Mikhail Tyaglyy “A tragedy of guilty victims”? The memory of the Roma genocide in postwar Ukraine Part 3 https://ukrainianjewishencounter.org/en/a-tragedy-of-guilty-victims-memory-of-the-roma-genocide-in- postwar-ukraine-part-3/ Posted On: March 10th, 2021 In the third part, the author examines another important type of Soviet “space of memory” about the war: the sphere of artistic representation. Films, music, and literary works had a huge potential for the construction of collective perception. How were Roma characters depicted in “documentary-artistic” novels, “adventure” stories, and popular films? Analyzing the sociocultural context in which the images of Roma were embedded, the concluding part of this article demonstrates that the depiction of Roma victims as a nomadic community dovetailed with the ideas inherent in Soviet culture about nomadism as a phenomenon bordering on antisocial behavior and crime. Thus, Roma victims were perceived for the most part as people who had been persecuted justifiably and deservedly. Тhis led to the belief that they were not worthy of sympathy and deserving commemoration. Creative work The aggregate of “sites of memory” about the past war, which were created by the Soviet regime starting in the 1960s, also includes the sphere of artistic reflection. Bookstores and library book collections began to fill up with numerous published accounts, stories, and novels about the “Great Patriotic War.” However, the term “reflection” is used provisionally here: The issue was rather about creating a new narrative language with a developed system of ideological accents, symbols, and markers. For a deeper understanding of the image of the recent past, the term “representation” is more appropriate. Among the authors of literary works about “the national, heroic struggle of the Soviet people on the home front,” with which consumers were literally inundated, were former underground members and partisans. In many cases, their works were written with the help of assistants who were more conversant with the literary sphere. Literature and cinematography about the “Great Patriotic War” in general and about the occupying regime in particular were extraordinarily diverse. On the one hand, they were marked by the complex and contradictory processes that society was experiencing, and on the other, these artistic works formed them to a significant degree. The trend toward the humanization of the Soviet creative sphere during the period of the Thaw under Khrushchev was supplanted by an official and ossified narrative about the Second World War, which became predominant during the Brezhnev era. At the same time, the approved canon of memory was aimed at the new generations, which had not experienced the war and did not have their own memory of it. This conditioned the rise and active utilization of methods of presentation that had not been used earlier: Memoirs of war veterans took on a tinge of adventure literature, while literary and cinematographic works began to acquire the status of documentary accounts. Analyses of the depiction of the Roma genocide in Soviet culture appear in studies by Nikolai Bessonov [1], Мartin Holler [2], and Аndrej Kotljarchuk. [3] These researchers concluded that the memory of the Roma genocide in the postwar USSR existed on the periphery of public awareness, and was manifested only in individual, limited spheres, rarely reaching a wider audience. The representation of this genocide was restricted primarily to the spheres of the art and artistic creativity produced by the Roma themselves (one brilliant example is the activities of the Moscow-based Romen Theater). Holler emphasizes that “the chances of success in raising public awareness of murdered Roma remained extremely insignificant in Soviet conditions. Several petitions that were sent to high-ranking party and state officials, in which Roma activists spoke about the “fate of the gypsies,” were never answered, and articles submitted to the editorial offices of newspapers were never published.” In 1967 a meeting took place between the well-known Soviet Jewish writer Lev Ginzburg and the members of the Romen Theater, during which the participants discussed the crucial need to immortalize the murdered Roma. [4] Ginzburg noted that commemorative activity also has a “patriotic meaning because, in recalling this, once again we recall with gratitude our Soviet army that saved the gypsy people from destruction and preserved the [gypsy] nation and its culture.” [5] What is significant about this episode is how the perception of a representative of one group of victims works when he tries to share it with the representatives of another group that he believes experienced persecution for identical reasons. In doing so, he does not forget to emphasize the ideological clichés that were required of him not only as a Jew but also as a Soviet person and writer; specifically, gratitude