated, ‘As you know, in Yugoslavia we already have a new status as a nationality, for a people whose ancient customs originate in India. We also want this for ourselves.’93 Within a few days the police reported that around thirty people from the ČSSR had received

89 90 91 92 93

SNA Bratislava, f. ÚV KSS – Predsedníctvo – kr. 1597, a.j. 1553/13: Informácia o príprave III. medzinárodného kongresu Rómov v NSR, untitled / undated annex. SNA Bratislava, f. ÚV KSS – Predsedníctvo – kr. 1610, a.j. 128/13: Informácia o konaní III. svetového kongresu RIJ – Medzinárodnej jednoty Cigánov v NSR (5.6.1981). ABS ČR: 709931 MV: Mezinárodní cikánské hnutí – postoupení poznatků (XI. Správa SNB), 18 December 1980. Ibid. SNA Bratislava, f. ÚV KSS – Predsedníctvo – č. krabice 1597, a.j. 1553/13: Informácia o príprave III. medzinárodného kongresu Rómov v NSR.

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invitations, all of whom were then screened regarding their ‘suitability for travelling to the Third Congress of Gypsies-Roma in the BRD’. According to the KSS report, a Roma man named Ján Čonka, the manager of an agricultural enterprise in a collective farm in Humenné, eastern Slovakia, who had previously claimed at a KSS meeting in Vranov nad Topľou in December 1980 that ‘citizens of gypsy origin are discriminated against in our country,’ had vowed to speak about this at the third Romani World Congress. Although Čonka had not submitted a request to travel to Germany, as a pre-emptive measure the Vranov nad Topľou police station was instructed to block any application he might make, and he was invited for an ‘interview’ at the KSS district committee ‘in order to explain his position more clearly’.94 An initial report claimed that only six people – all from the Bratislava area – had been contacted, of whom two were no longer alive, having died in a car crash in 1979. However, within a few days it appeared that around thirty people from the ČSSR were supposed to take part in the congress. On the basis of instructions issued by the Central Administration of the Federal Interior Ministry in Prague, the political police launched a security screening (štátobezpečnostná previerka) of these individuals regarding their ‘suitability for travelling to the Third Congress of Gypsies-Roma in the BRD’. Most of those questioned by the ŠtB claimed that they had not decided whether to take part.95 Human rights activism on behalf of Roma transformed the political importance of the Gypsy Question, propelling the Roma into the competence of the Counter-Espionage Directorate for Protection of the Economy (XI. Správa SNB) whose tasks included ‘the protection of state secrets’ across the whole territory of the ČSSR.96 A December 1980 report by an StB official on the ‘international gypsy movement’ emphasised the fact that the second World Romani Congress [withdrew] from their demand for territory from the UN on which the gypsies would build their own state [italics in original]. Instead they focused on attacking the socialist countries under the pretext of defending the gypsies’ interests, accusing these states of violating the gypsies’ human rights . . . The Congress claimed that around 10 million Gypsies are living in the world today, of whom some 4.5 million live in the socialist countries. Data from the Secretariat of

94

95 96

SNA Bratislava, f. ÚV KSS – Predsedníctvo – č. krabice 1597, a.j. 1553/13: Informácia o príprave III. medzinárodného kongresu Rómov v NSR, untitled / undated annex (author: Ján Černý, politický pracovník odd. štátnej administratívy ÚV KSS). Ibid. Rozkaz Ministra vnitra ČSSR: Organizační rˇád správy kontrarozvědky pro ochranu ekonomiky, 17 November 1980.

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the Slovak Government Commission for Gypsy Questions differs from the Congress statistics – they estimate a smaller number, perhaps only 200 000 in Czechoslovakia.

The StB also emphasised the congress demand ‘to stop the genocide of gypsies in Czechoslovakia (sterilization of women, taking children from their families)’ [italics in original], as well as the cultural rights demanded by the congress (education and media in Romani).97 In February 1982 the Counter-Espionage Directorate for the Struggle against Internal Enemies (X. Správa SNB) interrogated Milena Hübschmannová, to whom the StB gave the code-name CIKÁNKA, a pejorative label meaning ‘female gypsy’. The Tenth Directorate was set up to unmask ‘right-wing opportunism, revisionism, Zionism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Ukrainian nationalism and bourgeois ideologies in the social superstructure, especially in culture and art, science, in the universities and the media, and to unmask persons trying to destroy the state policy on religion’.98 The declared aim of the interview was to establish the nature of the contacts that Hübschmannová maintained ‘with the international gypsy organization RIJ’ and members of the ‘so-called Czechoslovak opposition’ and to ‘clarify her contribution to the drafting of Document 23 / 78, in which Charta 77 deal with the gypsy problematic’.99 Hübschmannová was almost fifty years old when the interview took place, and she already had experience of dealing with the security services. During the interview Hübschmannová denied that she or her acquaintances were in any way political, strategically presenting herself as an innocent folklorist. Likewise she admitted to knowing Anna Klemparová, the young Romani journalist from Košice, but tactically dismissed her as ‘politically very naïve’. Hübschmannová totally denied having contacts with Charter 77, claiming she had no idea if any of her friends had signed the charter, although she could not rule it out. Finally the State Security concluded that Hübschmannová was not in touch with the ‘opposition’ or involved in producing ‘enemy material’ and that the ‘contacts maintained by H. are not politically motivated’. However, the idea of trying to use Hübschmannová as an informer was rejected. The third World Romani Congress marked the beginning of a split in the international Romani movement that would persist until the early

97 98 99

ABS ČR: 709931 MV: Mezinárodní cikánské hnutí – postoupení poznatků (XI. Správa SNB), 18 December 1980. Rozkaz Ministra vnitra ČSSR: Organizační rˇád správy kontrarozvědky pro boj proti vnitrˇnímu neprˇíteli, 24 February 1975, čl. 4. ABS ČR: 709931 MV (Krycí jméno – Cikánka): X. správa SNB 1. Odbor 1. Oddělení (24.2.1982): Záznam z pozhovorů s objektem akce CIKÁNKA.

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1990s. According to Yaron Matras, the Romani movement in Germany was suspicious of the activities of the International Romani Union, which emerged from the first World Romani Congress in 1971. Grassroots Roma and Sinti groups in the Federal Republic kept a distance from IRU efforts to standardise a written Romani language or create a Romani anthem or national flag: ‘A key issue for the emerging movement in Germany during the 1970s was, in fact, resistance towards any form of central registration as Gypsies or outside interference with Romani culture, including research, this attitude being at least in part a result of the traumatic experiences with “racial biologists” and their role in shaping anti-Gypsy policy during the Nazi era.’100 From the early 1980s, meanwhile, divisions emerged between the German-based Romani movement in Heidelberg and support groups for Romani refugees from Yugoslavia and later Poland that emerged in cities such as Cologne, Düsseldorf, and Stuttgart. Further groups were established by Lovara in Berlin, Krefeld, and Frankfurt. The Zentralrat, according to Matras, advised its member unions not to support foreign Romani refugees who were appealing for assistance in preventing deportations to their country of origin and in gaining residence permits for West Germany. Conclusion By the late 1980s, two visions of socialist modernity were reflected in the lens of the Gypsy Question. Communist functionaries, including those of Roma ancestry, continued to believe that Gypsies living in the mass housing blocks of cities and towns such as Most, Bardejov, and Košice had ‘never had it so good’. For socialist Czechoslovakia, the involvement of the Federal Republic of Germany in the so-called Gypsy Question was intolerable, as was Romani cooperation with the Gesellschaft für Bedrohte Völker, a human rights organisation campaigning against genocide in post-colonial states which was run by the son of German expellees from Silesia.101 The secretary of the Slovak Government Committee for Questions Relating to the Gypsy Question, Imrich Farkáš, reported in 1980 that the Gesellschaft für Bedrohte Völker had petitioned the Czechoslovak embassy in Bonn against the alleged sterilisation of Romani women, claiming that such treatment constituted genocide. For such claims to come from a formerly ‘fascist’ state was unbearable, wrote Slovak Romani official Vincent Danihel in 1986.102 100 101 102

Matras, ‘The Development.’ Gilad Margalit, Germany and Its Gypsies: A Post-Auschwitz Ordeal (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002). Vincent Danihel, Manuš znamená človek (Bratislava: Smena, 1986).

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However natural the Charter 77 allegations about Communist violations of Roma rights may seem in retrospect, to contemporaries these claims were far from self-evident, since the policies deemed discriminatory by Czech dissidents were seen as emancipatory by the socialist regime. Communist Party officials and high-level civil servants continued to defend the ‘socialist’ approach to the Gypsy Question, arguing that poverty, illiteracy, and anti-Gypsy prejudice would be solved only by assimilating the Roma into socialist society as productive worker-citizens leading a ‘cultured’ way of life. When Imrich Farkáš, who was himself of Roma ancestry, reported to his colleagues that Radio Free Europe had broadcast Charter 77’s essay about the Gypsies, he claimed in an internal meeting, ‘It’s not the Gypsies who are protesting or complaining that our socialist order treats them badly or denies their rights, but non-Gypsies. . . who are living only too well in our country, who have links to internal and external subversives.’ The only correct response, from this perspective, was to ensure that government policies were implemented in a proper way by building more houses, striving to integrate the Gypsies, and, above all, keeping within the law ‘so that we don’t make mistakes for which we could be criticized abroad’.103 In April 1978, an Austrian journalist visited eastern Slovakia to find out about the conditions of the Roma in Czechoslovakia. According to the Slovak government report on his visit, Dr Otto Heman had attended the World Romani Congress in Geneva and had visited Czechoslovakia to investigate the living conditions of Slovak Roma for himself. Imrich Farkáš claimed in a private speech to government officials that Dr Heman ‘had wanted to know why we have separate primary schools for gypsy children, why we don’t teach in the gypsy language, and why we define the Gypsies as an ethnic group and not as a nationality’. Heman visited the ‘new estate for gypsy families in Bardejov’ – one of the experimental new housing estates mentioned in the first section of this chapter – where he apparently ‘asked the Gypsies if they were satisfied with the state administration, and why they didn’t ask to study in the gypsy language in school’. However, Secretary Farkáš then triumphantly claimed, ‘When he was told that they’d never had it so good as now in socialist Czechoslovakia, and that they didn’t need the gypsy language at all, he switched off his tape recorder.’104

103

104

Rómsky Inštitút, Bratislava: Archive of Dr Emília Horváthová: Ministerstvo práce a sociálních vecí SSR, Sekretariát Komisie vlády SSR pre otázky cigánskych obyvateľov, Prednášky prednesené na celoslovenskej porade tajomníkov komisií rád KNV pre otázky cigánskych obyvateľov, ktorá sa konala v dnˇoch 24. a 25. septembra 1980 v Bratislave (len pre vnútornú potrebu), Bratislava, Október 1980. Ibid.

