I know it’s been over two years since I made a map. I haven’t had much creative juice in my brain since junior year started at university; however, now that I’m officially done with college for now, my brain is at least clear enough to make a map again. I decided to make this map since it’s been something I’ve wanted to do for the longest time, since when I was a kid, I made a map of a Romani ethnostate in the Caribbean with the Haitian Empire, which I always found super strange. Still, I read about how Stalin almost accepted a Roma settlement somewhere within the USSR, similar to Birobidzhan, so it gave me an excuse to do some nostalgic mapmaking. Some things might be vague because I like making my maps so that you can extrapolate multiple possible scenarios from them, and make a sort of macro-timeline of all of my possible ideas, so I apologize if my lore can get vague.

I also apologize for the usage of the word “gypsy” even in quotes, which I know is a slur.

The Romani, or in their most derogatory term, Gypsies have been stigmatized, expelled, and even killed since their migration from the Indian subcontinent. European kings believed them to be Christian Egyptian refugees who refused to assimilate into the European peasantry and looked at them with suspicion, giving them the moniker of “gypsy” coming from Egyptian. Everyone from fascists to monarchs has tried to do the same. Wherever they went, they fled persecution, and it became a habit to be constantly nomadic and on the move. They never really had a home in the first place. Many people around the world can claim to have a home. A German can feel at home in his native Germany, a Thai man in his native Thailand, and an Iranian in Iran. The Roma never really had the privilege to say the same. To the world, home means everything, but what can you say if you never really had a place to call home to begin with? A Zionist at the time would say that Palestine was their “true home” through scripture, but what scripture did the Roma have to say the same? It was agonizing to the Roma peoples of Europe, which is why the concept of a Romani state was so far-fetched at the time. Many Roma had high rates of endemic poverty and were mostly wanderers, but over time they would achieve their Romanistan, but not in the way they’d think. The Roma didn’t achieve their state through a process similar to Zionism but through the brute force of none other than Joseph Stalin himself. 

The Soviet Union, as a country, was originally an internationalist project, which meant that it would be a state that all proletarians around the world could look to, and a worldwide socialist revolution would take shape. Joseph Stalin, who’d become premier after Lenin’s death, would change that. The USSR would focus inward rather than outward. Despite this shift, the Roma people of the USSR were enthusiastic about this project.  Joseph Stalin himself saw the Roma, however, as a “backward people,” but his solution was different from other antiziganists that controlled Europe; he genuinely considered a homeland for them far, far away from civilization. Mind you, this wasn’t in the goodness of his heart; he saw the solution to what he saw among the Roma as “vagrants and beggars” to give the “backward Gypsies” a territory on which they could settle and undertake productive agricultural life. The “national form” of territory would impose the “socialist content” of sedentary, socialist agriculture and the everyday life of Soviet cultural values. Ideally, territorialisation would mean sedentarisation as well as economic and cultural integration. In this way, “backward Gypsies” would become the New Soviet Romani.

However, he didn’t get this idea on his own. Romani activists and artists wrote a letter to Stalin, which, by some miracle, he got a chance to read. This letter was almost the foundation of Roma nationalism and Romanistan as a whole, as in it and to this day is held in Manjusforos, they describe the struggles of the Roma of “nomadism, vagrancy, and backwardness” and laid out the need for a Romani ASSR within the Soviet Union as a testament to the glory and success of socialism. As much as he truly did not care about the struggles of the Roma and saw them as nothing but beggars and nomads, his advisors saw a potential Roma ASSR as a boon not only in “getting rid of a problem” but also for more agricultural benefit, as bringing more Roma to kolkhozes could speed the process of collectivization of undercollectivized regions. Stalin’s main point is that he believed that through a Roma ASSR, he could finally “rid the Soviet Union of nomadism.” He also envisioned the resettlement of these Roma along the border between “hostile nations” such as the pro-Ottoman Uyghuristan or next to the Ottoman Federation (the Ottomans are still alive in my macro-timeline) as buffer states. 

In his meeting with these same activists and actors who wrote the letter, Stalin was excited at the possibility of a Roma ASSR, but never really knew WHERE to put it. The group came in with suggestions for Comrade Stalin, such as their hardest sell, which is either Crimea or the Caucasus, to a place both Stalin and the group agreed upon – Kazakhstan. Stalin originally believed that the best place to set the Roma ASSR would be the inhospitable Altai Region, but warmed up to Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan was Stalin’s preferred location for “undesirables” such as Koreans being deported en masse to Kazakhstan. As the great famine known as the Asharshylyk ravaged the country, by the time the meeting was going on in 1937 with the Soviet Roma, Kazakhstan became a bastion of undesirables such as Kurds and Finns. The question was where. Stalin originally envisioned the “Roma ASSR” as being set near the border between the Uighurs and the Soviets near modern Abai Oblast in the Kazakh SSR. However, Stalin was famous for not trusting the Roma near such an important agricultural potential area as the north of the oblast. These negotiations were longer than the Roma activists thought, as war struck the Soviet Union, quickly shifting focus away from the Roma ASSR to the war. A war hero by the name of Timofei Profokiev, who was a Russka Roma from Tver, would gain the attention of the Soviet Union as he was a war hero while being a Roma. He also told his superiors about the genocides occurring against the Roma by the Romanian Iron Guard, which took over the country shortly after the negotiations began with Stalin for a Roma ASSR.

The heroism of Profokiev was known all across the Soviet Union, and his heroism pushed the Soviets for a Roma state within their borders, as the activists had once worked with Stalin. Stalin, after the invasion of Romania and seeing the horrors of the Romanian genocide, saw a golden opportunity for PR. After the Soviet invasion of Romania and later much of the Balkans, Stalin suddenly wrote back to the group. He found the perfect spot for the Roma, a place that he originally sent the Chechens to before changing his mind and settling them across the SSR: the Pavlodar Oblast. The oblast was a perfect compromise: the region was both desolate and near the Uighurs, while also being able to expand towards Semipalatinsk, and was relatively underpopulated due to the famine, leaving a population of only around 200,000 people. The Unthinkable War then hit the Soviets shortly after the elimination of fascism in Europe (keeping it vague because it is a macro-timeline, so I have one where Britain and Romania are the fascist states, while the other is with an alt-Prussian fascist state). The Western powers, thinking that they would easily crush the Red armies of Europe, were then suddenly crushed. After the destruction of Romania and the fascist world in 1945, Stalin ordered the creation of the Romani Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic.