The Gypsy question should never be discussed without us […] We see the biggest political deficiency in the solution of the problem of the Gypsies in the socialist democracy system as the fact that this problem has so far been solved without the Gypsies themselves. The Gypsies certainly need to change from being mere passive objects to subjects actively participating in their own self-realisation and change.1
These formulations feature in a source from May 1968 documenting a pivotal time in the history of the Romani movement in post-war Czechoslovakia when a group of Romani activists organised a meeting in Brno, the capital of Moravia, to press for the establishment of a Romani organisation. After almost twenty years of an effort to self-organise, in August 1969, they finally succeeded to establish the Union of Gypsies-Roma with the consent of all the relevant authorities. The organisers of this event and the leaders of the movement had been involved in diverse activities and initiatives since 1950 aimed at ensuring the participation of the Roma in the design and implementation of policies targeting the “Gypsies”. In the resolution from their 1968 meeting, they were very critical of the situation of the Roma in Czechoslovakia at the time. They especially criticised recent state policies aimed at an organised dissolution of locally segregated Romani settlements (the so-called “dispersal of undesirable concentrations” in the administrative language of the time) and, at the same time, at controlling spontaneous labour migration in which large numbers of Roma were coming from Slovakia to the Czech lands. Implementation of this policy meant considerable restrictions on their freedom to choose a domicile and consequently on the social mobility of anyone of the Roma in Czechoslovakia, depending on local circumstances. The Romani representatives gathered in Brno in 1968 called not only for the revision of this policy, but also fundamentally for Romani participation. They argued that there were enough Romani practitioners as well as functionaries with valuable experience in dealing with local problems who could serve as staff members of the state authorities. Even more importantly, they also claimed that the very exclusion of the Romani perspective and representation from the state structures (dealing at the time with the “Gypsies” as a social problem) was the core of the stalemate in the state’s “solution to the Gypsy question”.
Since the mid-1990s, an inter-ministerial body currently called the Government Council for the Roma Minority Affarires has been overseeing the implementation of policies aimed at enhancing the situation of the Roma in the Czech Republic, following a document that has been routinely called the Roma Integration Strategy. After decades of civic engagement by both Romani and non-Romani actors, domestic NGOs and international organisations, and their pressure on the Czech state to deal with the troublesome position and situation of the Roma in the CR, the Czech Roma are still facing discrimination in all spheres of their lives today: in housing, on the job market, in education, etc. The most recent version of the strategic document bears a slightly revised title, Strategy for Roma Equality, Inclusion and Participation (Strategy for Roma Integration) 2021–2030.2 This change in the Czech key strategic document follows from a shift in the EU Roma Framework. It enables to move the focus on the predominantly socioeconomic integration of marginalised Romani communities to an approach that also takes into account historical justice and empowerment. Politically, in the Czech context, this perspective opens up the recognition of that part of the Romani population in Czech republic that is not socio-economically marginalised but still faces everyday anti-Romani racism as well as the recognition of the key role of the Roma themselves in the process of policy design and implementation and, importantly, their pivotal role in any progress achieved in the recent decades. The change is also indicative, at least to some extent, of a certain mental shift in the approach to the situation and position of Roma in the society, inspired and fuelled by the wider decolonial shift in the public debate on Roma internationally, which has been led by a number of Romani public figures and, importantly, also Romani academics. The emphasis on persistence of inequality and exclusion is not just applied in the analysis and critique of the most visible cases of direct and structural discrimination. It also highlights the principles of partnership that require Romani participation in the negotiation of central governmental documents aimed at improving the situation of Roma, in the negotiation of their guiding principles and in the identification of their key priorities (and extends also to other arenas of public life, including for example media, art galleries, museums, as well as the academia). The perceived necessity to still include, in the current Czech strategic document, the older terminology and along with it a different, rather ethnocentric vision of what the core of the problem is, parenthesised yet still present in the title of the document, reflects some of the difficulties apparent in the contemporary Czech context.
Following that same participatory line, in 2023 the position of the Government Commissioner for the Roma Minority Affairs was introduced in the Czech Republic to enlarge the Czech central administrative bodies’ ability to deal with the problems faced by the Roma (although, mirroring the somewhat equivocal position of the central state bodies toward the seriousness of the problem, the post of the Commissioner was administratively introduced as a part-time position). In one of her first moves in this role, Lucie Fuková, the long-term Romani woman activist who was appointed as the first such commissioner, announced and took the first steps to establish a network of “regional Romani ambassadors”. In Fuková’s words, this network is supposed to ensure the involvement of “Romani men and women in all levels of public life”, and “to connect politicians, officials, institutions, and the police with the [Romani] people who live in a given municipality, town, or region”. Since the 1990s, a network of regional administration officials called Romani Coordinators has existed, tasked with addressing the most pressing problems of the Romani population in the given regional administrative units in coordination with the regional authorities. Fuková has remarked that at the present time, non-Romani professionals serve in most of these positions. While not wanting to disparage the professionalism of the current Romani Coordinators, she insists that “Roma must participate in solving local problems and in the changes that directly affect them. No more ‘about us without us’”.3
The similarities between the appeals made historically by the leaders of the Romani movement in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and those made by this current key state figure representing the Roma within the Czech state structures are striking. The recognition of this overlap leads to the reconsideration of the long-term continuities in the approach of nation states in Central Europe and elsewhere toward the Romani minority, present in the region for centuries. This recognition allows to transcend the timeframes in which the history of the region is usually narrated and interpreted, pointing to unsettling phenomena that often escape the interest of historians precisely because they are invisible as phenomena rooted in the experience of the Roma and thus marginalised.
The complex historical marginalisation of Roma and their direct as well as structural discrimination has its important implications for many fields, including the academia, even if this field is not a primary focus of documents on the inequalities faced by Roma. Romani studies as a discipline is a field of study that has been dominated by researchers from non-Romani backgrounds. Historically researchers writing about the Roma were differently interested in the perspectives of the Roma and differently invested in the contemporary aspirations of the individual Roma they knew or of the Roma as a group. The problematic issue of the production of knowledge about the Roma, rather than for and/or with the Roma, has been in the centre of a critical discussion since mid-2000s raised by a group of Romani scholars and their non-Romani colleagues thus giving rise to an important initiative called Critical Romani Studies (see, for example Bogdan and others, 2018; Brooks, Clark and Rostas, 2022; Kóczé and Rövid, 2012; Mirga-Kruszelnicka, 2018). Within this debate the issue of decolonising the traditional set-up of Romani studies as well as the legacies of the older approaches to Romani studies research and knowledge production and the need to open up the space for Romani expert voices continues to be discussed. Within the field of historical research and writing, the invisibility of Romani voices and of Romani agency in history as a result of methodological choices – including, but not limited to, heuristics and positionality – is one of the issues raised in the debate. Recently a number of texts have been published that deliberately seek to focus on the Romani perspectives and Romani agency, as well as texts that seek to integrate the Roma into the mainstream history of the European nation-states (see for example Joskowicz, 2023; Marushiakova and Popov, 2021; Mirga-Kruszelnicka and Dunajeva, 2020; O’Keeffe, 2013; Roman, Zahova and Marinov, 2021). This book is a contribution to this strand of writing (Romani) history.
Romani Equality, Socio-Political Participation and Self-Organisation in Communist Czechoslovakia
The book traces Romani social and political engagement in post-war Czechoslovakia during its first two decades of existence as a communist state (1948–1969). It focuses on the diverse ways in which Romani individuals as well as organised groups of Romani activists strove to find their inlets into the discussion and implementation of policies targeting the Roma which were being newly designed by the communist state, and the ways in which they pushed to establish their own organisation as a key partner in the negotiations with state representatives regarding the policies targeting the “Gypsies”.
The first two post-war decades in Czechoslovakia were marked by unprecedentedly massive population movements, both forced and voluntary in nature, and by the establishment of communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia in 1948 (Arburg, 2003). This era represented a very specific time for the Roma in the history of Czechoslovakia. The expulsion of the German population, together with the radical contraction of the Czechoslovak Jewish population due to the Holocaust and emigration, ultimately catapulted the Roma into the position of the state’s largest, most visible minority, one which at the same time was not officially seen as ethnically or nationally defined. The contest over the status of the Roma as either a nationality group with political representation and rights, or a “backward” group of citizens defined socially and primarily in need of “help by the state”, has represented one of the key red threads in the history of the post-war relations of the state with the Roma and of the Roma with the state (Donert, 2017). The radically new nature of the position of the Roma in Czechoslovak society, especially in the early 1950s, was further reinforced by the communist ideology’s new redefinition of the position of the Roma in Czechoslovak history and society. That ideology used the centuries-long persecution of the Roma not just to explain their precarious situation at the time, but also to contrast that persecution with the planning of their future and its goal: their inclusion in the productivity and wealth of the new socialist society. The enhancement of the economic and social status of the “Gypsy population” in communist Czechoslovakia was supposed to become a showcase example of the justness of the new regime, based on the elimination of social inequality, social insecurity and racism. There were Romani people who sought exactly what communist ideology seemed to offer: equality of treatment and equal access to social mobility.
The next two decades, therefore, were a time when the willingness of the state bodies to cooperate with Roma and Romani readiness to participate in such cooperation were tested. This went hand in hand with the discussion of establishing an organisation that would represent the Roma in the various negotiations with the state authorities, an idea that was also closely linked with the debate on the status of the Roma as a nationality in Czechoslovakia. Along with this discussion, an even more important question presented itself (Hübschmannová, 1970): who was to own the authority to define the “Gypsy problem”? Whose experience and perspective was to form the basis for formulating the content and the major focus of the state policies aimed at solving the perceived problem? Most significantly, what were the possible ways for the Roma to become part of these debates and to bring to the forefront the topics which they themselves saw as crucial for the reconstruction of their Holocaust-ravaged communities and their advancement to prosperity under socialism? These questions are, unfortunately, still very relevant for a large proportion of the Roma-related policies planned and implemented across Europe, notwithstanding the tremendous efforts and positive results the Romani movements across Europe have achieved, especially over the last 30 years.
The documents presented herein reveal a sustained effort by different Romani activists in Czechoslovakia since 1948 to establish an organisation of their own that would be recognised by the state. All these attempts kept failing until 1969, when for a brief moment, one Romani organisation in each part of the Czechoslovak republic was allowed to exist, namely, the Czech Union of Gypsies-Roma (Svaz Cikánů-Romů) and the Slovak Union of Gypsies-Roma (Zväz Cigánov-Rómov). That is why the year 1969 marks the outer limit of this book’s focus. Both organisations were soon dissolved, in 1973, under the pressure of the central bodies of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. The time of their existence represents a new, specific chapter in the history of the Romani socio-political movement and as such deserves specific attention. Given the importance and scope of the activities of the two Unions of Gypsies-Roma, including the involvement of Czech and Slovak Romani leaders in the nascent international Romani movement, surprisingly mostly brief texts outlining the main contours of the organisation were published until recently (Lhotka, 2009; Jurová, 1993; Pavelčíková, 1999; Pavelčíková, 2004; but see Donert, 2017; Lužica, 2021). While this phase of Romani socio-political engagement (1969–1973) has drawn limited attention, the previous, nascent phase of such engagement has attracted even less interest (Jurová, 1993; Pavelčíková, 1999; Pavelčíková, 2004; but see Sadílková, Slačka and Závodská, 2018; Donert, 2017). With the present book, we would like to fill this gap and contribute to the writing of this so far overlooked chapter of the Romani and Czechoslovak history, not only because it was so crucial for the further development of the Romani movement, but also because it is also crucial to understanding of the complexities of the early stage of communist rule in Czechoslovakia.
While not denying the paternalism and the ever-increasing unscrupulousness of the approach taken by the state bodies toward the “Gypsies” since the late 1950s aimed at “dissolving” them as a specific ethnically defined group in to the masses of the socialist citzens, a phenomenon that has been explored by the existing literature, this book argues that the period between 1948 and 1969 also offered diverse opportunities for the Roma in Czechoslovakia to get socially and politically involved and to work on their own visions of their future as a national minority. This phenomenon had no precedent in the history of Czechoslovakia. It was especially the idea of the equality of the Roma as citizens of a socialist state, stemming from the ideological visions of a new society liberated from class barriers and racial discrimination that resonated particularly strongly among certain parts of local Romani communities (Guy, 1998). While the following decades revealed important limits to the everyday practices at all levels of the state administration and of the society in general with respect to this ideal, engagé Roma continued to uphold it. Inspired by approaches emphasising Romani agency as an important aspect of historical research and history writing, this book invites for an exploration of the actors, arenas, and issues that defined this period of Romani engagement and activism. It represents an important contribution to the topic of Romani mobilisation and civil rights movements across Europe since the 19th century as a way of exploring the position of the Roma in the history of European societies. While focusing on the Roma as a group that is still rather underexplored in the history of state socialism, this book simultaneously offers important insights for this part of research and for the current discussions.