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At the same time, however, a new generation of Roma activists was replacing the postwar generation who had headed the Unions of GypsiesRoma in 1968. More inclined to question the legitimacy of state socialism, as well as simply the ideological refusal to recognise the Roma as a legal nationality, these activists were critical of the staunch Communist beliefs of the older generation. Two of the leading Czech Roma activists of the ageing postwar generation, Tomáš and Miroslav Holomek, died in the late 1980s. In their place arose a new generation led by Karel Holomek, the son of Miroslav Holomek (the first president of the Czech Gypsies-Roma Union, 1969–1973), and Roma lawyer Emil Ščuka, who founded a Romani theatre group called Romen in 1982. The younger generation of Romani activists began to meet with the older generation, including Dezider Olah from Zvolen, Miroslav and Tomáš Holomek from Brno, Vincent Danihel, and others, to discuss the question of nationality recognition for the Roma.105 In April 1986, Dr Vlado Oláh and two other Slovak Roma activists requested a meeting with the KSČ Central Committee, and submitted a request for a Czechoslovak Roma Union to be established within the National Front. Almost a year later the KSČ rejected the proposal, but Karel Hoffmann, a secretary at the Central Committee, continued to negotiate sporadically and informally with Roma activists.106 Both the influence of Soviet perestroika and the increasing emphasis on minority protection at the CSCE throughout the 1980s, however, seemed to affect the Czechoslovak regime’s approach to the Roma. Minority rights were discussed at the Vienna review conference in 1986, and the Vienna Concluding Document enjoined states to ‘protect and create conditions for the promotion of ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious identity of national minorities on their territory’. In November 1988 and January 1989, Karel Hoffmann organised a meeting in the Hotel Prague for some twenty Roma activists who had been nominated by both Government Commissions for the Gypsy Population.107 After the meeting, Hoffmann submitted a highly critical report to the party Presidium in February 1989, which strikingly used the term Romové rather than Cigáni and stated that the ‘proposals and conclusions contained therein had been discussed with positive results with a group of Roma, selected from all regions of the ČSR,’ noting

105 106 107

Interview with Anna Koptová, Košice, November 2006. Nina Pavelčiková, Romové v českých zemích v letech 1945–1989 (Prague: Úrˇad dokumentace a vyšetrˇování zločinů komunismu, 2004), 130–131. ˇ ešení problematiky romských obyvatel v období 1970 Petr Víšek, ‘Program integrace – R až 1989’, in Romové v České republice, 1945–1989 (Prague: Socioklub, 1999), 184–218.

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that no such discussions had been held since the closure of the Unions of Gypsies-Roma in 1973.108 When this last report on the Roma appeared on the agenda of a Central Committee Presidium meeting in February 1989, the Communist regime was struggling to maintain support among the population. In January demonstrators had filled the streets of Prague to commemorate the death of Jan Palach, the young man who had set himself alight in protest against the Warsaw Pact occupation of Czechoslovakia. Protestors massed on Prague’s Wenceslas Square in January 1989 and chanted slogans such as ‘Freedom!’, ‘Human rights!’, ‘Long live the Charter!’, ‘We want to live like people!’, ‘Long live Havel!’, and ‘Tomorrow is here again!’109 Police and security bodies responded to the demonstrations with the largest displays of violence since 1969. Unlike the state repression of dissidents or allegedly ‘asocial’ Roma, these public demonstrations were a sign of the rapid erosion of societal trust in the Communist regime’s promise to guarantee a quiet and secure life under socialism.110 Between the end of June and November 1989 more than forty thousand people signed the oppositional declaration Několik Vět (A Few Sentences). In this context, the Central Committee debate about the Roma is striking not for the solutions proposed (or not) but the uncertain tone of the discussion. The Central Committee report recommended a reconsideration of the legal status of the Roma and that Roma representatives be included in discussions on the new constitution. It referred to recent developments in Hungary and Yugoslavia, where Roma had been granted cultural rights as a nationality, and compared these with the assimilation policy still being pursued in Bulgaria. When the Party Presidium discussed the report, Hoffmann told the meeting that ‘there were commissions for the Roma under the National Committees, but without Roma.’111 The Presidium was, however, reluctant to act on these proposals. Certainly no one agreed with recognising the Roma as a nationality. The ageing President Gustáv Husák demurred that the Roma were a ‘heterogeneous group in our society’ – implicitly referring to the Stalinist assertion that Roma lacked the unifying characteristics of a nation. Miloš Jakeš warned that ‘their Unions cannot have a political or a national character’, that 108 109 110 111

NA, f. N69 – Prˇedsednictvo ÚV KSČ 1989, P 103/89, bod. 8: Zpráva o stavu rˇešení problematiky romského obyvatelstva v ČSSR a základní zaměrˇení dalšího postupu. Pullmann, Konec experimentu. Michal Pullmann, ‘Gewalt in der Umbruchzeit der ČSSR’, in Martin Sabrow (ed.), 1989 und die Rolle der Gewalt (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012), 351. NA, f. N69 – Prˇedsednictvo ÚV KSČ 1989, P 103/89, bod. 8: Zpráva o stavu rˇešení problematiky romského obyvatelstva v ČSSR a základní zaměrˇení dalšího postupu. Zápis (handwritten notes).

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‘civilized Roma don’t want to have any contact with the others’, and that taking a more ‘liberal’ approach towards the Roma would be seen as a weakness. The only concession was an agreement to publish a Roma cultural magazine. Thus by November 1989 the guiding line on policy towards the Roma – as the Central Committee report itself stated – remained the 1958 resolution on ‘work among the Gypsy population’.

8

Losing Rights after 1989?

In late November 1989 two Roma activists, Emil Ščuka and Jan Rusenko, addressed cheering crowds from the Civic Forum stage in Prague’s Letná Park. On behalf of the newly founded Romani Civic Initiative (Romská občanská iniciativa, ROI), Ščuka declared, ‘We Roma also belong among you, as citizens and patriots. We were born in this country, and we want to live here. We aren’t here on contracts, like foreign workers. We want to live so that we’re not ashamed, and so you’re not ashamed of us.’1 Ščuka’s desire to differentiate Czech Roma from ‘foreigners’ – with an implicit reference to Vietnamese and other contract workers – showed a prescient awareness of the fragility of Roma claims to citizenship at a moment of revolutionary change.2 The image of Roma and dissidents speaking publicly in front of television cameras and a mass audience exemplifies the popular desire for non-violence, democracy, and ‘humanness’ that formed the core values of the 1989 revolution in Czechoslovakia.3 The Czechoslovak Communist Party was one of the last to relinquish power in Eastern Europe, but ten days of demonstrations and a general strike had finally brought the republic to a standstill. Popular mobilisation drove the revolution in Czechoslovakia to a greater degree than in any other Eastern European state, James Krapfl has argued, noting that ‘Czechs and Slovaks did not 1 2

3

Projev Emila Ščuky v roce 1989 na Letenské pláni, 25 November 1989. Source: Česká televize. On Vietnamese contract workers in Czechoslovakia, see Alena Alamgir, ‘Recalcitrant Women: Internationalism and the Redefinition of Welfare Limits in the CzechoslovakVietnamese Labor Exchange Program’, Slavic Review, 73:1 (Spring 2014), 133–155; Alena Alamgir, ‘Race Is Elsewhere: State Socialist Ideology and the Racialisation of Vietnamese Workers in Czechoslovakia’, Race & Class, 54 (2013). James Krapfl, Revolution with a Human Face: Politics, Culture and Community in Czechoslovakia, 1989–1992 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 7; Michal Pullmann, Konec experimentu: Prˇestavba a pád komunismu v Československu (Prague, Scriptorium, 2011), 224–225; Michal Pullmann, ‘Gewalt in der Umbruchszeit der CSSR’, in Martin Sabrow (ed.), 1989 und die Rolle der Gewalt: Wie friedlich war die “friedliche Revolution”? Die Rolle der Gewalt beim Zusammenbruch der kommunistischen Regime in Europa (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012).

247

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reject the Communist regime because it was socialist but because it was unresponsively bureaucratic and inhumane.’4 As in East Germany, most Czechs and Slovaks understood community – and nation – in civic rather than ethnic terms during the 1989 revolution.5 This would soon change. The Velvet Revolution of 1989 ended forty years of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia, but the civic initiatives established by Czech and Slovak dissidents swiftly disintegrated. Ethnic nationalism replaced the civic model of politics promoted by the Czech Civil Forum and the Slovak Public Against Violence. On the back of desires for popular self-expression in politics nationalist political parties emerged: the Czech centre-right Civic Democratic Party of Václav Klaus and the populist Movement for a Democratic Slovakia headed by Vladimír Mečiar, who soon agreed on the split of federal Czechoslovakia into two national republics. Dubbed the Velvet Divorce, the break-up of Czechoslovakia was accomplished without violence (in striking contrast to the civil wars unleashed by the disintegration of the two other socialist federations, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union). But the split had particularly negative consequences for Roma: a new citizenship law resulted in the reassessment of citizenship status for thousands of Slovak Roma who had migrated to the Czech lands after 1945. An estimated 150,000 Roma had to re-apply for citizenship in their country of permanent residence, which the European Roma Rights Centre presented as the first act of forced mass statelessness in Europe since World War II.6 This closing chapter broadens the perspective and provides a comparative overview of the apparent explosion of Roma rights in post-socialist Eastern Europe. The backdrop is not the victorious street scenes of 1989, where crowds cheered for democracy, but rather the slow unravelling of the socialist state and its way of life throughout the 1990s, bringing in its wake a host of tantalising civil and political rights and freedoms but also the collapse of the universal guarantees of minimum standards of living and, especially for the Roma, a spiral of populism, racism, and violence. For Roma, the transition to liberal democracy was replete with contradictions. The freedom to identify as Roma was offset by fear of racist violence or discrimination. Mass unemployment and market reforms 4 5 6

Krapfl, Revolution with a Human Face, 7. Krapfl, ‘The Boundaries of Community’, in Revolution with a Human Face, 143. European Roma Rights Centre, ‘Statement of the ERRC on acceptance into NATO of Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland’ (1997); Jirˇina Šiklová and Marta Miklušáková, ‘Citizenship of Roma after the split of Czechoslovakia: A social problem to be faced by other multinational states’, European Journal of Social Work, 1:2 (May 1998), 177–187.

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created ghettos from segregated communities.7 European institutions such as the Council of Europe recognised the Roma as a ‘true European minority’, and hundreds of Romani non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have been established in the post-socialist countries. On the other hand, states and societies across Europe revived the long-standing perception that Roma are ‘rootless’ – because they lack a territorial state – to question their legal status as citizens or asylum-seekers.8 A wave of racially motivated violence against Roma prompted international human rights NGOs such as the European Roma Rights Centre – established in 1996 as the first professional public interest law organisation dedicated exclusively to defending Roma rights – to step into the vacuum caused by the collapse of socialist citizenship. Human rights after 1990 were no longer a utopian moral alternative to socialism but became an obligatory aspect of ‘conditionality’ for membership in Western trade and security organisations, such as the Council of Europe, NATO, and especially the European Union (EU).9 The 1993 Copenhagen Criteria for European Community membership stipulated that candidate countries should build stable institutions guaranteeing democracy and the rule of law, a functioning market economy, and ‘respect for human rights and the protection of minorities’. By the end of the decade, however, fear of ‘East European Gypsies’ migrating west spurred EU member states to introduce programmes to combat poverty and social exclusion amongst Roma in the post-socialist states. Frequently framed as labour market ‘activation’ measures aimed at prising Roma from the welfare ‘dependency’ trap, Huub van Baar notes, the programmes promoted by the World Bank and other international organisations frequently saw Roma doing exactly the same kind of work as they had before.10 The freedom to migrate across national borders in 7

8

9

10

Nando Sigona and Nidhi Trehan, ‘Introduction: Romani Politics in Neoliberal Europe’, in Nando Sigona and Nidhi Trehan (eds.), Romani Politics in Contemporary Europe: Poverty, Ethnic Mobilization, and the Neoliberal Order (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Huub van Baar, ‘The Perpetual Machine of Forced Mobility: Europe’s Roma and the Institutionalization of Rootlessness’, in Yolande Jansen, Robin Celikates, and Joost de Bloois (eds.), The Irregularization of Migration in Contemporary Europe: Detention, Deportation, Drowning (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). After 1989, the European Community ‘engaged in concerted treaty making with its eastern neighbours, and determined that these would include clauses specifying the consequences of violations of human rights and democratic principles’; Lorand Bartels, Human Rights Conditionality in the EU’s International Agreements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1. Huub van Baar, ‘Socioeconomic mobility and neoliberal governmentality in postsocialist Europe: Activation and the de-humanisation of the Roma’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 38:8 (2012), 1289–1304.

