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Description

I expect there will be many "jokes" about this one. The fun thing about a block list is that it's functionally infinite.

---

There are many diaspora communities in the world, though most still see themselves as being "from" somewhere. There are very few exceptions to this, as even the Mongol people can claim the vast lands they wandered as "Mongolia". The Romani were only vaguely tied to India, a link long eschewed by the people themselves as they became itinerant wanderers of Europe. This one fact, that they often wandered and didn't often make themselves a permanent inhabitant of anywhere, set them apart in the eyes of the people they lived among. Always the Romani were at the mercy of whichever community they lived in, at any moment they could be expelled from a city or a country if the authorities didn't want them there. Their choice to wander was their own, of course, and as much a part of their culture as anything, but that didn't stop some from looking at a world dominated by those who had settled centuries if not millennia ago, and thinking that perhaps the best scenario would be for them to do the same.

The idea of "Romanistan" is not a new one, and had been proposed many times in the past in places ranging from India to central Europe to South America and so on. The luxury of not being a people of a place was that almost anywhere could become a Romani home. Cultures frequently moved and migrated, though the caveat was that it was most often at the expense of whoever had been there before. England had been founded on the backs of the Celts conquered by the Anglo-Saxons, who were in turn later dominated by a French aristocracy that "went native" through political disputes between London and Paris. Treating culture and nations as static is a far newer thing, and any effort by the Romani to make the transition from migratory to settled would invariably come at the expense of whoever had been there before they were. Perhaps it was this reality which kept them from settling down at most any other point in history, but the world that came out of the year 1945 was a very different one indeed.

People were moving all over in the aftermath of the war, with the Germans expelled from eastern Europe, Japanese settlers retreating from the broken empire, and the Jews starting to move with greater fervor towards Palestine. The Romani saw an opportunity in all of this, and having suffered during the Holocaust seized their chance to present an opportunity to make Romanistan a reality. With Europe now split between the spheres of the United States and Soviet Union, the question of which power to approach was one that divided the Romani greatly. For most, the idea of "Romanistan" had taken on a parallel of Zionism, in the idea of returning to an ancestral homeland, and in this case that was India. Through the influence of its independence leaders, the British Raj was on the verge of collapse, and hopes were high that a negotiation could be made with either the British government or the nascent Indian government to create a Romanistan in India, to be among their brethren once again.

1948 proved a red letter year for the Romanistan movement. Three things happened in that year. The first was the formation of the United Nations, which at its outset seemed a utopian effort to create a coordinated world order. The second was the Arab-Israeli War, and the Nakba which resulted from it. The third was the chaotic and violent partition of the Raj into India and Pakistan, and the blood that was shed over it. For those who supported Romanistan, two things became immediately clear. Any effort at Romanistan would inevitably a settler project that would result in violence and cultural displacement like that in Palestine, and the now-hostile India and Pakistan would ill appreciate a potential wildcard being thrown into their midst. Romanistan could not be formed in India, and it seemingly couldn't be formed anywhere else either. The movement seemed doomed to fail, up until an unexpected force swept in to seize the opportunity for themselves, less out of any genuine sympathy and with an eye towards pragmatic internal politics.

Russia's relationship with the Romani was a complex one, and had at times been perhaps more accepting of them than any other state, for a given definition of the word. Indeed, a "Gypsy Soviet Socialist Republic" had been proposed as early as the 1920s, and had nearly made the leap from bureaucratic directive to lived reality, but with Stalin happily rearranging peoples across his empire he was prepared to re-approach the issue. While he had no true love of the Romani, he saw in the Romanistan movement the chance to both gain favor in his new Eastern Bloc, the nations of which had long had unfavorable opinions of the Romani, and to play kingmaker in Central Asia. Although the peoples of the Central Asian SSRs were fully under Stalin's thumb, there was no guarantee of it, and if he were to give the Romani land in Central Asia to form their own state then he would effectively create a nation permanently loyal to Moscow and potentially hobble any anti-Soviet coalition-building in the region.