Romani Movements in Europe from International and National Perspectives
In the research focused on the history of Romani people in Europe, the history of Romani self-organisation has long been a rather marginal subject. The international, or rather transnational Romani movement emerging in the early 1960s was the subject of texts especially by Klímová Alexander and Acton (Acton and Klímová, 2001; Klímová Alexander, 2005; Acton, 2019). Koczsé, Mirga-Kruszelnicka and others approached recently the topic of the Romani civil rights movement from the gender perspective and offered another transnational as well as intersectional insight into the topic (Kóczé, Zentai, Jovanović, and Vincze, 2019). Focused especially on developments since 1990s, some of their texts also reflect on the post-war genesis of local Romani movements and the key women figures in these while also reflecting on the rather conspicuous invisibility of women – with a few exceptions – both in the historiographies of these movements and in the early phases of the movements themselves (Koczé, 2019). An overview of the history of Romani movements across Europe and beyond was also presented as part of a recent online initiative, the RomaArchive, aimed at a decolonised presentation of Romani culture and history curated in close cooperation with Romani academics.4 At the local, i.e. national level, quite a lot of attention has so far been paid to the post-war Sinti movement in Germany, as a movement based on the struggle against the persistent discrimination of this group of Holocaust survivors in Germany, the fight for their recognition as victims of Nazism, and compensation (see for example Matras, 1998; Heinemann, 2017). Its origins are described as an initiative that arose among the families of Sinti Holocaust survivors as soon as the late 1940s, with the first organisation formed in 1956. The movement regained new momentum in the 1970s when the German Sinti managed to organise powerful public protests using the means of contemporary human rights protest movements: demonstrations, public rallies and marches, and even hunger strikes. As the discussion of the Czechoslovak movement will disclose, these methods were very far from the strategies employed by the Roma in socialist Czechoslovakia in their fight for the recognition of their equality and rights to representation. The first major breakthrough for the Sinti movement in Germany was achieved in the early 1980s, when in 1982 then-Chancellor Helmut Schmidt recognised the genocide of the Sinti and Roma and its victims as victims of racial persecution. However, there was still a long way to go before a fair approach to their compensation and a general equalisation of the position of Sinti in German society could be reached. The fight for the recognition of the Holocaust of the Sinti and Roma and the commemoration of Sinti and Romani Holocaust victims is presented as a key incentive for and aspect of Romani mobilisation, not just in the post-war times, as illustrated by the exemplary German case, but also after 1990, as evidenced, for example, in the agenda of the Romani movement in Poland since 1991 (Mirga-Kruszelnicka and Mirga-Wójtowicz, 2019). The Czechoslovak example presents another, more complicated trajectory: while the protagonists of the Romani movements in post-war Czechoslovakia who had been active in submitting proposals for the establishment of an organisation since the early 1950s were Holocaust survivors themselves who had undergone very drastic experiences, it was not until the late 1960s that recognition and remembrance of the Holocaust of the Roma became part of the agenda of the organisations they proposed.
The second well-mapped Romani movement is the example of the state-sponsored ethnic development of the Roma in Soviet Russia in the 1920s and 1930s (Lemon, 2000; Marushiakova and Popov, 2021, pp. 695–1008; O’Keeffe, 2013). In the early 1920s, the Roma were included in the policy that supported the ethno-cultural development of different national communities/nationalities as the basis of their inclusion into Soviet society. As part of this policy, separate “Gypsy” agricultural and craftsmen units were created and the state supported the publication of literature in the Romani language, even sponsoring the standardisation of Romani to be used in public writing, the establishment of “Gypsy schools”, and the publication of textbooks and teaching materials in Romani. From 1923 to 1928, a Romani organisation existed that was heavily dependent on the then-establishment, the All-Russian Union of Gypsies. With the change in some aspects of the affirmative policies vis-a-vis different nationalities in the Soviet Union in late 1930s, also the support for independent development of the Roma as nationality ended. The Soviet example of support for the Romani national movement, as short-lived as it was, is highly relevant to the post-war situation of the Roma in the Soviet bloc for two reasons. First, it represents a model of the state approach to the Roma that was partially replicated in the socialist countries after Second World War, in which the central institutions sought to transform – or “re-educate” – their “backward Gypsy populations” into “socialist citizens”, mostly through their inclusion in “productive work”. In this sense, the state-planned socioeconomic development of Romani communities was also linked to their political persuasion and sought to “integrate” the Roma into the masses of the majority-society citizens of the socialist states in their own way, while, as in Soviet Russia, taking into account their cultural heritage and the possibilities of their ethno-cultural development either just temporarily, or occasionally, or not at all. It is not without interest that this early Soviet emancipatory approach was cited as a model and argument in the debates in the Czechoslovak context when the Roma and their supporters, in the early 1950s, tried to argue – invoking the “spirit of Stalinist politics” – for an approach that promoted independent ethno-cultural development in addition to economic development. It is clear that those in post-war Czechoslovakia who referred to the history of the approach toward the Roma in the Soviet Union either probably did not have, or deliberately omitted, information about the radical revision to the Soviet authorities’ approach to nationalities including the Roma in the Soviet Union from the late 1930s onwards.
Marushiakova and Popov, with their large international team of researchers, have focused on the Romani movement in interwar Europe, enlarging considerably not only the knowledge on interwar Romani emancipation and civil rights movements, but also widening the pathway for including histories of Romani movements and Romani socio-political participation as citizens in the histories of European states. In addition to studies on the history of these movements, they have published an unprecedented volume of documents that presents this part of Romani history in Europe in fascinating detail (Marushiakova and Popov, 2021; Marushiakova and Popov, 2022; Roman, Zahova, and Marinov, 2021). The published collection of documents produced as part of their initiative is, in the European context, the first such large-scale undertaking aimed at publishing sources of Romani provenance: not just with regard to the interwar period, which long remained, with a few exceptions, much of a blind spot in terms of knowledge about the history of Romani civic engagement, but also in general. The second such period that can currently be traced on the basis of a large number of ego-documents is the Second World War, where, of course, this self-documentation consists primarily of survivors’ testimonies. A unique venture in this field was the research initiative of Fings (2019), aimed at locating and making available a selection of ego-documents by the Romani and Sinti men and women from the time of their wartime persecution. In the Czechoslovak context, Jurová (2008) published a large volume that made available sources on the history of the state approach toward the Roma between 1945–1975. With the cooperation of the Museum of Romani Culture, in 2018 the authors of this book published a book in the Czech language on the roots of Romani self-organisation in Czechoslovakia that included a selection of 12 sources, mostly ego-documents, reprinted as facsimiles (Sadílková, Slačka and Závodská, 2018). This current volume builds on that modest initiative and experience with presenting such sources and is based on further research by the authors.
Research into Romani social and political participation in the countries inside the socialist bloc in the 1945–1989 period, which represents the most immediate context for the subject of this book is still relatively limited. Histories of these movements in the individual countries are covered with varying degrees of detail and with respect to different contexts. Their focus involves concentrating on the development of the Romani movement itself in the context of the development of state policies towards the Roma in a given country, or rather, on the development of Roma-related policies where, at a certain point, information regarding Romani activists resurfaces. It is therefore quite difficult to compare the conditions of the emergence of Romani movements in this part of Europe at the moment, or actually to even start a deeper discussion on a comparative basis. Access to primary sources that would allow for a more detailed insight into the history of these movements is a fundamental problem – not only are they not accessible unless in respective national and personal archival collections, but the texts which do exist rarely comment on them in greater detail. Sourcebooks on the approach to the Roma under communism in Central and South-Central Europe have been also published for some of the countries in local languages as well as in English translation (Hajnáczky, 2019; Marin, 2017).
An exception in this respect is the history of the Romani movement in Bulgaria (Marushiakova and Popov 2015; Marushiakova and Popov 2000). The Bulgarian case is also exceptional in that it allows to trace the history of a Romani political movement from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. As far as its development after 1945 is concerned, it is clear that the Bulgarian movement had an important prehistory from the 1920s onwards and a distinct continuity in its nature and thinking, thanks to the long-term political commitment of its main figure, Shakir Pashov (Marushiakova, Popov, and Kovacheva 2023). The history of the Romani movement in Bulgaria in the period under review (1948–1969) continued to be significantly linked to this politically very active Romani activist. Pashov had long been committed to the sociocultural development of the Roma as a group with their own ethnic identity and pride. He also had a long-standing involvement with the Bulgarian Communist Party and the internal transformations of the power alliances within the party have strongly influenced his fate as a communist and a “Romani nationalist”. He came from the Bulgarian Muslim Romani community, which was another reason for the fragility of his position when the Bulgarian state began to seek to eradicate Turkish or Muslim cultural influence and to suppress awareness of its history. Until 1950, Pashov’s approach to negotiating the position of the Roma and their development in communist Bulgaria was aligned with the political line of the state leadership, which supported (in the spirit of Stalin’s early 1920s policy) the all-around socio-political and ethno-cultural development of the Roma. Thus it was that from 1945, the Romani organisation Ekhipe existed in Bulgaria, publishing its own newspaper, and after 1947 building branches in up to 90 Bulgarian towns with the support of the state. In addition, under Pashov’s leadership, a theatre called “Roma” operated in Sofia, and a circle of enthusiasts also worked to promote the use of Romani in the public domains. However, Pashov’s position as a prominent Romani communist changed dramatically in the late 1940s. He was first expelled from the Communist Party, dismissed from his leading positions in the theatre, the newspaper and the organisation he had founded, and became a political prisoner in the early 1950s and early 1960s. He was rehabilitated twice, once in 1956 and again in the mid-1960s, but never returned to political life. This dramatic development took place in the context of the Bulgarian central bodies’ movement towards a policy of assimilation in the early 1950s, reaffirmed in the 1970s, which aimed to erase the existence of the Roma as a group in Bulgaria. Compared to the Czechoslovak case followed in this book, in Bulgaria, the post-war period when it was possible to develop the Romani political and cultural movement was much shorter (the Czechoslovak authorities moved decisively towards assimilation in 1958). To a large extent, the development of the Bulgarian movement was also determined by the relatively close interdependence of its main protagonist with certain circles of people in the Communist Party of Bulgaria. The key representatives of the Romani movement in Czechoslovakia were also, for the most part, members of the Communist Party, but they held rather minor regional positions. They did not themselves have any significant political ambitions directed towards the non-Romani political milieu. Although they acted as active supporters of the Romani movement for civil rights and the development of the Roma as a nationality, which was contrary to the direction of state policy after 1958, they did not, at that time, find themselves in a situation that would threaten their personal freedom.
Developments in the Romani movements in Hungary and Poland, Czechoslovakia’s nearest neighbouring states in Central Europe, have been described in much less detail, even if for example the history of the position of the Roma in post-war Hungary is a current research topic (Hajnáczky, 2020; Hajnáczky, 2019; Majtényi and Majtényi, 2016; Varsa, 2021). In the first post-war years, when communist dictatorships were being established in these countries, an approach that sought the all-embracing integration of the Roma into socialist society was also promoted. In Hungary, as in Bulgaria, there was a significant shift away from this initial approach that sought to transform the Roma into socialist citizens while preserving and even developing their ethno-cultural heritage and identity, moving toward a policy of targeted assimilation in the early 1960s. This shift occurred in Hungary and Poland a decade later than it did in Bulgaria and around the same time that the central authorities in Czechoslovakia concluded what up until then had been a relatively open debate that did not exclude independent Romani ethno-cultural development. Along with a dramatic, major political struggle in Hungary in 1956 and the subsequent suppression of the anti-communist opposition, this shift in the approach toward the Roma also marked the demise of the only still-existing Romani organisation in Hungary. The latter was created in 1957 as an organisation incorporated into the structures of the Hungarian Ministry of Culture supporting the development of national minorities in Hungary, thereby indirectly confirming the status of the Roma in Hungary as such. As one of the few Romani organisations in existence at that time, it was headed by a woman, Mária László. Because of her publicly-expressed opposition to the internment of people persecuted in Hungary for their political positions after 1956, she was removed from the organisation’s leadership in 1959 and the organisation as such was dissolved in 1961, with the Roma being denied the recognition of a nationality. The further development of the Romani movement in Hungary was linked with dissident circles. It is quite in contrast with the situation in Czechoslovakia, where the main representatives of the Romani movement remained part of the system and the establishment, although they were vocal in various ways in pointing out the then fundamental problems of Romani communities as well as individuals and voicing their criticism of contemporary practices. In comparison to Hungary (and Bulgaria), the only officially-permitted Romani organisations in Czechoslovakia were established in 1969, after almost two decades of negotiation and lobbying, and in the context of the suppression of the Prague Spring, and only operated until 1973.
