Elena Marushiakova & Veselin Popov (University of St. Andrews)
Over the past two decades the Roma issue has become one of the most current topics in European public space and also became especially relevant in academia. Despite of this there are still not researched topics, such as history of the Roma in the period between WWI and WWII, and the appearance and development of social and political projects proposed by Roma themselves. Our presentation has the ambitious goal to fill in this gap. The departing point of the research is the circumstances that Roma are not a hermetically isolated social and cultural system. They exist in two dimensions, both as separate ethnic communities and as a part of the macro-society in which they live within the respective nation-states. Together with members of the macro-society they experienced breakdowns of old Empires (Ottoman, Russian and Austro-Hungarian) and the establishment of national states. On the vast territories of that what would became the Soviet Union they were included in the building of a new political system. In this time span Roma are not only as passive recipients of policy measures but also as active architects of their lives. Our talk will present work and written heritage of Roma visionaries whose activities and texts reflect the main stages in the development of the Roma movement and represent its different aspirations. We will speak about Roma history as an inseparable part of the mainstream history and Roma socio-political visions as part of the history of modern political thought in Eastern Europe.