Still working on reading this text with increasing alarm. There is A LOT going on in this one that seems so problematic. Wish I could better dissect it all, but the writers cover a lot in this short text and it basically reads as a text that tries to frame racism as the reason for nationalism in previously Soviet states today( too bad that the reasons given are applicable to countries like Finland as well that was never part of the Soviet).

The conclusion part has a line about the rise of nationalism as an "attempt to rediscover the authenticity that has been lost - or stolen by communism" as a sort of apologia for post Soviet states going full in on fascism. It reads a bit like history starts from the Soviet time.

Also this entire book has a lot of articles framing racism as "it's non Western too" and to me that reads like muddying the water on the effects of colonialism. It's both sidesing racism, ffs. Soviet Russia is also framed as a colonizing power.

A few choice bits from the article: "The related but differing Soviet logic of anti-Roma racism was driven by the logic of national domination, subservience to the state, assimilation and the destruction and outlawing of Roma culture and language. For Stalin, the ‘Gypsies’ were a backward race in need of socialist improvement. In the 1930s in the Soviet Union the Roma, as with many others, had suffered from forced collectivisation, and above all from Stalinist terror, during which there were hundreds of thousands of arbitrary arrests, together with widespread shootings and deportations to Siberia (FIDH 2004). Whereas in Romania, for example, the inter-war years were very different with an ‘extraordinary sense of ethnic self-awareness’ (Crowe 2007), the formation of Roma associations, a voluntarist move to sedentary lifestyles and, for some, a move into professional and official positions. This was a trend which had been happening in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, but one which had been reversed with the onset of Stalinist terror and the rise of national chauvinism. The new communist regimes in the CEE countries facilitated a move, not from Holocaust to liberation for the Roma but, from the brutal experiences of one racialised regime to domination and suppression in another. Liberation from racialisation was never on the communist agenda, whereas merging specific nationalisms with Stalinist ideologies to make the Roma disappear into the proletariat in the formation of new socialist societies clearly was.

Complex, multi-faceted racial discourse about the Roma constructed key ideological linkages between the central elements; a genetic inferiority, a foreign asocial group in need of nationalising, a pre-modern backward culture in need of Soviet modernisation, a parasitic group that fed on ‘real’ workers, a population out of control and in need of sterilisation, a criminal group in need of the prison or the labour camp, inveterate drunks who needed sobering up, and overall a ‘brown’, ‘dark’ presence that needed managing, regulating and controlling. Racialisation carried through by communist regimes in this region involved a range of strategies. The utilisation of strategies to exclude the Roma from political power and state posts was one of these, operationalised for example in the ‘secret anti-nationality system’ in Romania, which put majority Romanians in positions of upper and mid-level state power in regions inhabited by national minorities.

A destructionist logic characterised communist racialisation. An anti-minority, anti-ethnic, anti-cultural, anti-linguistic ethos driven by the Soviet state permeated these regimes. This destruction of ethnic, cultural and linguistic ties and social bonds was necessary to bring the new society into being. Suppression of Roma associations, groups and unions, forced evictions, displacement and migrations of Roma communities and the stealing and decimation of Roma land, livelihoods and lifestyles have all been identified in these racial states. None of this was named as racism, as this did not exist in the Soviet Union. The forgetting and denial of the Roma Holocaust was followed by the denial of official anti-Roma racism with a merging of historical and institutional amnesia. The ‘Gypsy Issue’ was here constructed as a social issue to be solved by socialist means including segregation, destruction, discrimination and disappearance."

All of this seems just so sus. But I have no idea how things were for say the Roma in the Soviet Union.

Does anyone have any good reading to point me to when it comes to racism and the Soviet Union?