In Poland, where much of the Romani population was itinerant in the decades following the war, there was a continuous push to sedentarise that part of the population alongside efforts to integrate them into socialist society through their involvement in the economy. In addition, the Polish state allowed the establishment and long-term existence of locally active Romani organisations, the first of which was established as early as 1951 and another in 1963, with a long-term continuity (Mirga-Kruszelnicka and Mirga-Wójtowicz, 2019). In the 1970s and 1980s, other organisations were established in other Polish cities. Mirga-Kruszelnicka and Mirga-Wójtowicz state that the content of these organisations’ activities was exclusively cultural and educational, naming the establishment of an ethnographic exhibition on the Roma in the Tarnow Ethnographical Museum as one of the outputs of their activities. Their longevity suggests a certain mode of coexistence with contemporary central and regional state actors. In addition, however, the presence of several Romani representatives from Poland at the International Romani Congress in Göttingen in 1981 suggests that there were also Romani activist circles in Poland with a more pronounced socio-political ambition which only manifested itself after 1990. Ego-documents presenting in greater detail the Romani initiatives in these countries and/or allowing for a more detailed insight into the main protagonists’ way of thinking in these movements, or their approaches to the negotiation of their positions and visions, as well as their eventual fates, have not yet been published in the international context. The existence and development of the Romani movements in other parts of the region, and especially the South-Eastern Europe, such as the large movement in Yugoslavia (see, for example the works by Acković – Acković, 1994), is covered by research and publication only to a varying degree and in local languages.
The Place of the History of the Romani Movement in the History and Historiography of the Czechoslovak State’s Approaches towards the Roma
While a number of studies on the position of Roma in Czechoslovakia were written already in the 1970s and 1980s, the history of the Roma in Czechoslovakia during socialism as such started to be researched and written about especially during the 1990s and early 2000s. These post-1989 works concentrated on the description of the central state approach and used an interpretative framework of totalitarianism, ultimately portraying the Roma as a specific group among the victims of the “communist regime” in Czechoslovakia (Jurová, 1993; Pavelčíková, 2004). In line with older texts which had already represented the core of the criticism of the state’s approach towards the Roma, the post-1989 historiography concentrated on and denounced the assimilatory nature of the previous approaches. While outlining the basic chronology of state policies aimed at the Roma, this research kept its focus on the central level, to a large extent, and thus did not throw much light on the implementation of major policies, its local negotiation and the outcomes of that implementation.
The following milestones in the history of the Czechoslovak state’s approach to the Roma were identified in that research. The abolition of the interwar Law on Wandering Gypsies (no. 117/1927) in 1950 was interpreted as a symbol of the divorce of the post-war communist state from the previous discrimination, as well as indicating more subtle changes in the formulation of anti-Gypsy legislation. However, as Dvořák (2003) later claimed, most of the features of the interwar law aimed at controlling the movements of families of travelling Romani businessmen and craftsmen had in fact already also been implemented in other pieces of general legislation. The directive of the Ministry of Interior from 1952 on the “Adjustment of the conditions of persons of Gypsy origin” announced the main premises of a new approach as based on an emancipatory “civilising” mission. Roma were presented in the directive as victims of the previous regimes who needed “patient help” from the institutions of the newly formed Czechoslovak state and society at large on their way to socioeconomic enhancement via inclusion in the work force and “re-education”. It was at this time that the question of the status of the Roma as a nationality rather than as a social group started to be discussed. The conflict over the possibility of recognition of the Roma as a nationality between people linked to or sympathising with the Romani movement and the representatives of central state institutions and Communist Party structures became the key limit to the possibilities of the implementation of the agenda proposed by the protagonists of this movement.
Since the mid-1950s, the strand of thinking about and identifying the “Gypsies” as a threat to public security and public health, continuing the interwar and war-time approaches, started to replace the emancipatory approach. In 1958, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia issued a resolution in which it rejected the previous soft approach, denounced the discussion of the status of the Czechoslovak “Gypsies” as a nationality as dangerous nationalism, and announced the start of the assimilation policy. Two regulations formed the backbone of this phase of the assimilatory approach. Still in 1958, the Law on the Permanent Settlement of Nomadic Persons (no. 74/1958) was passed, primarily meant to eradicate the travelling character of the lives of a certain (and rather limited) part of the Romani and Sinti population in Czechoslovakia whose professions and livelihoods were historically based on circular movement along their regular business routes. At the same time, however, it also affected those Roma who could not be considered “nomadic by tradition”, but who rather took part in the labour migration that put thousands of Romani families on the move from Slovakia to the Czech lands (and back). This migration movement was fuelled by the demand for a workforce in the Czech lands as well as by unprecedented possibilities of social mobility for the Slovak Roma in the Czech lands and continued to grow nevertheless.
At the same time, since the mid-1950s, the central and regional authorities in Slovakia had been lobbying for a solution to the problem of large, isolated and segregated Romani settlements and neighbourhoods. These were typical of the Slovak countryside, where their economic and social isolation was further exacerbated by the persecution measures directed at the Roma in Slovakia during the Second World War, which included also the forced eviction of Romani communities from Slovak municipalities to places away from public sight. The intention to tackle both of these issues formed the basis of the last key state resettlement initiative focused exclusively on the Roma, which included the implementation of the policy of the state-organised “dispersal” of “undesirable Gypsy concentrations” and the “liquidation of Gypsy settlements” announced in 1965. This centrally planned policy aimed at moving thousands of Romani families from Slovakia to the Czech lands according to a meticulous scheme in which people from a particular region of Slovakia were to be moved to a specifically-assigned region in the Czech lands. A central, inter-ministerial body was set up to oversee the implementation of this policy, the Government Committee for Gypsy Population Questions. This was a new shift in the organisational structures implementing Roma-related policies, as the agenda related to the Roma had been so far only moved from ministry to ministry to implement each part of the central policy, with the Interior Ministry continuing to play the key role. The dispersal policy utterly failed to achieve the planned numbers of successfully resettled families and also failed to get spontaneous migration by Romani people under control. Nevertheless, it influenced the lives of the Roma at large, not just those who were indeed forcibly resettled, but also those who had to cope with the administrative obstacles to their individual life and work trajectories, including (re)migration, when they were not in line with the central directives.