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the enlarged European Union, and the manipulation of anti-Gypsyism by populist politicians in Western Europe in the wake of economic crisis, resulting in mass evictions of Roma from camps in France and Italy, once again turned the Roma into a ‘problem’ for the welfare states of Europe and for human rights in European law. Dreams of Freedom The Romani Civic Initiative was born as protests swelled across Czechoslovakia in late November 1989 and became the largest of the hundreds of Romani organisations established across the country after the Velvet Revolution. On 21 November 1989 Roma activists issued a declaration in the name of the three hundred thousand citizens of Romani nationality whom they claimed were living in the ČSSR. The text confirmed ROI support for the demands of the ‘university students, artists and the Czechoslovak Committee for Human Rights’.11 Emil Ščuka, Vojtěch Žiga, Jan Rusenko, and Milena Hübschmannová met in private apartments in central Prague and hastily prepared leaflets in Romani, Czech, and Slovak. Emotively, one leaflet declared, ‘Sisters, brothers, Roma . . . Now is the day our ancestors waited for. That day is here. Roma living in this country can take their destiny into their own hands for the first time.’12 Student activists helped distribute the leaflets at Prague’s Charles University. After a group of Roma activists brought a petition to the Laterna Magika theatre where the Civic Forum was meeting, Emil Ščuka was asked to join the forum. On 23 December 1989, Ščuka participated in the first plenary session of the Civic Forum as a member of its Nationalities Commission. The Roma Civic Initiative immediately distanced itself from KSČsupported efforts to revive the Union of Gypsies-Roma (Svaz CikánůRomů) that had been established after the Prague Spring. ROI leaders were intent on establishing a Romani political party to win electoral representation for Roma, rather than reviving the socialist idea of ‘mass organisations’. But there were also moral reasons for rejecting an organisation that the ROI viewed as tainted with the legacy of Communism. The first issue of the ROI newspaper Romano lav (Romani Word) noted that the Unions of Gypsies-Roma had been closed down in 1973 for political reasons, ‘after Roma demanded rights as a nationality’. However, the ROI also accused former union leaders of corruption and 11 12

Jakub Krčík, ‘Romské politické hnutí v České republice v letech 1989–1992’ (Prague: Diplomová práce, FF UK, Indologický ústav, 2002), 23. MRK Brno, f. Emil Ščuka, Jan Rusenko, ROI.

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careerism, ironically reproducing the rhetoric that the Husák regime had used to justify shutting down the Romani organisations: ‘Some leading functionaries of this organisation stepped down on their own initiative . . . and were then offered lucrative positions and functions in other institutions and organizations of the party of the former regime. We Roma distance ourselves from these functionaries who sold out and trampled on the pure ideals of honourable Roma with their corrupt and profitseeking activities in Névodrom and Butiker.’13 The ROI rejection of the socialist-era Unions of Gypsies-Roma was symptomatic of the split between communists and anticommunists that underpinned the formation of political parties in Czechoslovakia during the early 1990s. Citizenship rights – including the cultural rights of a nationality – were the keystone of the ROI programme published in January 1990 in Romano Lav under the heading, in Romani and Czech, ‘So kamel Romanˇi občansko iniciativa (Co chce ROI)’ – What the ROI wants. First on the list was recognition as a nationality in the Czechoslovak constitution, followed by a demand for a political party to represent all Roma, Romani language teaching in schools, support for Roma culture, proper housing for all Roma, policies to support the full employment of Roma, the elimination of the social causes of Roma criminality, and the development of international cooperation with Roma organisations abroad, especially the International Romani Union. Point 12 stated, ‘Immediately stop the sterilization of healthy Romani women.’14 Romano lav emphasised the difference between nationality (národnost) and state citizenship (státní prˇíslušnost) to show what ‘Roma nationality’ would mean in practice: state support for Roma theatres, publishing houses, artists’ agencies, and education – but not a loss of Czechoslovak citizenship. ‘WE WILL HAVE RIGHTS, NOT RESPONSIBILITIES! . . . For many years to be a member of our nation was a terrible insult . . . We Roma do not want to be insulted and humiliated. We want to live with everyone in our country in peace and friendship . . . WE ARE CITIZENS OF THE CZECHOSLOVAK REPUBLIC and no-one can take this citizenship away from us, even if we have a different nationality.’15 Eleven self-declared Romani MPs – the highest number in any postcommunist Eastern European state – were elected to the various parliamentary assemblies in the 1990 elections in Czechoslovakia as a result of the close cooperation between the Roma Civic Initiative and 13 14 15

MRK Brno, ‘Prohlášení prˇipravného výboru ze dne 15.12.1989’, Romano lav, 1:1 (1989), 5. MRK Brno, ‘So kamel Romanˇi Občansko Iniciativa’, Romano lav, 1:4 (1990). MRK Brno, ‘So kamel’; emphasis in the original.

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Figure 8.1. Founding congress of the Roma Civic Initiative (Romská občanská iniciativa, ROI), Palác Eden, Prague, 1990. From left: Karel Holomek, Emil Ščuka. From the collections of the Museum of Roma Culture. Photographer: Petr Matička.

the Civic Forum.16 All had been involved in official or unofficial social or cultural work with Roma before the revolution. In Slovakia, Anna Koptová (née Klempárová) – who had travelled to the World Romani Congress in Geneva in 1978 – became the first candidate who explicitly identified as Roma to win a seat in the Slovak parliament. The first democratic Czechoslovak elections were remarkable in this respect; elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the number of Roma elected to national legislatures on mainstream party tickets remained low throughout the 1990s. In Hungary, for instance, two Romani MPs were elected to the Hungarian parliament as a result of the alliance between the Romani Union Phralipe (Brotherhood) and the Union of Free Democrats, which emerged as the second-most important party in the March 1990 elections. Opportunities for candidates to campaign on the basis of Romani identity in Czechoslovakia swiftly diminished after the 1990 elections, when the two main reform movements disintegrated as a result of differing 16

Peter Vermeersch, The Romani Movement: Minority Politics and Ethnic Mobilization in Contemporary Central Europe (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2006).

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opinions on the political and economic transition. The Civic Forum broke up into the liberal Civic Movement (OH) and the market-oriented Civic Democratic Party (ODS), while the Slovak Public Against Violence split into the left-oriented and nationalist Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) and the more right-oriented Civic Democratic Union (ODÚ). Apart from Ladislav Body, who remained an MP for the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, all the Romani activists disappeared from the legislatures after the 1992 elections in Czechoslovakia.17 In contrast to Hungary, which adopted a system of minority selfgovernments attached to local municipalities (largely driven by the aim of protecting the interests of Hungarian minorities abroad), Romani political participation in Czechoslovakia was initially driven by a system of round tables, at which Roma representatives discussed policy formulation with the respective ministers.18 Communist policy towards Gypsies was described as a ‘failure’ due to its ‘systematic, long-term suppression of Roma identity’ in a 1990 Labour Ministry report drafted by the informal network of social workers, activists, and social scientists who had been engaged in alternative, semi-official protest activities with the Roma during the late 1970s and 1980s.19 During late socialism, as we saw in the previous chapter, the social ‘carer’ (kurátor) had acted as a mediator between ‘unadaptable’ Roma and the state, dispensing advice and small amounts of material benefits on a case-by-case basis. After 1990 Roma elites immediately demanded that the function of special social ‘carers’ be abolished, resenting their paternalistic role as a legacy of the Communist era. This sentiment was echoed in a report written by two of the Prague social workers in early 1990, who appealed for an immediate change in the paternalistic relationship between agents of the state and Roma: ‘In light of the new social and political conditions in Czechoslovakia and especially the tumultuous Roma movement, social work with Roma citizens has acquired a new dimension – that of cooperation with Roma initiatives. This cooperation must be based on entirely new principles, on full equality.’20

17 18

19

20

Vermeersch, The Romani Movement, 107. Eva Sobotka, ‘Limits of the State: Political Participation and Representation of Roma in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia’, Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe (2001), 1–23. MRK Brno 379/2001: Studie o současné společenské situaci romského obyvatelstvo v ČSFR. Federální ministerstvo práce a sociálních věcí, prosinec 1990, p. 30; MRK Brno 379/ 2001. Členové skupiny expertů k romské problematice. MRK 176/2004 – MPSV ČSR 1989: Správa sociálních služeb – Národního výboru hl. m. Prahy – Odd. zvláštní péče, Komentárˇ k výkazu V – MZSV ČSR – 26-01 část A, 20 February 1990 (Dr Hana Frištenská and Jana Chárová).

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The same report denounced the socialist regime’s refusal to recognise Roma subjective identification as a culture, which had been exemplified by the practice of collecting statistics on the Gypsy population according to levels of social integration. In early 1990, one Prague social worker wrote a highly critical report to the Ministry of Labour, claiming that National Committees registered a Roma citizen as a ‘Gypsy’ only when they were judged to be in need of ‘social assistance’, which meant that ‘only Roma in complicated social situations’ were registered as Gypsies. But since Czechoslovak law did not recognise the existence of Roma as a minority, ‘there is no reason for keeping any other records about the Roma, because according to these laws the Roma do not exist in our country.’ These data, she warned, ‘do not represent demographic statistics and cannot be used for such prognoses. They only provide an overview of social work with Roma clients.’21 In 1991 pressure from advocates of Romani cultural nationalism ensured that recognition of Roma ethnicity or national identity became the central pillar of Czechoslovak government policy towards the ‘Roma minority’.22 The model of Romani cultural nationalism resulted in the foundation of a Czech Museum of Romani Culture in Brno in 1993 by members of the Holomek family and other activists linked to the leaders of the socialist-era Czech Union of Gypsies-Roma. Despite this cultural turn, Roma activists expressed their fears about the loss of social and economic rights when they assembled at the first roundtable meeting on Roma hosted by the Department for Social Affairs in March 1991. During the round table, Roma representatives complained that non-Roma experts were taking control of post-socialist government policy for Roma without their participation. Almost unanimously, the Roma activists highlighted social problems over cultural issue, and called for a state institution at a federal or republic level that would be staffed predominantly by Roma.23 Romani politicians from Slovakia, where living standards were already much lower and where unemployment was rising faster than in the Czech Republic, warned that the main problems facing the Roma were not cultural but economic and social. Unemployment and housing were the two big worries, especially in segregated rural settlements such as Rudnˇany, which was built on soil contaminated by heavy metals (including mercury) from a disused mine.

21 23

22 Ibid. Usnesení vlády ČSFR č. 619 / 3 October 1991 k romské menšině. MRK Brno, Jednání “u kulatého stolu” zástupců ustrˇedních orgánů státní správy a romské reprezentace, konané dne 22. brˇezna 1991. Setkání porˇádal a vedl místoprˇedseda vlády ČSFR, p. RNDr. J. Mikloško, DrSc. Zúčastnil se jej ministr práce a sociálních věcí ČSFR p. P. Miller.

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Many proposed that Roma wishing to set up businesses should be supported with funds from the federal budget and guaranteed purchases from state institutions. Summing up, Deputy Prime Minister Mikloško approved of the proposals and suggested that ‘the fact that some of the principles had been taken from the past was not necessarily a bad thing, because state policy towards the Roma had not actually been governed by those principles.’24 Strikingly, one of the first reports about Roma after 1989 submitted to the government by the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs concerned the highly controversial topic of sterilisation. This was submitted to the government for information by the Federal Minister of Labour and Social Affairs Petr Miller and Deputy Vice President ČSFR J. Mikloško on 27 July 1990.25 Charter 77 cited from a 1989 professional health journal, which justified sterilising Roma women in eastern Slovakia on the grounds that ‘this concerns citizens, who to a great degree display a negative attitude towards work and education, high levels of criminality, a tendency to alcoholism and among the women to prostitution, and in the final instance generally lag behind the cultural and social development of other groups in the population.’26 The general prosecutor launched an investigation, but according to a 2005 study by the Czech Ombudsman, simply reproduced the standpoint of the Ministry of Labour and Health – which defended paying monetary compensation for sterilisation – without commenting on it. After this no investigations were launched until 1997. Relatively few people, moreover, took up the opportunity to selfidentify as Roma in the first post-communist census of March 1991, which allowed Czechoslovak Roma (Romové) to self-identify as a nationality or to claim Romani as their mother tongue. During the last two censuses of the socialist period (1970, 1980), census officials had identified persons as Gypsies by marking the census roll. Only 32,903 people claimed Roma nationality, with a further 7,664 claiming Romani as their mother tongue without identifying as ‘Roma’. These figures were little more than a fifth of the total number of ‘Gypsies’ recorded in National Committee statistics for 1989 (32,903 compared with 145,738 in the 1989 official statistics). Unofficial estimates were as high as 300,000. 24 25

26

MRK Brno, Jednání “u kulatého stolu”. Sterilizace romských žen – informace pro vládu ČSFR ze dne 27. července 1990. Prˇedkladatelé J. Mikloško, místoprˇedseda vlády ČSFR a P. Miller, ministr práce a sociálních věcí ČSFR. See Andrej Sulitka, ‘Vývoj a súčasný stav praktických riešení a kompetencií vrcholných orgánov štátu po roku 1989’ in Romové v České republice (1945– 1998) (Prague: Socioklub, 1999), 223. Ibid.

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By 2001 the number of people claiming Roma nationality had dropped further to 11,746 (although significantly more entered Romani as their mother tongue) – or 0.1 per cent of the population, even though census forms had been made available in Romani.27 In Slovakia, the number of people identifying as Roma rose slightly from nearly 81,000 in 1992 to nearly 90,000 in 2001, although the Slovak government, NGOs, and international organisations all estimated that the ‘real’ number was as high as 500,000.28 The reluctance to self-identify must be understood – at least in part – against the backdrop of a rapid increase in violent attacks against Roma across the whole of post-communist Europe. Human Rights and Violence in the 1990s Racially motivated violence against Roma in every post-communist state during the months following the collapse of Communism swiftly turned the protection of Roma into one of the main human rights campaigns in East Central Europe. Speaking to the Czech parliament in February 1990, Romani MP Karel Holomek warned that ‘pogroms’ were on the horizon in Slovakia, and neither the state authorities nor he Civic Forum seemed to have control over the situation.29 Gypsy neighbourhoods in villages and towns in Romania, Poland, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe were attacked, houses burned, and inhabitants beaten or killed. Czech neo-Nazi, white power, and extreme right groups marched through Prague in 1990, calling for Gypsies to hang.30 Official figures mention 2,500 racially motivated incidents in the Czech Republic during the 1990s, of which more than 1,500 were racially motivated crimes, mainly committed by neo-Nazis, whose targets included citizens with darker skin (mainly Roma), Vietnamese, and foreigners.31 In Romania, the National Salvation government of Ion Iliescu brought in miners from the Jiu Valley to put down peaceful demonstrations in Bucharest. Thousands of miners devastated the city centre and then attacked the local Roma neighbourhood, destroying homes and property. This was the start of a wave of anti-Roma violence that swept Romania in the early 1990s, 27 28

29 30 31

Vermeersch, The Romani Movement, 18–19. Sobotka, ‘Limits of the State’, citing the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Reports submitted by States under Article 9 of the Convention (1999). ČNR 1989–1990, 21. Schůze, 13.2.1990 Stenoprotokol, http://www.psp.cz/eknih/ 1986cnr/stenprot/021schuz/s021001.htm. Helsinki Watch, Struggling for Ethnic Identity: Czechoslovakia’s Endangered Gypsies (New York: Human Rights Watch, August 1992). Cas Mudde (ed.), Racist Extremism in Central and Eastern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).

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symbolised by the pogrom in Hadareni in 1993, when a group of policemen and civilians murdered three Roma men (two were beaten and one burned to death) and destroyed fourteen homes.32 In East Germany, neo-Nazis firebombed a hostel housing two hundred Romanian Roma in Rostock on 22 August 1992, to the cheers of onlookers.33 On 10 December 1993, meanwhile, President Václav Havel claimed: ‘The Gypsy problem is a litmus test not of democracy but of a civil society.’34 In her brilliant dissection of socialism and its legacies, anthropologist Katherine Verdery noted that Gypsies had become symbols for unwelcome market reforms but warned that much more was at stake than ‘representation’.35 Already in late 1991, a Czechoslovak federal government report on human rights submitted by Vice-Premier Jozef Mikloško (KDH) recognised that skinhead attacks on Roma were no longer simply motivated by a ‘collective psychosis’ scapegoating Gypsies in response to the sudden loss of material security but also by ‘intolerant racial ideologies’. Yet the same report also took at face value the official statistics on Roma ‘criminality’ that institutionalised a link between Gypsy ethnicity and social deviance without questioning the categories and assumptions that informed this data.36 The apparent reluctance of post-communist states to protect Roma from violence was the trigger for a flood of international human rights NGOs and international organisations to step into the vacuum. Human Rights Watch (the successor to Helsinki Watch, founded as a private human rights NGO devoted to monitoring the implementation of the Helsinki Accords) published a series of reports about Roma in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania in the first half of the decade, criticising national governments and police for failing to protect Roma from racially motivated violence and employing the language of humanitarian concern with titles such as Struggling for Ethnic Identity: Czechoslovakia’s Endangered Gypsies.37 Other NGOs campaigning for

32 33

34 35 36

37

David Crowe, ‘The Roma in Post-Communist Eastern Europe: Questions of Ethnic Conflict and Ethnic Peace’, Nationalities Papers, 36:3 (July 2008). Gilad Margalit, Germany and Its Gypsies: A Post-Auschwitz Ordeal (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 8; Eva Sobotka, ‘Romani Migration in the 1990s: Perspectives on Dynamics, Interpretation and Policy’, Romani Studies 5, 13:2 (December 2003), 79–121. ‘Havel Calls he Gypsies “Litmus Test”’, The New York Times (10 December 1993). Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 99. Zpráva o dodržování lidských práv v ČSFR prˇedkládáno na základě usnesení Federálního shromáždění ČSFR č. 218 ze dne 7. listopadu 1991 (Jozef Mikloško, Ján Langoš, Ivan Gašparovič). Helsinki Watch, Struggling for Ethnic Identity.

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Roma rights included Minority Rights Group International, Amnesty International, Save the Children, the Open Society Institute, and the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights. In the second half of the 1990s, the European Roma Rights Center (ERRC) became the first professional international NGO to focus exclusively on the human rights situation of Roma.38 As well as documenting and publicising human rights violations and sending protest letters to ‘shame’ governments, the ERRC provided targeted legal assistance to Romani victims of human rights violations and pursued strategic litigation, which the ERRC defines as ‘supporting legal cases designed to expose and contribute to the elimination of discriminatory structures that prevent Roma from enjoying full equality’.39 The connections between transnational advocacy networks of international human rights NGOs and Western governments in the transition to democracy have not typically been studied by histories of the Helsinki network. Sarah Snyder concludes her study of mobilisation around human rights norms after the Helsinki Final Act with a reflection on the persistence of ‘human rights violations’ in the region. ‘Many concerned with human rights in Eastern Europe declared victory too soon,’ she notes. Thus she recognises that the ‘the story of the transnational Helsinki network is not a triumphal one,’ although she argues ‘it does demonstrate that nongovernmental activism can effect positive political change.’40 As we have seen, Czech dissidents invoked human rights as part of a moral critique of state socialism, but after 1989 the networks and institutions established by the Helsinki Final Act were turned increasingly towards democratisation. ‘The promise of the 1975 Helsinki Accords has now become a program for democratic action,’ read a White House statement at the CSCE Conference on the Human Dimension in Copenhagen in June 1990.41 Several months later, a summit meeting issued the Charter of Paris for a New Europe. Declaring that ‘the division of Europe has ended,’ the charter emphasised CSCE commitments to human rights, democracy, the rule of law, and market economics. An important but under-researched actor in the reorganisation of the Helsinki Network after 1989 was the Project on Ethnic Relations (PER), an NGO founded in 1991 as a project of the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX). PER played an important role 38 39 40

41

Vermeersch, The Romani Movement, 202. European Roma Rights Center, www.errc.org/strategic-litigation (accessed August 2015). Sarah B. Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 249. Statement by the president, cited in Snyder, Human Rights Activism, 237.

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in promoting Romani activists from socialist countries, such as Romanian intellectual Nicolae Gheorghe, in the post-socialist era.42 The history of PER raises questions about the role of US state agencies in monitoring interethnic conflict and promoting civil society leaders in the late socialist and post-socialist periods. In 1992, PER organised a joint meeting in Stupava, Slovakia, for ‘leaders of Romani communities in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Romania and Yugoslavia’, with government officials from the countries concerned and academic experts from the United States and Europe. Describing the Communist regimes as a rule of ‘lies’, the organisers echoed John F. Kennedy’s speech in Berlin by saying, on behalf of everyone at the conference, ‘Wir sind alles Roma.’43 A PER policy paper by Nicolae Gheorghe and Andrzej Mirga, both of whom were appointed head of the Contact Point for Roma and Sinti at the OSCE Office for Democratic Organisations and Human Rights in Warsaw (the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe was a permanent international organisation, the successor to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe), pointed to the need for Roma to become ‘active subjects of politics and policies directed toward them’.44 Widespread fears among Roma citizens that declaring Romani nationality would compromise their civil rights, however, were borne out after the split of Czechoslovakia into two national republics in January 1993. The new Czech citizenship law reinstated the previously unused institution of ‘state citizenship’ at the expense of the federal citizenship introduced in 1968, threatening Slovak migrants (including most Roma in the Czech lands) with statelessness if they could not fulfil additional criteria such as proof of two years’ permanent residence (complicated by the fact that much housing allocated to Roma by the Communist regime did not meet the quality requirements for registration as permanent dwellings), a clean criminal record, or perfect mastery of Czech.45 Rumours surfaced months before the Velvet Divorce that Czechoslovak politicians were circulating a ‘secret report’ about a planned ‘exodus’ of Slovak Roma from the Czech lands. The Romani newspaper Romano Kurko ran an interview with Roma deputy Ladislav Body (the sole Romani MP at this time for the Czechoslovak 42 43 44 45

The PER archives are now stored in the Princeton University Library. The Romanies in Central and Eastern Europe: Illusions and Reality (Princeton, NJ: Project on Ethnic Relations, 1992). Andrzej Mirga and Nicolae Gheorghe, The Roma in the 21st Century: A Policy Paper (Princeton, NJ: Project on Ethnic Relations, 1997). Helen O’Nions, Minority Rights Protection in International Law: The Roma of Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 118.