So it was in 1949 that Stalin put forward the formal offer to create the Romani Soviet Socialist Republic, putting it forward in the United Nations. The land offered was a harsh and arid region along the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, but the Romani were willing to accept the harsh conditions if it came from a global superpower making an actual offer, even one under Stalinist rule. Migration eastward had begun even before the formal creation of the Romani SSR, and once it had been made the floodgates opened not only from voluntary migration but from what amounted to a genteel ethnic cleansing as the Eastern Bloc happily "encouraged" their Romani populations to leave. If Moscow wanted to make them its problem, that was just fine by them, and entire villages were effectively deported into the USSR as soon as Stalin had set out his goals of creating Romanistan. The selected region, one dubbed "Mangystau", had been sparsely populated prior to the migration, and had grown to nearly 500,000 by 1950.

It was chaos. Mangystau, what was now Romanistan, was arid and had almost no freshwater. On top of this the Kazakhs, Karakalpaks, Turkmens, and Uzbeks who had lived there prior weren't terribly happy about the sudden arrival of hundreds of thousands of foreigners, but at Stalin's decree their complaints were silenced. The Romani would still make some effort to try and respect the customs and cultures who had lived there prior, notably many ancient necropolises and mosques and burial sites. Infrastructure was in no way prepared for this massive influx of people which only continued throughout the 1950s, even after the death of Stalin, leading to frenzied construction of the infamous "commieblocks" and the sudden emergence of Parnibur as a city with more than 100,000 people which had prior been almost entirely undeveloped. The discovery of new uranium deposits did help bring more resources from the Soviet core, though, and even when the population crested 1 million in 1955 Romanistan was by then better able to handle its influx.

Even then the situation was growing so dire that in 1954, after Khrushchev declared that the Romani would have to settle down and abandon wandering, RSSR leader Matéo Maximoff had to publicly plead to the Eastern Bloc to stop sending their Romani into Soviet territory. His arguments were largely ignored. Romanistan hadn't been intended to enable the ethnic cleansing of the Roma from Eastern Europe, but as far as the European states were concerned that the Romani now had "somewhere to go" meant that they had carte blanche to send away a despised minority. Khrushchev himself had to eventually intervene and curtail the efforts of the Eastern Bloc to continually displace the Romani into Soviet territory, but when he was ousted in 1964 the floodgates were re-opened and a continual flow of Romani kept moving eastwards as communist regimes happily used the existence of Romanistan to exile them, using their own homeland as a cudgel against them as yet another form of the discrimination which had helped spawn Romanistan to begin with.

Which wasn't to say that there was nothing good that came out of Romanistan, far from it. Being one of the first large Romani-majority territories in the world meant that for the first time in a very long time, the Romani now formed a dominant group in a state, even if that was under the Red Banner. Under such circumstances a Romani national identity had begun to flourish and develop, and while the many languages of the Romani remained a vernacular a new form of "Standardized Roma" was created to serve as a bridge language to avoid having to rely on Russian. Ironically in the officially atheist USSR, a major step towards preserving and codifying the new Standard Roma was the publishing of a Christian bible translated with assistance from state resources. Where Stalin had hoped that Romanistan would become an anchor for Moscow's power in the region, it instead became as much of a wild card as one might have expected, and with a population surpassing 2 million by 1970 many Romani were now voluntarily leaving the Eastern Bloc.

Romanistan was not without controversy, notably that the Kazakhs had loudly protested the loss of the Mangystau region, but at this point most were coming to simply accept the new status quo if it meant staying in Moscow's graces even when the USSR was stagnating and declining. Given the nature of its existence, Romanistan was perhaps the most actively nationalistic SSR, much to Moscow's dismay, and even as Gorbachev took power he struggled to keep Romanistan in line. When the New Union Treaty was put forward, Romanistan was one of the SSRs to reject the treaty even before the disaster of the August Coup and had begun to actively agitate towards independence. As the USSR went to pieces, Moscow was eventually forced to relinquish its hold over Parnibur, and when the country declared independence in 1990 there was little they could do about it. The transition from the Romanistan Soviet Socialist Republic to the Republic of Romanistan was, all things considered, rather gentle.

