Why was there never a Roma state? It’s a question that sounds simple, but the answer stretches across centuries, through wars, and into the very heart of how nations define themselves. Today, Roma are scattered across the globe, their numbers estimated between six and fifteen million, though some claims reach as high as seventy million. But no piece of land bears their name.
No border protects them. And in many places, their very existence is denied. The story begins long before the modern era. Small groups of Romani people may have appeared in the Middle East as early as 600 to 500 BCE.
But the major migration started after the Muslim conquest of Sind in 711 CE, when refugees fled westward. They moved across Asia and into Europe, carrying their language, their traditions, and their stubborn sense of identity. The name “Roma” itself is broad, but within it, there are distinct groups. The Cinti, for example, are a specific ethnic minority found mainly in Western and Central Europe, while Roma is the umbrella term for all Romani people.
The flag they share is recognized internationally: two horizontal stripes, blue on top, green on the bottom, with a red spoked wheel in the center. The word “gypsy” comes from “Egyptian,” a misnomer that stuck. Life was never easy. Some Roma became farmers or tradesmen, but many were forced to keep moving, hunted by suspicion and fear.
By the mid-fifteenth century, most European countries had passed harsh anti-Romani laws. These laws pushed Roma to the margins, making them outsiders in every land they crossed. The persecution was relentless, but it intensified in the twentieth century. After World War I, new restrictions appeared across Western Europe.
By 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany, anti-Roma measures were already embedded in German law. In 1936, the first 400 Roma were imprisoned at Dahal. In 1942, Himmler ordered the deportation of German Roma to Auschwitz. This was part of a genocide known as the Borajos, a term that carries the weight of unimaginable suffering.
The numbers are staggering, with casualties estimated between 250,000 and 2 million. Yet after the war, Roma survivors were not called to testify at the Nuremberg trials. Many were left stateless, and West Germany denied them compensation. History had recorded their pain but refused to acknowledge their humanity.
Amid this devastation, a dream began to take shape. Roma communities started organizing more actively to protect themselves. In the early 1950s, Romanian Roma leaders appealed to the United Nations for a homeland, sometimes called a Romani Israel or Romanistan. It was a bold idea, but it was not the only one.
Yoseph Brostido, the leader of socialist Yugoslavia, along with the party for the complete emancipation of Roma from North Macedonia, had similar ideas. None of these ever materialized. Hundreds of Romani citizens petitioned Moscow for a homeland, hoping it would secure their integration into Soviet society. They imagined a territory where they could finally belong, a place that would legitimize their existence in the eyes of the state.
But the homeland was never created. Instead, the Soviet Union tried to settle Roma on collective farms, believing this would transform nomadic gypsies into productive Soviet citizens. These collective farms integrated Roma families into Soviet economic and cultural life, and Roma leaders used them as leverage to lobby for greater state support, including demands for a national territory. But Moscow focused on strengthening the collective farms, not on granting autonomy.
The map of the Soviet Union was never reconfigured to include a gypsy autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, nor a gypsy autonomous region, nor even a so-called special gypsy territory. It was not for want of trying. Plans for the compact settlement of Romani nomads were again and again limited to the borders of individual collective farms, which were to remain as geographically scattered as the overall Romani population. Ultimately, Soviet leaders decided that Roma did not need a separate homeland.
In their view, Roma already had one: the Soviet Union itself. The nationality policy, summed up in the phrase “national in form, socialist in content,” gave ethnic minorities like the Roma schools, theaters, and newspapers in their own language, but all infused with socialist values. While Roma were still burdened by racist stereotypes and heavy-handed policies, the Soviet approach insisted that they belonged as Soviet citizens. This was a radical departure from the rejection they faced elsewhere in Europe.
In 2013, for example, a French official declared that Romani migrants should return to their homeland, ignoring the fact that no such homeland exists. The Soviet dream of a gypsy homeland never came true, but the attempt to imagine one, and the policies that surrounded it, highlight a very different vision of Romani belonging compared to the persecution they suffered elsewhere. Roma were not just a problem to be solved or a people to be expelled.
In the Soviet imagination, they were part of a larger whole, even if that whole never gave them a place to call their own.