to the Soviet army (and thus to the Soviet state on the whole) for being saved from the Nazis’ murderous policies. To be sure, this was never the goal of the Red Army. [6] Holler justly notes that, despite its inadequacy, the existing commemorative activity in the Roma milieu took place exclusively within the framework of the Romen Theater’s pursuits. It practically never went farther than the Roma audience. However, even within the precisely defined ideological framework, the actors of this theater occasionally managed to make veiled references to the genocide, which could be spotted only by very attentive viewers. Analyzing the theater’s repertoire, Holler notes that “the content of all three dramas was identical in emphasizing partisan glory. The elucidation of the Roma genocide as such was limited mostly to a brief episode or even a one-time theatrical interlude.” [7] Plans to stage a separate work on the genocide theme were never realized until perestroika in 1985. If one analyzes the memorialization of the Roma genocide, it is no less important to consider whether these events elicited interest among non-Roma “agents of memory”: directors, writers, screenwriters, and other Soviet cultural figures. Did they consider it necessary to interweave information about the Roma tragedy into the fabric of their own artistic accounts? If so, then how did Roma appear in books and on movie screens? Cinema Bessonov, Holler, and Kotljarchuk analyzed the Soviet films Trudnoe shchast′e (Hard Happiness,1958), Chernaia bereza (Black Birch, 1977), Khto povernetsia—doliubyt′ (He Who Returns Will Love to the End, 1966), and Tsygan (The Gypsy; the first film adaptation was done in 1967, the second—in 1979). In the first two films, Roma are only minor characters, part of the general resistance movement. The features of the Nazis’ anti-Roma policies are not examined here. The situation is more complex with regard to the Tsygan films (the two film adaptations of the novel by Soviet writer Anatolii Kalinin). In Holler’s opinion, “the demise of Budulai’s family is not the result of the targeted killings of Roma; it happened during an attack by German tank units on a Russian collective farm. In Tsygan, the Roma genocide is not mentioned. Budulai’s sufferings embody the fate of “the Soviet citizen as such.” His individuality as a “gypsy” plays a certain role only in the short story after the war. [8] Here I beg to differ. Both the author of the book and the director of the 1967 film adaptation Yevgeny Matveev demonstrated an amazing ability to express “between the lines” that which was not desirable to say out loud. The target of the German tank attack was indeed a Soviet collective farm. However, the tank that could have attacked Slavic refugees aimed fire precisely at a Roma family in a kibitka [Roma wagon—Trans.]. This could not have failed to nudge the Soviet reader (and viewer) into thinking about the occupiers’ particular obsession with Roma inhabitants. Moreover, Matveev’s screen adaptation includes an episode that even more clearly apprises the viewer of the fact that the status of the Roma on the occupied territory was not identical to the majority. Seventy-two minutes into the film, when the narrative turns to the past, showing how the main character (a Russian woman) takes in a Roma infant, her female neighbor shouts: “Lord, all we need is a gypsy child! Where will we go with it now? Because of him, the German will finish us off!” More than twenty years after the war, Soviet viewers still remembered that for hiding Jews, the Germans would shoot not only the guilty party but his entire family. Matveev discovered an indirect way to inform the viewer that the fates of the Roma and the Jews on German-occupied territories were similar. It is noteworthy that in the second film adaptation, by director Aleksandr Blank, this scene is missing. It is possible that this director was in the tighter grip of the Soviet ideological canon about the war. It is also likely that he did not feel the need to convey to viewers information that went outside the framework of minimally required details about the main character and his losses. Given that this episode was not in Kalinin’s novel either, the latter seems more likely. The only film in Soviet cinematography to portray a scene about the Roma genocide was Khto povernetsia—doliubyt′, made by the Ukrainian director Leonid Osyka. [9] Kotljarchuk concludes that the films Tsygan and Khto povernetsia—doliubyt′ “sum up the new trend in the postwar policy of memory, with a shift from heroes to victims and/or heroes and their postwar trauma.” [10] However, this trend in Soviet cinematography remained unfulfilled; no new cinematic works on this topic ever appeared again. It is also worth noting certain issues that have escaped scholars’ attention. All three directors chose to portray (or convey between-the-lines information) nomadic camp groups.