Then again, it was "gentle" inasmuch as the country was able to peacefully separate and find its existence unchallenged by territorial disputes or the threat of reprisal from surrounding nations, much as was the case for much of the Caucasus Mountains and for the newly-formed nation of Karakalpakstan immediately next door, which quickly became just about the only nation in the region that was properly friendly towards Romanistan. Surrounded by Turkic nations that had no fond feelings towards the interlopers, Romanistan was politically and diplomatically isolated almost immediately, and any effort to try and reach towards Europe or the United States was hobbled by the fact that Russia was crippled but not broken, and even as the Chechens seceded in an orgy of violence the Russian Empire was still more than able to play kingmaker in the former Soviet Empire. Once Putin rose to power and solidified a wave of anti-Western resentment, Romanistan's foreign policy was soon one of simply keeping its head down and trying to avoid notice.

This has been the delicate game played by Romanistan ever since independence, attempting to balance a full embrace of its culture and identity with avoiding the potential of aggravating Moscow's designs in the region. Unlike Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, Romanistan (and Karakalpakstan) have never fully bent the knee to Russia's attempts at re-ascendancy, but their isolation and weakness compared to their neighbors means that they can't actively go about defying Moscow's will. Surveys taken since 2022 show an immense opposition to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but the government has offered tepid support at best for Kyiv. In comparison, Romanistan has been a furiously loud voice in opposition to the Israeli invasion of Gaza, being one of the many governments in the "Global South" to rightfully and actively label Israel's actions as a genocide. Much of this has as much to do with their own experience of ethnic cleansing, with the deportations of the Cold War still within living memory for a vast portion of Romanistan's population.

The future does not look ideal. The continued strain of Russia's attempts at dominating Ukraine might hobble Russia's ability to act against Romanistan, but if Russia were to somehow collapse then the sudden power vacuum could potentially send the politics of the region into utter chaos, leaving Romanistan at the mercy of belligerent neighbors. And even if matters remain politically stable, the climate is growing worse. The drying of the Aral Sea has negatively impacted the entire region, even if Romanistan doesn't border the former sea, and the Caspian in turn is starting to dry. Even then, if sea level rise grows out of hand then a flooding Black Sea could spill across into the Caspian and leave even the doubly-landlocked Romanistan vulnerable to rising sea levels. Even then, though, the idea of possibly just picking up and moving as they did in the past is no longer feasible. Not only is the nation now a nation of 3 million people in a region with poor access to water and arable land, but the cultural attitudes have changed.

Diaspora is a cultural condition that changes alarmingly quickly. The Romani spent the better part of 400 years wandering, and in the span of a mere decade that was almost entirely abandoned. Romanistan came at the price of the old wandering ways, as did many other things. The old communities they'd once been part of have now spurned them. Yet for some, it's acceptable. For the first time, the Romani have access to the same mechanisms of self-determination that so many other nations do. For the first time in their existence, the Romani can dictate their own affairs the ways that the Germans and Turks and Kazakhs can without relying on the mercies of their host nations. When sovereignty and self-determination matters more than ever, the Romani are not willing to give it up. Their adopted land is harsh and unforgiving, but they have weathered worse, and no matter what it takes they will make it work. The world may swirl around them, but Romanistan will endure.

Description

I expect there will be many "jokes" about this one. The fun thing about a block list is that it's functionally infinite.

---

There are many diaspora communities in the world, though most still see themselves as being "from" somewhere. There are very few exceptions to this, as even the Mongol people can claim the vast lands they wandered as "Mongolia". The Romani were only vaguely tied to India, a link long eschewed by the people themselves as they became itinerant wanderers of Europe. This one fact, that they often wandered and didn't often make themselves a permanent inhabitant of anywhere, set them apart in the eyes of the people they lived among. Always the Romani were at the mercy of whichever community they lived in, at any moment they could be expelled from a city or a country if the authorities didn't want them there. Their choice to wander was their own, of course, and as much a part of their culture as anything, but that didn't stop some from looking at a world dominated by those who had settled centuries if not millennia ago, and thinking that perhaps the best scenario would be for them to do the same.

