"Backward Gypsies," Soviet Citizens: The All-Russian Gypsy Union, 1925-28 (Report‪)‬

In 1926, the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros) conceded that Gypsies posed serious challenges to the Soviet Union's all-encompassing modernization aims. In a memorandum detailing its recent successes in educating minority peoples, Narkompros singled out the empire's Gypsies as a people so peculiar, perplexing, and "backward" that they had thus far escaped the focused attention of political-enlightenment workers. "This nationality," Narkompros officials explained, is Yet despite their overwhelming "backwardness" and subversive tendencies, Narkompros declared, Gypsies were "still another people [naradnast'] that has begun to awake to conscious civic life and to lay their claim to cultural-enlightenment activity." (1)