The totalitarian interpretation of this part of the history of the state approach to the Roma made invisible any Romani agency, other than direct opposition or accommodation to this forced manipulation of their lives, and described the effects of these policies as leading to the disintegration of Romani cultural tradition and identity. While not denying the drastic effects of the implemented state policies on individual Romani men and women as well as their families and communities, or the group as such, more recent historiographical approaches that focus on the regional implementation of the above mentioned policies and especially the resettlement measures have also discussed those aspects that opened the way for the local negotiation of the implementation of the central policies and navigation of the measures by the Roma, thus making space for the exploration of Romani agency also in these situations (Ort, 2023; Sadílková, 2017).
The last milestone in the history of the Czechoslovak state’s approach to the Roma in those first two post-war decades that is discussed in the existing historiography is the authorities’ consent to the establishment of the two organisations mentioned above, the Czech and Slovak Unions of Gypsies-Roma during 1968–1969. Their existence is interpreted in the historiography as an outcome of the Prague Spring and the general socio-political thaw that opened up the public space for criticism of the previous approaches, including the Roma-related polices. The forced dissolution of these Romani organisations in 1973 marks, in the existing historiography, the beginning of the era of a return to further assimilation policies.
Following this chronology of the state approaches to the Roma as carved out in the 1990s, later studies (Sokolova, 2008; Spurný, 2011) focused on the genesis of selected central Roma-related policies and, moving away from the totalitarian narrative, analysed these as outcomes of the negotiation of power within communist rule. These studies argued that local functionaries and other citizens were an important source of legitimising communist power in general, as well as a source of the (re)formulation(s) of the approach toward “Gypsies” in particular. Spurný, therefore, explained the dramatic turn to assimilation policy in the late 1950s as a reaction of the central bodies of the Communist Party to dissenting voices from Czech regions, especially those in the formerly German areas, and often tinged with racism, calling for more heavy-handed solutions to the increasing presence of Roma in their localities. Similarly, Sokolová discussed the implementation of a later policy of promoting sterilisation that was implemented in Czechoslovakia from the early 1970s. While phrased as ethnically neutral, the policy nevertheless disproportionately drastically impacted Romani women. Sokolová interpreted this paradox in terms of the shared anti-Romani negative stereotyping which allowed for the translation of their ethnic difference into categories of social deviation. Her analysis thus focuses on the creation of the public consent on the desirability of promoting sterilisation among Romani women at any cost. These studies deliberately concentrated on Czech(oslovak) non-Romani society and its ways of dealing with the Roma themselves, with Roma-related stereotypes, and with policies showing disturbing continuities of racism and institutional violence. By putting their analysis of Roma-related policies at the heart of their research on state socialism in Czechoslovakia, Spurný and Sokolová also managed to push the history of the Roma, as a subject, out of its historiographic isolation. However, they also largely excluded the Roma themselves from view, continuing to reserve the position for them of being the objects (and victims) of the discriminatory policies negotiated by non-Romani “others”. Recent strands in history writing have refocused attention on the agency of Romani individuals as citizens of post-war Czechoslovakia not only involved in the post-war negotiation of their status as a group in the context of the formulation of Roma-related policies (Donert, 2017), but also, for example striving for recognition and due compensation as Holocaust survivors (Berkyová, 2020; Sadílková and Závodská, 2021; Smlsal, 2024). A similar emphasis on Romani agency has been applied also in the research on the interwar period (see, for example the text on Czechoslovakia by Slačka and Viková in Marushiakova and Popov, 2022, pp. 283–326; Viková, 2018).
The focus and approach of this book is closely inspired by the work of Celia Donert and her book on the Roma in communist Czechoslovakia, which explores the conceptualisation of civil and human rights in 20th-century Europe by using the example of Roma in socialist Czechoslovakia. While following the chronology of the development of the state policies towards the Roma between 1945 and 1989, Donert focused on the public and expert debates on Roma-related policies and approaches of the time, highlighted the voices of Romani activists in these debates and contextualised their activities in her discussion of the concept of socialist citizenship. While making an unprecedented room for the exploration of the agency of a number of Romani activists in the dealings with the state, she kept the focus on the negotiation of their citizenship in the context of the development of the Roma-related policies and on how the state representatives viewed and explained the “Gypsies”.
This book focuses on a much shorter time period, from the beginning of the communist rule in Czechoslovakia (1948) to the time when the first Romani organisations emerged as state-sanctioned organisations in the process of the negotiation of their status during 1968–1969. It explores the genesis of the Romani movement through the texts produced by the protagonists of this movement themselves. The book concentrates on their visions for the future of the Roma in Czechoslovakia and their push for their recognition as potential partners in the enhancement of the situation of the Roma in Czechoslovakia – as Roma as well as Czechoslovak citizens. Marushiakova and Popov (2021) discussed this parallel position of Roma as citizens of the state and as members of an ethnic community in the context of the interwar Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. This book offers the opportunity to follow the interplay of the diverse identifications and identities of individual Romani men and women and their collectives in the context of communist Czechoslovakia. While primarily focusing on the various protagonists of the Romani movement in Czechoslovakia and the context in which the movement developed, the book also provides insight into a variety of other voices, Romani as well as non-Romani as partners or opponents in the multiple negotiations of the position of the Roma as individuals as well as a group. As a sourcebook, it presents transcripts and translations of documents that allow to explore in detail the interplay between the individual socially-engaged people in different areas of public life and the navigation of their agendas through the structures of the post-war state. From the texts they produced, it is clear that the insistence of these Romani citizens and activists on their equality as Czechoslovak citizens was one of main driving forces behind their participation in public life and debates, particularly those that revolved around the status of the Roma and Roma-related policies as key arenas in which they felt their voices have to be heard. It was out of this struggle for participation that their need for representation emerged. Equality and representation thus represent two deeply intertwined concepts and ideals of the emerging Romani movement. The people who participated in it strived primarily for recognition from the diverse non-Romani partners in the negotiations of their position, status and future and as such, the concept of equlity and representation are at the heart of this book and also stand in its title.
