Gypsies of the Belarusian Provinces and Land Management Policy at the turn of the 1830s-1840s

Abstract

At the turn of the 18th-19th centuries, the tsarist government in Russia faced the Gypsy question in the context of implementation of the society homogenization policy. There were campaigns initiated to fight with Gypsy vagrancyduring the 1770s-1810s, the primary target of which was to modernize the Gypsies of the Russian Empire and turn them into a constant component of rural or urban societies. However, despite the repressive tools included, these measures did not effect the desired result. The purpose of the present paper is to study the relationship between the Belarusian Gypsies and the authorities when it came to acquisition of land and set up of arable farms in the late 1830s-early 1840s as part of implementation of the subsequent campaign to turn the Gypsies of Russia into a settled population. The basis of the research were archival materials from the fund of the Second Department of the Ministry of State Property of the Russian State Historical Archive (St. Petersburg). Studying of various historical sources revealed the features of implementation of the decree of Nicholas I (1839) in the Belarusian provinces. Despite the willingness of the local gypsy camps to adopt the sedentary life, they faced various forms of latent chauvinism at the local level: officials sabotaged orders from St. Petersburg; peasants did not want to accept Gypsies into their societies. The article is intended for specialists in the history of the Roma and the national politics in the Russian Empire.