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Communist Party) about the report, which the newspaper claimed ‘was without doubt a source of worry for all Roma’. Under the headline ‘Czechoslovakia is our homeland too,’ Body explained, ‘paradoxically, although I have Slovak nationality, my home is here, in the Czech lands. When we founded the Roma Democratic Congress we stated in our joint declaration that we want a common state. We don’t want to be foreigners in our own state.’46 An estimated 150,000 Roma in the new Czech Republic had to reapply for citizenship in their country of permanent residence, which the European Roma Rights Centre presented as the first act of forced mass statelessness in Europe since World War II.47 Following protests by international organisations and human rights advocates the Czech government introduced a series of amendments to the law. In 1997 the Czech Supreme Court ruled on the legality of denying citizenship on the basis of minor criminal offences. The applicant in the case, who had lived in the Czech Republic since he was three months old and was brought up in Czech orphanages, had been sentenced to expulsion following the theft of sugar beets worth a few dollars. Arguments by his defence lawyers that his private and family life had been violated contrary to Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights were upheld, and the court ruled that the offence did not meet the criteria of a criminal offence for the purpose of the Citizenship Law.48 Shortly after the Supreme Court decided on this 1997 case, the Czech Republic was again subjected to international criticism after waves of Roma arrived in Canada to seek asylum after a Czech television documentary depicted the country as a haven of tolerance with a special assistance programme for Roma.49 By 1997, the number of asylum-seekers from the Czech Republic reached 1,300 and the Canadian government imposed visa restrictions on Czech citizens.50 Thus, as the following section will explain further, Roma rights emerged as a ‘human rights’ issue during the 1990s in the context of the loss of citizenship rights guaranteed under socialism in parallel with increasingly restrictive asylum and immigration policies in the West.

46 47 48

49 50

MRK Brno: ‘V Československu je i náš domov: Rozhovor s romským poslancem’, Romano Kurko, 18 September 1992. European Roma Rights Centre, ‘Statement of the ERRC’. O’Nions, Minority Rights Protection, 122; Jirˇina Šiklová and Marta Miklušaková, ‘Law as an Instrument of Discrimination: Denying Citizenship to the Czech Roma’, East European Constitutional Review, 7:2 (1998). David Chirico, ‘The Long, Hot Czech Summer’, Roma Rights, 3 (1997). Sobotka, ‘Romani Migration in the 1990s’, 96.

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Roma Rights in the ‘New’ New Europe The transition to market economies across Eastern Europe enabled some Romani traders and businesspeople to establish thriving businesses and accumulate personal wealth in a way that would have been inconceivable under Communism, but the majority of Roma who were employed in low-skilled, labour-intensive jobs in industry, agriculture, or construction before 1989 experienced the transformation as a loss of rights in all fields of life: employment, education, housing, and health.51 The redistributive, egalitarian logic of the socialist economy had reduced the relative deprivation of Roma populations. Work, as both a right and duty, lost its place in structuring most spheres of life after 1989. Postsocialist labour markets are ‘increasingly fragmented, and segmented, and work is increasingly experienced as precarious and contingent’.52 For the majority of impoverished Roma, argues István Pogány, ‘minority rights are irrelevant’ in comparison to the loss of constitutional rights to work, education, and housing that Communist regimes guaranteed.53 The Charter of Paris for a New Europe, Pogány observes, exemplified the new vision of the ‘proper scope of “human rights”, a notoriously elastic concept’, as embracing civil and political rights as universal but social and economic rights as particular. Moreover, although the new constitutions adopted by post-socialist states bore traces of both the ‘old’ and ‘new’ visions of rights, the Constitutional Courts in East Central Europe proved much less willing to enforce violations of social and economic rights.54 The profound shifts in economic policy towards neo-liberal market principles or ‘shock therapy’ in the 1990s in the former socialist countries resulted in catastrophic unemployment for many Roma.55 In 1985 the employment rate for Romani men in Hungary was on a par with that for 51 52 53

54

55

István Pogány, ‘Refashioning Rights in Central and Eastern Europe: Some Implications for the Region’s Roma’, European Public Law, 10:1 (2004), 92. Alison Stenning et al., Domesticating Neo-Liberalism: Spaces of Economic Practice and Social Reproduction in Post-Socialist Cities (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). István Pogány, ‘Refashioning Rights in Central and Eastern Europe: Some Implications for the Region’s Roma’, European Public Law, 10:1 (2004); see also István Pogany, The Roma Café: Human Rights and the Plight of the Romani People (London: Pluto Press, 2004). Petr Kopecký, ‘The Czech Republic: From the Burden of the Old Federal Constitution to the Constitutional Horse Trading among Political Parties’, in Jan Zielonka (ed.), Democratic Consolidation in Eastern Europe, vol. 1: Institutional Engineering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Nando Sigona and Nidhi Trehan, ‘Introduction’, in Romani Politics in Contemporary Europe: Poverty, Ethnic Mobilization and the Neoliberal Order (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 2.

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the general male population; in 2009, an estimated 70 per cent of Hungarian Romani men were unemployed. Poverty and malnutrition were widespread, especially in Bulgaria and Romania, where a World Bank report claimed 84.3 per cent and 78.8 per cent, respectively, of Romani citizens were living in poverty in 2003.56 Property restitution, privatisation of the housing market, and the removal of rent controls contributed to the ghettoisation of segregated communities of Roma in urban and rural settings. School segregation and coercive sterilisation continued through the 1990s against a backdrop of dramatically increasing social and economic inequality between Roma and non-Roma citizens. One response to the crisis from international actors was the ‘Europeanisation’ of the Roma as a cultural issue, an approach led by the Council of Europe, whose activities have centred mainly on the promotion of European identity and the protection of human rights in Europe. As Marco Duranti has shown, anticommunism was one of the main motives for Council of Europe founders who established the European Convention on Human Rights.57 In February 1993, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted a resolution that called the Gypsies ‘a true European minority’ living ‘scattered all over Europe, not having a country to call their own’. Based on a report by Dutch socialist Josephine Verspaget, the resolution emphasised cultural differences between the Roma and majority societies to a much greater degree than contemporary reports by the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities. The resolution, adopted in the name of promoting the ‘emergence of a genuine European cultural identity’, claimed that ‘respect for the rights of Gypsies, individual, fundamental and human rights and their rights as a minority is essential to improve their situation’ and that guarantees for ‘equal rights, equal chances, equal treatment, and measures to improve their situation will make a revival of Gypsy language and culture possible, thus enriching the European cultural diversity’.58 For the first half of the 1990s, however, the council’s concern for Roma remained subordinate to its broader attempts to protect the cultural 56 57

58

Dena Ringold, et al. (ed.), Roma in an Expanding Europe: Breaking the Poverty Cycle (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003). Marco Duranti, ‘Conservatives and the European Convention on Human Rights’, in Norbert Frei and Annette Weinke (eds.), Toward a New Moral World Order? Menschenrechtspolitik und Völkerrecht seit 1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013); Marco Duranti, ‘The Holocaust, the Legacy of 1789 and the Birth of International Human Rights Law: Revisiting the Foundation Myth’, Journal of Genocide Research, 14:2 (2012), 159–186. Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, Recommendation 1203 (1993) on Gypsies in Europe (adopted by the Assembly on 2 February 1993).

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rights of minorities, primarily through new legal instruments such as the 1992 European Charter on the Protection of Minority Languages and the 1993 Framework Convention on the Protection of National Minorities. The construction of the Roma as a ‘European minority’ was intended to support the political project of constructing a post-communist European civil society based on cultural diversity and respect for human rights, such as freedom of movement.59 Reframing Romani identities as ‘European’, as Huub van Baar has written, was intended as a catalyst to ‘empower the Roma, to facilitate their inclusion, to guarantee their access to justice and public services’, and to renounce the authoritarian policies of former Communist regimes in East Central Europe.60 The Council of Europe also proposed the creation of an international elected body of Romani representatives who could advocate for ‘Romani questions’ at the European level. But at the same time, as the historian Henriette Asséo has suggested, such definitions revived older traditions of viewing Roma as a de-territorialised people with no claim to citizenship rights in the states to which they belong caught between liberal multiculturalism in the West and the ethnically defined states of the post-communist East.61 This was particularly noticeable in Council of Europe statements about Romani migration, such as a 1995 report by Verspaget for the Council of Europe Committee on Migration referring to a ‘return to the normal mobility of the Gypsies’, thus implying that Romani migration to Western Europe during the 1990s was simply a revival of the tradition of the ‘wandering Gypsy’.62 The Europeanisation of Roma rights took a new turn as a result of the eastward enlargement of the European Union into post-communist Europe, the most significant foreign policy issue for both postcommunist states and the European Community (later, European Union) during the 1990s and early 2000s. The slogan of the ‘return to Europe’ captured the aspirations of East Central European societies and elites to rejoin the West European democracies from which they had been ‘kidnapped’ by Stalin after World War II.63 In May 2004, eight East Central European countries (Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, 59 60 61 62

63

Henriette Asséo, ‘Les Gypsy Studies et le droit européen des minorités’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 5:51 (2004), 71–86. Huub van Baar, ‘Europe’s Romaphobia: problematization, securitization, nomadization’, Environment and Planning, 29 (2011), 203–212. Asséo, ‘Les Gypsy Studies’. Cited in Martin Kovats, ‘The Emergence of European Roma Policy’, in Will Guy (ed.), Between Past and Future: The Roma of Central and Eastern Europe (Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001), 100. Milada Vachudová, Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage and Integration after Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 83–84.

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Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia, as well as Malta and Cyprus) joined the European Union, followed in 2007 by Romania and Bulgaria. More than any other international organisation in Europe, writes Peter Vermeersch, ‘the EU was able to turn policy making on minority issues in postcommunist Central Europe into a matter of international politics.’64 In 1993 the European Council adopted the ‘Copenhagen Criteria’, a set of requirements for states wishing to join the European Community, which stated that prospective member states should have established a functioning market economy; adopted EU legislation; accepted the goals of political, economic, and monetary union; and ensured the ‘stability of institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for minorities’.65 Influenced by the civil war in Yugoslavia, the strategy adopted in the Copenhagen Criteria of using the promise of EU membership to enforce minority protection reflected EU member state concerns about the ‘possible emergence of territorial disputes, inter-state war, and conflict between centralized governments and national minorities’.66 Unlike territorial national minorities who formulated ethnonationalist claims, notes Peter Vermeersch, the Roma were not perceived by the European Union as a potential threat to European stability when the Copenhagen Criteria were adopted. However, the ‘Roma question’ swiftly became emblematic of the tensions between EU concern for human rights violations in postcommunist countries and increasingly restrictive immigration and asylum policies in the West during the 1990s. Germany’s decision to tighten its previously liberal asylum laws in 1993 in response to a surge of extreme nationalism against foreigners was a milestone in the transformation of European immigration policies.67 Germany was the destination of more than half of all Eastern Europeans applying for asylum in Western Europe from 1989 to 1992, in total about one million applications, of which more than half came from Yugoslavia and Romania. As civil wars spread across Yugoslavia, most Western European countries 64 65

66

67

Vermeersch, The Romani Movement. European Commission, Enlargement Briefing (1999), cited in Will Guy, ‘EU Initiatives on Roma: Limitations and Ways Forward’, in Nidhi Trehan and Nando Sigona (eds.), Romani Politics in Contemporary Europe: Poverty, Ethnic Mobilization and the Neoliberal Order (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 29. Peter Vermeersch, ‘EU Enlargement and Minority Rights Policies in Central Europe: Explaining Policy Shifts in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland’, Journal of Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe (2003). Milada Anna Vachudová, ‘Eastern Europe as Gatekeeper: The Immigration and Asylum Policies of an Enlarging European Union’, in Peter Andreas and Timothy Snyder (eds.), The Wall around the West: State Borders and Immigration Controls in North America and Europe (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 153–171, here 156.