Chapter Outlines and an Overview of the Selected Reprinted Sources
The book traces the history of the founding of Romani organisations in Czechoslovakia between 1948 and 1969 in the context of an overview of the circumstances in which these initiatives arose and strived to achieve their goals, as well as in the context of the different public arenas in which Romani voices were raised in socialist Czechoslovakia. The book does so on two different levels. It presents three historical studies that focus on different aspects of the history of Romani self-organisation in Czechoslovakia, based on a large number of sources, a large part of them of Romani provenance. All the three chapters are closely interrelated – they focus on the same developments on the basis of a shared body of archival material, and thus offer to follow the same development from different perspectives and concentrating on different aspects of the same struggle. Out of the body of sources gathered during the research underpinning the book, the authors selected twenty one of them for individual presentation. The selection includes primarily sources written by different Romani activists between 1948 and 1969, both in communication with each other and in communication with various state bodies. The presentation of each of the sources includes the reprint of the original text, its English translation and a contextualising commentary. Short biographical texts presenting a number of the key Romani activists of the time both from the Czech lands as well as Slovakia are also presented in the book, to offer a deeper insight in the context of the activities of the individual Romani actors.
The introductory chapter by Helena Sadílková explores the history of the Romani movement and self-organisation in Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1969. It offers a chronology of its genesis, explores the context of its emergence and analyses the key initiatives in terms of their goals and visions of the Roma as partners in the formulation of their future. The chapter reflects on several specific aspects of the analysed initiatives, such as the growing experiences of the participants in the movement with involvement in negotiations with local and regional administrations or Communist Party organisations, but also the legacy of the Romani genocide for these post-war negotiations. The chapter provides a detailed insight into the emergence and formulation of the arguments and visions that were later transformed into the state-sanctioned establishment of Romani organisations in late 1960s. It also explores the mechanisms of creating social spaces in which the founders of the nascent Romani movement tested their strategies when negotiating their visions with state representatives.
In the following chapter, Milada Závodská focuses on the negotiation of the position of the Roma in academia as an important arena in which the key question of the status of the Roma as a nationality, so crucial for the objectification of the Roma by state policies, was discussed. While academic circles were, for different reasons, historically closed to Roma as actors (beyond the varying intensity of certain academics’ cooperation with Romani consultants), in the early 1950s a number of Romani figures strove to be included as equal partners in this sphere, too. The chapter examines the contribution of the academic circles to the social, political and ideological debates on the Roma and on the regularisation of their position in post-war Czechoslovak society. It also explores the limits of the involvement of the academic circles in the formulation of the policies targeting Roma and of their acceptance of Roma with academic backgrounds as partners in this debate.
In the final chapter, Dušan Slačka approaches the genesis of the Romani movement from the perspectives of reactions of different state actors to these Romani initiatives. His study explores the challenges that the insistence on forming a Romani organisation posed to the social, political and ideological structures of post-war Czechoslovakia. Just as Romani activists sought the possibility of their involvement in the design and implementation of Roma-related policies, the Czechoslovak authorities also tried, in their own way, to negotiate the ideologically underpinned goal to immerse the “Gypsies”, as a previously underprivileged group, in the newly-constructed, egalitarian, socialist society, together with the need to employ “citizens of Gypsy origin” in the implementation of the planned policies in order to solve the problems on the ground. The negotiation of the nationality status of the Roma emerged in these negotiations as the key issue and barrier to further dialogue.
The choice of the source materials featured in the sourcebook is accordingly primarily aimed at mapping the main Romani self-organisation and participation initiatives. The sources included in the book present twenty one documents spanning the years 1948 to 1969. They include proposals made by the Roma to the central institutions of the state, minutes from meetings among Romani activists and from their meetings with state representatives, letters written by individual Roma to state authorities and institutions, letters exchanged between Romani activists themselves, articles written by them, etc. It is clear from the sources that the vision of establishing a Romani organisation was just one format through which the individual people sought to achieve not only representation, but above all equality, and to participate on that basis in the matters that affected them as Roma. For this reason, the collection of sources includes also documents that outline the emergence of the initiatives seeking participation and equality in contexts other than that of the movement to self-organise. The sources thus also offer insights into other public arenas in which specific Romani figures also sought representation.
Archival material selected to represent in this book the Romani self-organisation initiatives in Czechoslovakia during 1948–1969 includes primarily sources documenting the key milestones of this development: the proposal by Anton Facuna from 1957 to establish an organisation called Romani Cultural Union with a detailed outline of its structure and aims; and the key documents from 1968 preceding the establishment of the Unions of Gypsies-Roma in both parts of Czechoslovakia – proposals by Anton Facuna and his Slovak colleagues, and by a collective of Romani activists under the leadership of Miroslav Holomek, who were working for years in close cooperation with the administrative authorities in Brno, the capital of Moravia and the capital of the Romani movement in the Czech part of Czechoslovakia. The sourcebook also includes a few examples of the reactions by the Roma working in different parts of the Czech lands to the announcement of the establishment of a Romani organisation in 1969 which reflect their preceding involvement in the issues related to the situation of the Roma in their regions and their experience in the negotiation with different local actors in this topic.
Next to these documents, the selection also includes sources that are key for the insight into the debates on the current Roma-related policies of the time and the early discussions on the status of the Roma as a nationality. In this context, minutes from the meetings where the status of the Roma was intensively discussed between different Romani and non-Romani actors are included. It was at one of these meetings, in 1953, that the use of the term “Rom” was suggested to replace the negatively charged identification terms “Cikán”/ “Cigáň” (“Gypsy”) as used in Czech and Slovak languages. Nevertheless, the use of the Romani derived terminology entered into official use in Czechoslovakia only at the end of the 1960s. Complementing the insight into the debate on the Roma-related policies of the time, the reprinted sources also include letters to central state authorities by different Romani actors that include criticisms of the implemented policies and their effects in reality, such as for example the letter by Elena Lacková from 1957 criticising the approach of local Slovak authorities to the Roma, or a letter by Zigmund Vágai from 1967 describing the dramatic side effects of the “dispersal” policy. Both of these documents also present the distinct voices of these two figures as (future) key participants of the Romani movement in Czechoslovakia. Proposals by different Romani activists working in the regions aimed at the improvement of the administrative structures charged with the task to enhance the situation of the local Romani communities further enlarge the insight into the debate on the policies of the time and the position of the Romani activists in their implementation.
