К вопросу об устной истории: на примере несостоявшейся Цыганской автономной республики в СССР

In the 1920s and 1930, in the USSR, nation-building was carried out in line with the paradigm of “affirmative action”. This led to the creation of many national administrative-territorial units at different levels. The leadership of the All-Russian Union of Gypsies has also repeatedly raised the issue of the need to create a Gypsy national region, which will develop into a Gypsy autonomous republic, and some Gypsy activists have also pleaded for this in their letters to Stalin. In 1936, a meeting of the Council of Nationalities of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR decided to start preparatory work in this direction and issued the corresponding Resolution of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.
A comprehensive survey of the places of possible future Gypsy national unit in the West Siberian Territory was organised, as well as other preparatory work. However, for various reasons at the end of the 1930s the topic of the Gypsy Autonomous Republic disappeared from the agenda. The article presents these events which were preserved in the oral history of the Gypsies and also how the memory of these events intertwined with the memories of the deportation of nomadic Gypsies from Moscow to Siberia in 1933. As a result of the contamination of memories of these two events, a historical narrative was created in folklorised form. A discussion is offered about method of oral history, in which the interpretation of events can develop into a national narrative, far from always being a reliable historical source. To achieve full historical knowledge, it is necessary to verify the oral history with existing documentary sources, taking into account the general socio-political context in which the Roma historical narrative was created and functions.