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adopted policies designed to restrict the misuse of asylum channels during the early 1990s and introduced readmission agreements based on the ‘safe country’ principle that provided for the deportation of asylum-seekers and illegal immigrants to the state from which they had entered. Moreover, during the 1990s the EU member states were cooperating to tighten the common external border against illegal immigration and international crime. In 1995, seven member countries of the Schengen Agreement removed border controls with the aim of completing the European internal market, and by 1997, all EU states except Britain and Ireland had become members. As a result, the postcommunist countries applying to join the European Union were designated ‘safe countries’ and obliged to take on the responsibility of policing the EU common external border to the east and south-east as a ‘migrant buffer zone’.68 Fears of ‘floods’ or ‘waves’ of Gypsies arriving from Eastern Europe as refugees, asylum-seekers, or economic migrants resulted in a shift of European Commission policy towards Roma in the candidate countries after 1997, when EU member states recognised that their criticism of human rights violations in East Central Europe could result in Roma legitimately seeking asylum in the West.69 As EU accession approached, promising the cancellation of visa restrictions, the numbers of Czech Roma travelling to Britain prompted the UK Home Office to station immigration officials at the main airport in Prague to single out potential asylum-seekers. The European Commission and EU member states, meanwhile, became increasingly alarmed about the continuing severely disadvantaged situation of Romani communities in several candidate countries, which were ‘aggravated by hostile media coverage of the arrival in Western Europe of Roma [asylum-seekers] from these countries’. Measures to combat discrimination against Roma were explicitly listed as a short-term priority in the 1999 Accession Partnerships with five accession countries (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia) and repeatedly demanded in the annual progress reports monitoring compliance with political and aquis conditionality. European institutions maintained a conceptual distinction between the ‘Roma’ of Eastern Europe and Western European ‘Gypsies’, whose human rights were not treated as an object of concern for the European Union.70

68 69 70

Vachudová, ‘Eastern Europe as Gatekeeper’. Sobotka, ‘Romani Migration in the 1990s’. Katrin Simhandl, Der Diskurs der EU-Institutionen über die Kategorien ‘Zigeuner’ und ‘Roma’: Die Erschließung eines politischen Raumes über die Konzepte von ‘Antidiskriminierung’ und ‘sozialem Einschluss’ (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2007).

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Respecting the rights of minorities, for example through implementation of the Council of Europe Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, was not required of existing member states. In only one candidate country – Slovakia – did an apparent failure to change the situation of Roma actually become an obstacle to the EU accession process, however.71 It was in Slovakia, too, that transnational advocacy networks contributed most to transforming government policies on Roma rights, although this occurred in the larger context of the crucial role played by NGOs and grassroots campaigns for democratisation in the electoral defeat of Vladimír Mečiar and the HZDS by Mikuláš Dzurinda’s centre-right coalition party SDK in the 1998 elections, which pledged to end the nationalist and isolationist policies of Mečiar by opening up the economy and speeding up EU accession. After 1992, the government of Vladimír Mečiar created a political base by rallying Slovak nationalism around the call for an autonomous Slovakia and hinting at the threats posed by Czechs, Hungarians, and Roma – as well as opposition politicians, independent journalists, and Western academics.72 The post-1998 Dzurinda government claimed it would now show more ‘empathy’ towards Roma citizens.73 While the SDK government was more receptive to civil society advocacy, however, its policies towards Gypsies displayed a tendency to ‘Europeanise’ the Roma issue (thereby minimising the political responsibility of the Slovak government), while its social policy reforms dramatically exacerbated the social exclusion of Slovak Roma. In many ways, Slovakia can be seen as a laboratory for the paradoxes of Roma rights after socialism. In response to Romani citizens’ loss of social and economic rights in Slovakia, the activist and former MP Anna Koptová exercised her right of individual petition at the United Nations in December 1998 by appealing to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) as a victim of violations under the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Represented by the European Roma Rights Centre, Koptová filed the case on behalf of several Romani families who had been forced to leave their homes after the closure of the agricultural cooperative where they had worked since 1981. ‘Upon their departure, the authorities demolished the stables which they had occupied.’74 In May 1991 the families returned to the municipality in

71 73 74

72 Vermeersch, The Romani Movement, 197. Vachudová, Europe Undivided, 53. Vermeersch, The Romani Movement. Anna Koptová v. Slovak Republic: CERD-C-57-D-13–1998. UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, 57th Session, 31 July – 25 August 2000, Communication no. 13/1998.

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which the cooperative had been located, which was also where they were legally registered as residents, and were allocated temporary social housing. According to the claim put forward by Koptová, hostility from the locals prevented the families from settling permanently in the villages, until in July 1997 the Municipal Councils of Rokytovce and Nagov issued resolutions permanently prohibiting Roma from entering the village or settling in shelters in the district. On 21 July 1997, the dwellings built by the Romani families in the municipality of Cabiny were set on fire. Anna Koptová appealed to the CERD after the Slovak Constitutional Court rejected her claim that all Roma in Slovakia suffered infringements of their rights under the Slovak constitution to freedom of movement and residence, freedom from racial and ethnic discrimination, and freedom in the choice of nationality. Although the CERD accepted her claim, its response was limited to issuing a recommendation to Slovakia to lift restrictions on ‘freedom of movement and residence’. The recommendation highlighted the weakness of minority rights regimes: the lack of enforceability of non-discrimination provisions by any judicial body. However, the ERRC continued to pursue strategic litigation through the European Court of Human Rights, resulting in the landmark case DH and Others v. Czech Republic concerning Romani schoolchildren in Ostrava who claimed they had been placed in special elementary schools for the mentally disabled solely on account of their race. Originally dismissed by the Czech Constitutional Court in 1999, the case was brought to the EHRC, and after several appeals, the Grand Chamber found in favour of the plaintiffs in 2007. The finding put pressure on the Czech Republic to incorporate the concept of indirect discrimination into its domestic legislation, as required by the EU Racial Equality Directive. The plaintiffs received a sum of €4,000. Finally, the political stakes of EU accession in Slovakia also created an opportunity for the first major campaign by an international human rights NGO for justice for Slovak Romani women who were sterilised without their consent, a practice that human rights advocates revealed was continuing into the post-socialist era. The report that triggered these campaigns was co-written by a Slovak human rights NGO and the New York–based Center for Reproductive Rights and published in January 2003 at a crucial moment in the accession negotations.75 Discussing this case, Hungarian Romani scholar Angéla Kóczé has observed not only that the enforcement problems of rights-based approaches to gendered 75

Center for Reproductive Rights / Poradnˇa pre občianská a ľudské práva, Body and Soul: Forced Sterilization and Other Assaults on Roma Reproductive Freedom (January 2003).

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discrimination against Romani women are immense but also that the process of human rights advocacy depends on numerous hierarchies of power in which the victims of abuse ‘are assigned one primary form of agency in the international exchange – the right to claim the authority to define authentic experience and produce representations of that experience at the local level. Within this discursive relationship, the “call for help” is authorized by the victim, but the nature and scope of protective intervention is determined by more powerful actors – whether those organizations are international human rights organizations or transnational feminist advocacy organizations.’76 Drawing on the insights of subaltern studies, Kóczé notes that the involvement of international human rights NGOs can lead to the silencing of Romani women, who are represented as ‘victims’ and are left no position from which to speak. Slovakia’s accession to the European Union in 2004 resulted in Slovak citizens gaining the right to travel freely to other EU member states, an experience that Slovak Roma migrating to the United Kingdom described as a similar opportunity as the postwar migrations to Bohemia.77 But at the same time, as Huub van Baar and others have argued, EU expansion into Eastern Europe accelerated the shift from ‘rights’ to ‘governance’, with an increasing focus on constructing future European citizens as ‘active’ subjects in the democratic polity and on the labour market. The convergence of the human rights–civil society model with theories of neoliberal governance was illustrated by the case of a wideranging social policy reform in Slovakia. The coalition governments led by Dzurinda in 1998 and especially those after 2002 introduced sweeping market reforms in the labour market, pensions, social benefits, taxes, public finances, health care, and transport. In March 2003 the Dzurinda government adopted a ‘strategy’ for promoting employment growth by reforming the social system and the labour market. The most radical element of this new programme was a new Law on Assistance in Material Need, which formed a core element of the National Action Plan for Social Inclusion, the first policy statement in Slovakia to embrace the EU aims of reducing poverty and social exclusion.78 Framed as an ‘activation’ measure to ‘motivate’ the long-term 76

77 78

Angélá Kóczé, ‘The Limits of Rights-Based Discourse in Romani Women’s Activism: The Gender Dimension in Romani Politics’, in Nando Sigona and Nidhi Trehan (eds.), Romani Politics in Contemporary Europe: Poverty, Ethnic Mobilization and the Neoliberal Order (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 135–155. Jan Grill, ‘“Going Up to England”: Exploring Mobilities among Roma from Eastern Slovakia’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 38:8 (September 2012), 1269–1287. Martin Marušák and Leo Singer, ‘Social Unrest in Slovakia 2004: Romani Reaction to Neoliberal “Reforms”’, in Trehan and Sigona (eds.), Romani Politics in Contemporary

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unemployed into work, the justification report claimed the law ‘emerged from the philosophy of motivation and providing opportunities for individuals and their families’. Importantly, however, the law also implicitly targeted Roma as the group allegedly most susceptible to long-term dependence on social benefits, claiming, ‘It must be recognised that social benefits de-motivate individuals who lack deep-rooted working habits, generally lower standards of living and larger than average families.’79 Thus the law re-ethnicised cultural stereotypes about alleged Romani ‘asociality’. Roma, particularly those living in the estimated 620 segregated settlements in the east and central parts of Slovakia, were disproportionately affected by the reforms. Rising transport prices, for instance, significantly affected the social exclusion of Roma living in geographically segregated settlements.80 During February and March 2004 Roma in more than forty towns and villages in eastern and south-eastern Slovakia rioted in protest against radical cuts to social benefits under the new Law on Assistance in Material Need that targeted individuals living below the official subsistence minimum.81 The demonstrations took various forms, according to one study, including ‘rallies, petitions, letter campaigns targeting the members of government, appeals to the European Court of Human Rights, marches, organized lootings of shops and, in a few cases, serious clashes with police. Organized mass looting occurred in the following towns and villages: Levoča, Drahnˇov, Čierna nad Tisou, Trhovište, Hucín, Rimavská Sobota, Sačurov, Zemplín, Čaklov, Kamenˇany and Rovinka.’82 In response, the Slovak government mobilised the army for the first time since the revolution in November 1989.83 The European Roma Rights Centre reported that a Romani man died when police suppressed demonstrations in the Roma district of Trebišov with water cannons, truncheons, and tear gas.84 In conclusion, then, the rapid emergence of the ‘Roma issue’ as one of the major human rights questions in post-communist East Central Europe seems less a continuation of the Helsinki Network or the 1970s

79 80 81 82 83 84

Europe (Bratislava: Inštitút pre verejné otázky, Evaluácia sociálnej politiky zameranej na zníženie dlhodobej nezamestnanosti, 2006), 186–208. Dôvodová správa, Zákon o zmiernení hmotnej núdze a o zmene a doplnení niektorých zákonov (Draft submitted to SNR 22.8.2003 by MPSVR SR), 25. Marušák and Singer, ‘Social Unrest in Slovakia 2004’. Zákon č. 599 / 2003 Z.z. o pomoci v hmotnej nudzi Marušák and Singer, ‘Social Unrest in Slovakia 2004’. Marušák and Singer, ‘Social Unrest in Slovakia 2004’, 186. European Roma Rights Centre, Extreme Rights Deprivation among Roma in Slovakia Leads to Unrest (28 May 2004), http://www.errc.org/article/extreme-rights-deprivationamong-roma-in-slovakia-leads-to-unrest/1884.