Enlarging the circle of the arenas and agendas in which different Roma sought participation, the selection also includes sources documenting the efforts of Romani university students/graduates to participate in academic work concerning the Roma and their history and language inside universities and the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, such as an excerpt from a thesis by Bartoloměj Daniel, defended at the Charles University in Prague in 1956, on the earliest history of the Roma on the territory of Czechoslovakia, in which he also addressed problems of the writing of the history of the Roma at the time. The letter by Antonín Daniel addressed to the Rector of the Masaryk University in Brno from 1958, detailing his work with Romani language, offers the insight into the possibilities and visions of the use of the Romani language in public arenas. With respect to the public use of Romani, the sourcebook also includes a letter of birthday congratulation, from 1949, written in Romani and sent to the first Czechoslovak communist President, Klement Gottwald. It is very probably the first (and completely unique) instance of the use of Romani in communication with state authorities. Last but not least, an article by Leon Růžička, from 1957, probably the first-ever published text by a Romani Holocaust survivor in a Czechoslovak newspaper, is also included to document the efforts of some of the Romani and Sinti survivors to draw public attention to their wartime genocide at the time when the dominant narrative silenced specific Jewish and Romani voices. It also offers an insight into the position of the Romani survivors within Czechoslovak mass membership organisations (apart from the Communist Party ), and in particular in the Union of Anti-Fascist Fighters, uniting war veterans, resistance fighters and concentration camp prisoners.
The nature of the source materials and the logic of their selection implies that this book does not aspire to present all of the means through which it might be possible to explore the participation of the Roma in negotiating their position in postwar Czechoslovakia. The sourcebook primarily aims to capture various forms of initiatives evidencing Romani participation in the public, socio-political sphere, focusing on the main initiatives and their contexts. The collection does tilt towards source materials from the Czech lands, although the most prominent Romani voices from Slovakia are also included. Similarly, the documents presented in the sourcebook do not allow for deeper insight into the subject from gender perspective. Two Romani women, Elena Lacková and Anna Danielová, represent so far the only better-documented cases of Romani women’s involvement in the struggle to achieve equal rights for the Roma in communist Czechoslovakia. The focus of this book on the communications exchanged primarily with institutional (state) actors unfortunately side-lines the role of the Romani women and possibly of many others (at least some of whom are mentioned in the participant lists, etc. presented in the sourcebook) in negotiating the local or regional position of the Roma.
Notes on Editing the Source Materials
The documents included in this book are presented in the language in which they were originally written (in Czech, Slovak and Romani) and in English translation.
The original text of each document herein is a transcription of that document, unedited but formatted in a uniform way to promote clarity. The English translations do not reflect any possible spelling or wording errors present in the originals (in the very rare cases where interpretive shifts have occurred in the translation, a footnote draws attention to these interventions). Emphases included in the original documents (marked in bold font), handwritten texts and notes (marked in italics) and the underlining of certain passages (marked as underlined text) are preserved in both the transcriptions and the translations. The documents include information about their authors, the addressees, as well as about their reception by the secretariats of the institutions involved in these communications (official stamps, information about their receipt and forwarding, etc.), and the transcriptions and translations preserve this information, too. However, even with making the best effort to convey the maximum authenticity of the original documents in the Czech transcription, some shifts inevitably occurred. It is an advantage that some of these documents were part of a previous publication prepared in Czech in 2018 by the same authors for the Museum of Romani Culture, which made some of these sources available as facsimiles. (Nine of the twenty-one documents presented herein were previously published earlier and the availability of their facsimiles is indicated in footnotes).
The presentation of each document is accompanied by basic information about its provenance, a brief description of its content and physical properties, and where each can be found in the archival collections. The Czech transcription and its English translation are followed by a commentary on each document, formulated as a separate text contextualising the document and summarising the importance of each source material and its inclusion in this publication.
Czech/Slovak abbreviations of the names of frequently used institutions and state bodies, such as the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) or the administrative authorities, called at that time National Committees (NV) at different levels of the state administrative structure, are used where necessary to avoid overloading the text with long institutional names. A separate list of these most common abbreviations is included in the book. Less frequent abbreviations, particularly those found in the documents, are explained in the text where appropriate.
By publishing the documents the book also provides an insight into the discourse and language of the time, including the term “Gypsy”. As a key identification term used by the state representatives and their Romani counterparts, its use also in the analytical texts is unavoidable. Bearing in mind the negative connotation of the term in Czech and Slovak and the need to dissociate from this terminology, the term is used in quotation marks to indicate its occurrence as a quotation from the discourse of the actors in the debate that the book follows. While the term was used by Romani actors themselves, the documents also capture moments when the activists made an explicit reference to the negative connotations of the term, the implicit reproduction of social stereotypes its use entails and their ways of dealing with the terminological problem.
In addition, the orthographic rules of the Czech and Slovak languages allow for two spellings of the term “c/Cikán” and “c/Cigáň” respectively, differentiating between the spelling of the names of nationalities (the initial letter in upper case) and groups defined otherwise, mostly socially (the initial letter in lower case), and this is also reflected in the individual sources.5 This detail becomes important in the context of the central ideological and political discussion of the time on the status of the “G/gypsies” in Czechoslovakia as a nationality or a group defined by social characteristics. In the writings of the time, two variants of the term appear in the texts – with the lower-case variant being most common – which may indicate (but not as a rule) the position of the writer(s) on the issue of the recognition of the Roma as a nationality.
The book aims to reflect this situation in the presentation of the sources, by using both variants of the term in the translation of the documents, depending on the spelling used in the original text, and thus uses the lower-case spelling of the English term “gypsy” alongside the standard form “Gypsy”. In the analytical parts of the book (in the individual chapters as well as in the commentaries on the sources and short biographies included in the Appendix) the decision was taken to use the standard English spelling of the term “Gypsy”, also in the quotations of the language of the sources regardless of the spelling used in them, in order not to the distract the attention by considerations of possible inconsistencies, etc. In the analytical texts, explicit reference is made to the original spelling in the sources used when the spelling of the term in the original document is important for the understanding of the source and the context of its production and use.
Helena Sadílková
MZA: fond Svaz Cikánů Romů v ČSR – ústřední výbor Brno (G 434), k. 1, f. 849–851. The document is reprinted in this book as Document no. 18.
Available at: https://vlada.gov.cz/assets/ppov/zalezitosti-romske-komunity/roma_czech_republic_strategy_en.pdf (Accessed: 24 September 2024).
Czech Govt Commissioner for Roma Minority Affairs builds network of regional Romani ambassadors to work with her. Romea.cz (Z. Ryšavý, 3 October 2023). Available at: https://romea.cz/en/czech-republic/czech-govt-commissioner-for-roma-minority-affairs-builds-network-of-regional-romani-ambassadors-to-work-with-her#google_vignette (Accessed: 24 September 2024).
RomArchive – The Digital Archive of the Roma: Romani Civil Rights Movement. Available at: https://www.romarchive.eu/en/roma-civil-rights-movement/ (Accessed: 24 September 2024).
The development of the orthography rules in this time with the respect to this term is discussed in Chapter 2.