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vision of human rights as a moral utopia than a response to the collapse of socialist citizenship after 1989. At the fifth World Romani Congress in Prague in 2000, the International Romani Union under the leadership of the Czech Romani activist Emil Ščuka called for the recognition of the Romani people as an ‘a-territorial European nation’. This attracted criticism from activists who feared such a formulation could be used to revive the stereotype of the ‘wandering Gypsy’, so powerful in the 1930s. Meanwhile, the manipulation of anti-Gypyism in the wake of the economic crisis in Europe in the late 2000s resulted in the expulsion of thousands of Roma from France and Italy on the basis of ‘emergency’ legislation, the introduction of identification procedures in Italian camps for ‘nomads’, and he demolition of Roma settlements. The latest international declaration to formulate a vision for the future rights of European Roma – the Charter on the Rights of the Roma adopted in 2009 by the European Roma and Travellers Forum – made no mention of territory, referring instead to Roma as a European national minority making no claim to a state of their own, but rather advancing a more cautious appeal for equal citizenship and cultural autonomy.85

85

European Roma and Travellers Forum, Charter on the Rights of the Roma, www.ertf .org/images/ERTF_Charter_Rights_Roma_EN_FIN.pdf.

Conclusion

Speaking to a round table of young Roma professionals in Bulgaria in 2012, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton described the ‘full integration of the Roma people into the societies and nations where they reside’ as one of the ‘pieces of unfinished business’ for Europe. Claiming that ‘Americans have learned these lessons over the course of our history . . . and we are the stronger for it’, Clinton noted: ‘For too long, Roma citizens have been marginalized and isolated, prevented from contributing their talents and participating in their societies. This is a critical matter of human rights, and it affects millions of men, women, and children across the continent.’1 This statement was made on the occasion of the United States becoming an official observer of the Decade of Roma Inclusion (2005–2015), a high-profile initiative funded by the Open Society Foundation, which targeted the post-socialist countries with support from the largest international development organisations. The assumption that ensuring human rights for Roma is the solution to a ‘problem’ borne of Europe’s unfinished journey towards democracy was reflected in the numerous programmes financed by international and regional organisations in the post-socialist states after 1989, such as the World Bank, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the Council of Europe.2 It was a narrative that strongly influenced the eastward enlargement of the European Union during the 1990s and early 2000s in the form of technical assistance projects funded by the European Commission in East Central Europe through programmes

1

2

U.S. Embassy in Bulgaria, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at a Roundtable with Young Roma Professionals (5 February 2012), http://bulgaria.usembassy.gov/ secstate_roma02052012.html. Will Guy (ed.), Between Past and Future: The Roma of Central and Eastern Europe. (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001); Will Guy, Zdenek Uherek, and Renate Weinerova (eds.), Roma Migration in Europe: Case Studies (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2004); Huub van Baar, ‘Socio-Economic Mobility and Neo-Liberal Governmentality in Post-Socialist Europe: Activation and the Dehumanisation of the Roma’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 38:8 (September 2012), 1289–1304.

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such as PHARE, as well as political negotiations over adoption and implementation of the acquis communautaire (the body of European law) and the Copenhagen Criteria for membership in the European Union.3 Advocacy groups, politicians, and journalists viewed Roma as a barometer for human rights in the candidate countries during the eastward enlargement of the European Union.4 When EU member states realised their criticism of human rights violations in East Central Europe could result in Roma legitimately seeking asylum in the West, however, European Commission policy shifted during the enlargement process toward ‘respect for minorities and anti-discrimination regulations in the candidate member-states’.5 During the 1990s, increasingly restrictive asylum policies in Western European states, bilateral readmission agreements, and the construction of a common external border and visa policy around the member states of the European Union turned the postcommunist countries into a migration ‘buffer zone’ against refugees, asylum-seekers, and economic migrants trying to enter Europe from the south-east.6 Fears about labour migration in the West coalesced around the ‘East European Roma/Gypsies’ (a label that has no bearing on the diversity of Romani groups in the post-socialist Europe).7 In the wake of the economic crisis in the late 2000s, populist politicians in France and Italy caused a furore at the highest political levels in Europe by deporting Romani migrants and demolishing their temporary shelters on the basis of ‘emergency’ legislation targeting ‘nomads’ – thus raising questions about the capacity of liberal democracy and European law to protect the human rights of all its citizens.8 3

4

5 6

7 8

Huub van Baar, ‘The European Roma: Minority Representation, Memory, and the Limits of Transnational Governmentality’, (Amsterdam: PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2011); van Baar, ‘Socioeconomic mobility’; Peter Vermeersch, ‘Ethnic mobilisation and the political conditionality of European Union accession: the case of the Roma in Slovakia’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 28:1 (2002), 83–101. Peter Vermeersch, ‘Reframing the Roma: EU Initiatives and the Politics of Reinterpretation’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 38:8 (September 2012), 1195–1212. Peter Vermeersch, ‘Ethnic Mobilisation’. Milada Vachudová, ‘Eastern Europe as Gatekeeper: The Immigration and Asylum Policies of an Enlarging European Union’, in Peter Andreas and Timothy Snyder (eds.), The Wall Around the West: State Borders and Immigration Controls in North America and Europe (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 153–171. Jan Grill, ‘“Going Up to England”: Exploring Mobilities among Roma from Eastern Slovakia’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 38:8 (September 2012), 1269–1287. Olivier Legros and Tomasso Vitale, ‘Les migrants roms dans les villes françaises et italiennes: mobilités, regulations et marginalités’, Roms migrants en ville: pratiques et politiques en Italie et en France, Géocarrefour (Special Issue) 86:1 (2011), 3–14; on the ‘emergency nomad decree’ in Italy, see Costanza Hermanin, ‘“Counts” in the Italian

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Even among informed observers, the current debate about Roma rights remains polarised between two extremes, viewing Roma as either the undifferentiated victims of ‘human rights abuses’ or the culprits in a version of history as morality tale. How the human rights of Roma evolved in Europe’s recent history is a question that is rarely posed, let alone satisfactorily answered. Instead of placing the apparent emergence of Roma rights in the context of the Eastern European ‘democratic transition’ after 1989, this book has argued that socialist regimes in the Soviet bloc played a crucial role in the future development of discourses and practices of Roma rights by providing the Roma with equal rights and economic opportunities as citizens after 1945. Czech and Slovak Roma such as Elena Lacková and Tomáš Holomek played an active role in building socialism during the 1950s, working as party activists or cultural workers with Gypsies in rural Slovakia or the industrialised Czech borderlands. With the turn to individual human rights at the United Nations after World War II, following the catastrophic failure of the collective minority rights regime, Stalinist conceptions of national cultural rights – crucially underpinned by social and economic rights backed up by material guarantees from the socialist state – represented a possible alternative for Romani activists in postwar Europe. The promise of socialist modernity in the shape of industrialisation, state planning, and technocratic government was viewed by many Roma – along with millions of other Czechoslovak citizens – as a plausible route to a more equal society after the experiences of war, occupation, and the depression of the 1930s. Viewed under Eastern European Stalinism as a legacy of capitalism that could be solved by creating worker-citizens through full employment and mass mobilisation, in the post-Stalin era the Gypsy Question evolved into a real and symbolic test of the ability of the welfare dictatorships to impose their vision of social equality, justice, and conformity on refractory and recalcitrant populations. After the Prague Spring, Slovak and Czech Roma gained permission to establish Unions of Gypsies-Roma within the National Front, but the opportunity to organise collectively was shortlived. The unions were forced to liquidate themselves by the leadership of the ‘normalised’ Communist regime that took power after the Soviet invasion of the country in 1968. By the late 1970s, when the playwright and dissident Václav Havel put his name to a widely circulated Charter 77 essay about Gypsies-Roma in Czechoslovakia, which claimed the “nomad camps”: an incautious ethnic census of Roma’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 34:10 (October 2011), 1731–1750; Helen O’Nions, ‘Roma Expulsions and Discrimination: The Elephant in Brussels’, European Journal of Migration and Law, 13 (2011), 361–388.

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Figure C.1. Author and activist Elena Lacková, Prešov, 1990. From the collections of the Museum of Roma Culture. Photographer: František Sysel.

socialist regime was violating the human rights of Roma citizens in a manner tantamount to genocide, the plight of the Gypsies had become a metaphor for the moral bankruptcy of socialism. Romani experiences were not marginal to state socialism but fundamentally shaped the development of social and economic rights in Czechoslovakia. This book demonstrates that socialist governments in the post-Stalin era made concessions to societal demands for a rollback of the radically egalitarian campaigns introduced by the Stalinist state. In this sense, the findings of this study reflect scholarship by historians on the politics of sex equality under state socialism. By the 1960s, when the economic crisis caused by a loss of export markets prompted discussions

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about introducing a greater degree of enterprise self-management, government officials worried that Gypsy workers would be the first to suffer from these reforms, however limited. The result was a reformulation of social rights, linked during the 1950s to equality of paid work and citizenship and towards a definition of Roma as ‘needy’ objects of care within the socialist welfare state. It is in this context that experts in public health and social welfare revived eugenic ideas as social policy measures, resulting in a policy of offering Romani women material incentives to undergo sterilisation, which evolved into a widespread practice during the 1970s and 1980s. The history of Romani activists who established the first collective interest organisations for Roma in the socialist bloc – the Unions of Gypsies-Roma established under the National Front from 1969–1973 – also contributes to scholarship on the ethnic and social identity of elite and middle-class Roma, many of whom ‘passed’ as non-Roma in particular social and political contexts. Thus rather than reifying Czechoslovak Romani identity as a marginal, deviant, racialised underclass – as an influential group of Czech ethnologists has recently done – this book argues for an approach to Romani ethnicity that stresses historical contingency and the constant negotiation of definitions of what it means to be Roma.9 A rich body of scholarship on nationalism and state-building in East Central Europe has explored how local societies contested, resisted, or appropriated official categories of national ascription in the late Habsburg Empire and the interwar successor states.10 Fewer studies have traced the legacies of these struggles over citizenship and national belonging in the postwar years, taking into account the material and emotional consequences of wartime violence. Similarly to Jewish Holocaust survivors, the physical and psychological consequences of wartime persecution shaped attitudes towards assimilation, integration, and identity within Romani families. The broader politics of Holocaust memory in Europe shaped the turn towards human rights in transnational contacts between Romani activists in Eastern Europe and organisations such as the West German Society for Threatened Peoples during the 1970s and 1980s. Both the promise and failure of socialism had a decisive impact on advocates for the Roma in the international human rights movement 9 10

Marek Jakoubek, Romské osady v kulturologické perspektivě (Brno: Doplněk, 2003). See in particular Pieter Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Nancy Wingfield, Flag Wars and Stone Saints: How the Bohemian Lands became Czech (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2007); Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).

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after 1968. This book shows not only that socialist regimes were far more responsive to social pressures when formulating their policies towards minorities than Cold War accounts allowed but also that Roma of different nationalities, cultures, and classes used the language of citizenship and rights to advance their interests and forge new identities under socialism. For Romani activists, there was little that was utopian about either socialism or human rights.11 Instead, both held out the promise of citizenship within a state that pre- (and post-)socialist regimes had failed to provide. Human rights for Roma, seen from this perspective, emerged not as the solution to the problems caused by Communism but as a response to the vacuum created by the collapse of citizenship rights in the socialist bloc after 1989.

11

On human rights as a moral utopia since the 1970s, see Jan Eckel, ‘The Rebirth of Politics from the Spirit of Morality: Explaining the Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s’, in Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn (eds.), The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 226–260; Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

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N E W SP A P E R S A N D J O U R N A L S HUKO – Stavba socializmu Literární noviny Kulturní tvorba Kulturný život Mladý svět Obrana lidu Rudé právo

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Index

anthropology, 17, 19, 23, 46, 169, 229 anticommunism, 46, 233, 262 anti-discrimination, 22, 148, 272 Arendt, Hannah, 1 asocial, 29, 37, 115, 118, 121, 139, 173, 198, 245 asylum, 34, 118, 249, 260, 264–265, 272 Bardejov, 94, 101, 108, 137, 160, 167, 177, 219–220, 242–243 borderlands, 19, 21, 37, 56, 59, 62, 65–66, 70, 82, 84–85, 105, 111, 134, 164, 191, 218, 273 census, 17, 20, 33, 99, 191, 195–196, 255, 273 Certificate of National Reliability, 53 Charter 77, 7–9, 181, 214–215, 222–226, 234, 241, 243, 255, 273, 282–283, 288, 291 Charter of Paris for a New Europe, 258, 261 Cibuľa, Ján, 101, 189 citizenship, 15, 19, 35, 51, 186, 248, 251, 260, 281–283, 285, 289 civil society, 8, 13, 82, 117, 119, 146, 154, 180–181, 216, 234, 257, 259, 263, 266, 268 Cold War, 4–7, 9, 15, 34, 46, 49, 53–55, 99, 117–119, 140, 152, 215, 258, 276, 292, 294 collectivisation, 88, 90, 93, 98 commemoration, 16, 97, 199 Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. See Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, 266 Copenhagen Criteria, 249, 264, 272 Council of Europe, 2, 46, 207, 233, 249, 251, 262, 266, 271 criminology, 17, 19, 46

Czechoslovak Communist Party, 135, 146, 220, 247, 260 Davidová, Eva, 95, 101, 130, 163, 175, 204, 278, 280 Decade of Roma Inclusion, 271 Dědič, Miroslav, 59, 71–72, 76, 277–278 democracy, 2, 5–6, 13, 15, 45, 47, 50, 53, 55, 63–64, 82, 94, 118, 135, 147, 181, 183, 209, 233, 247–249, 257–258, 264, 271–272 deportation, 14, 28, 32–33, 40, 80, 139, 197, 265 DH and Others, 267 dissent, 119, 215, 234 Dubček, Alexander, 182, 185, 188, 288 Dzurinda, Mikuláš, 266 education, 6, 10, 23, 44–45, 52, 56, 59, 62, 64, 74–75, 77, 82, 85, 88, 98, 102, 106, 108–109, 113–114, 124, 135–138, 143, 145, 148–150, 152, 159, 170, 172, 183, 186, 191, 194, 203, 208, 213, 220, 223–224, 230, 241, 251, 255, 261 ‘Special schools’, 71 Erban, Evžan, 49, 69, 82 ethnic cleansing, 32 ethnicity, 14, 22, 55, 92, 144, 148, 153, 158, 171, 192, 228, 238, 254, 257, 275, 288 ethnography, 23, 48, 75, 81, 98, 100–102 European Charter on the Protection of Minority Languages, 263 European Community. See European Union European Convention on Human Rights, 5, 46, 55, 207, 233, 260, 262 European Parliament, 1, 46 European Roma Rights Centre, 248, 260 European Union, 1, 249, 263–264, 268, 271–272

295

296

Index

Facuna, Anton, 127, 135–136, 138, 180–188, 191–192, 202, 211, 236 family, 146 first World Romani Congress, 184, 205, 207–208, 242, 291 forced labour, 2, 18, 32, 40, 55, 63, 85 Framework Convention on the Protection of National Minorities, 263 gadžo, 191–192 gender, 53, 55, 146, 148 genocide, 1–2, 4, 19, 33–34, 46, 198, 214, 222, 224, 231, 241–242, 274 Gheorghe, Nicolae, 259 Gottwald, Klement, 56, 60, 77, 79 Guy, Will, 65, 78, 104, 115, 130, 134–135, 157, 162, 166–167, 187, 205, 236, 263–264, 271, 281, 285, 292 Habsburg Empire, 17, 20, 210, 275 Havel, Václav, 7, 9, 13, 181, 185, 215, 217, 224, 226, 230, 245, 257, 273, 285, 289 Helsinki Final Act, 9, 215, 232, 258 Holocaust, 2, 4, 16, 31, 33, 35, 46, 55, 231, 262, 275, 285, 292 Holomek, Tomáš, 35, 50, 73, 82, 195, 210–211, 244, 273 Holubec, Karel, 78–80, 150 Horváthová, Emília, 68, 93, 95, 97–98, 101, 106, 277, 288 Hübschmannová, Milena, 3, 35, 81, 86, 94, 136, 155, 175–178, 193, 195, 211, 228–229, 235, 241, 250, 277 humanitarianism, 5, 231 Hungary, 13, 16–18, 43, 53, 79, 84–85, 95, 108, 116, 119, 130, 135, 138–139, 141, 143, 153, 170, 185, 210, 217, 234–235, 245, 248, 252–253, 257, 259, 261, 263–265, 285–288, 290 Husák, Gustáv, 188, 216, 218, 245, 251 identification, 2, 17–18, 45, 69, 139, 193, 195, 254, 270 ideology, 2, 10, 29, 55–56, 113, 119, 146, 152, 205, 214, 225, 227, 230–231, 281 India, 3, 81, 133, 138, 204, 236, 239, 288 industrialisation, 87, 95–96, 111, 131, 159, 273 International Criminal Police Commission, 24, 26 International Romani Union, 109, 114, 189, 205, 214, 236–237, 242, 251, 270, 281 Jews, 19, 21, 26, 31–33, 39, 43, 46, 107, 110, 166, 198–199, 219, 275, 284–285

Karika, Gustáv, 77, 80, 90, 106, 109, 137, 202 Klempárová, Anna. See Anna Koptová Koptová, Anna, 3, 4, 214, 238, 252 Košice, 4, 10, 35, 38, 49, 64, 67, 73, 76, 85, 87, 90, 101–102, 106–109, 113, 129, 133–134, 149, 153, 157, 159, 161, 163, 165–166, 168, 172, 177, 183, 188, 191, 193, 214, 218, 220, 238, 241–242, 244, 278 Lacková, Elena or Ilona, 2–3, 5, 14, 48, 50, 65, 73, 76, 82, 84, 86, 90–91, 102, 104, 135, 137–138, 184, 190, 204, 273, 277–278 League of Nations, 9, 205 Lesný, Vincenc, 81 Ludvík Aškenazy, 59 Mečiar, Vladimír, 266 memory, 4, 46, 199, 275 migration, 139 minority rights, 4, 9, 205–206, 214, 231, 235, 261, 267, 273, 288 Minority Rights Treaties, 19–20 Mirga, Andrzej, 259 Moldava nad Bodvou, 21, 39 Most, 19, 33, 35, 37, 76, 88, 123, 129, 141, 173, 200, 218–220, 230, 240, 242, 284 My Friend Fabián, 56, 58–59, 61, 82 National Action Plan for Social Inclusion, 268 nationalism, 12, 30, 50, 80, 87, 100, 135, 154, 195–196, 205, 211, 231, 234, 236, 241, 248, 254, 264, 266, 275, 281 nomadism, 12, 21, 23, 115–117, 121–124, 126, 129, 139–141, 188, 207, 209 Open Society Foundation, 271 Organisation for Security and Cooperation, 259, 271 Oriental Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, 81–82, 150 passing, 76, 191 PHARE, 272 Prague Spring, 7, 9, 12, 136, 144, 146, 175–176, 179–185, 189, 204, 215, 226, 236, 250, 273, 282, 289, 293 Prešov, 3, 14, 32, 36, 38, 73, 85–86, 89–92, 101–102, 107–108, 111, 113, 125,

Index

297

129, 132, 159, 163, 166–167, 184, 191, 233, 290, 292 Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, 26, 31, 43 Puxon, Grattan, 184, 205, 207, 236, 287, 290

Stalinist nationality policy, 20, 48, 51, 82, 98–99, 137, 205 statelessness, 18, 46, 248, 259–260 sterilisation, 2, 33, 144–145, 168, 173–175, 194, 221–222, 224, 226, 241–242, 251, 275

racial discrimination, 16, 51, 54–56, 63–64, 68–69, 77, 90, 99, 139, 151, 177, 236 reproductive rights, 144, 267 resettlement, 28, 32, 65, 83, 107, 111, 144, 159–160, 162–163, 165–168, 188, 194, 202, 218, 224 Romania, 1, 16, 32, 34, 36, 153, 210, 256, 259, 262, 264–265, 287, 289

totalitarianism, 5–6, 15, 233 typhus, 28, 31–32, 39, 44, 107–108, 113

Schengen Agreement, 265 Ščuka, Emil, 244, 247, 250, 270 second World Romani Congress, 214, 231, 237–240, 290 self-determination, 9, 18, 20, 206, 230–232 self-help, 11, 111, 162, 181, 183, 201, 203 Servika Roma, 19, 84, 192 social rights, 49, 112, 116, 119, 145–147, 152, 221, 224, 275 socialist internationalism, 54–70, 210, 233 socialist legality, 8, 12, 115, 117–118, 121

UNESCO, 99, 208 Ungrika Roma, 19, 84, 136, 182, 192 Union of Gypsies-Roma, 77, 136, 174, 180–213, 225, 235, 237, 250, 254 USSR, 20, 236, 291 vagrancy, 18, 21, 115, 123, 127, 134, 139 Vlach, 17, 67, 76, 84, 98, 115, 126, 134, 141, 150, 163, 169, 182, 192, 210 Vlach Roma, 92 Weiss, Jirˇí, 56, 58–59, 82, 278 women, 4, 75–82, 171–175, 221–228, 267–275 World Bank, 249, 271 World Council of Churches, 214, 236 Yugoslavia, 1, 13, 141, 205, 210, 235, 239, 242, 245, 248, 259, 264