The idea of "Romanistan" is not a new one, and had been proposed many times in the past in places ranging from India to central Europe to South America and so on. The luxury of not being a people of a place was that almost anywhere could become a Romani home. Cultures frequently moved and migrated, though the caveat was that it was most often at the expense of whoever had been there before. England had been founded on the backs of the Celts conquered by the Anglo-Saxons, who were in turn later dominated by a French aristocracy that "went native" through political disputes between London and Paris. Treating culture and nations as static is a far newer thing, and any effort by the Romani to make the transition from migratory to settled would invariably come at the expense of whoever had been there before they were. Perhaps it was this reality which kept them from settling down at most any other point in history, but the world that came out of the year 1945 was a very different one indeed.

People were moving all over in the aftermath of the war, with the Germans expelled from eastern Europe, Japanese settlers retreating from the broken empire, and the Jews starting to move with greater fervor towards Palestine. The Romani saw an opportunity in all of this, and having suffered during the Holocaust seized their chance to present an opportunity to make Romanistan a reality. With Europe now split between the spheres of the United States and Soviet Union, the question of which power to approach was one that divided the Romani greatly. For most, the idea of "Romanistan" had taken on a parallel of Zionism, in the idea of returning to an ancestral homeland, and in this case that was India. Through the influence of its independence leaders, the British Raj was on the verge of collapse, and hopes were high that a negotiation could be made with either the British government or the nascent Indian government to create a Romanistan in India, to be among their brethren once again.

1948 proved a red letter year for the Romanistan movement. Three things happened in that year. The first was the formation of the United Nations, which at its outset seemed a utopian effort to create a coordinated world order. The second was the Arab-Israeli War, and the Nakba which resulted from it. The third was the chaotic and violent partition of the Raj into India and Pakistan, and the blood that was shed over it. For those who supported Romanistan, two things became immediately clear. Any effort at Romanistan would inevitably a settler project that would result in violence and cultural displacement like that in Palestine, and the now-hostile India and Pakistan would ill appreciate a potential wildcard being thrown into their midst. Romanistan could not be formed in India, and it seemingly couldn't be formed anywhere else either. The movement seemed doomed to fail, up until an unexpected force swept in to seize the opportunity for themselves, less out of any genuine sympathy and with an eye towards pragmatic internal politics.

Russia's relationship with the Romani was a complex one, and had at times been perhaps more accepting of them than any other state, for a given definition of the word. Indeed, a "Gypsy Soviet Socialist Republic" had been proposed as early as the 1920s, and had nearly made the leap from bureaucratic directive to lived reality, but with Stalin happily rearranging peoples across his empire he was prepared to re-approach the issue. While he had no true love of the Romani, he saw in the Romanistan movement the chance to both gain favor in his new Eastern Bloc, the nations of which had long had unfavorable opinions of the Romani, and to play kingmaker in Central Asia. Although the peoples of the Central Asian SSRs were fully under Stalin's thumb, there was no guarantee of it, and if he were to give the Romani land in Central Asia to form their own state then he would effectively create a nation permanently loyal to Moscow and potentially hobble any anti-Soviet coalition-building in the region.

So it was in 1949 that Stalin put forward the formal offer to create the Romani Soviet Socialist Republic, putting it forward in the United Nations. The land offered was a harsh and arid region along the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea, but the Romani were willing to accept the harsh conditions if it came from a global superpower making an actual offer, even one under Stalinist rule. Migration eastward had begun even before the formal creation of the Romani SSR, and once it had been made the floodgates opened not only from voluntary migration but from what amounted to a genteel ethnic cleansing as the Eastern Bloc happily "encouraged" their Romani populations to leave. If Moscow wanted to make them its problem, that was just fine by them, and entire villages were effectively deported into the USSR as soon as Stalin had set out his goals of creating Romanistan. The selected region, one dubbed "Mangystau", had been sparsely populated prior to the migration, and had grown to nearly 500,000 by 1950.

It was chaos. Mangystau, what was now Romanistan, was arid and had almost no freshwater. On top of this the Kazakhs, Karakalpaks, Turkmens, and Uzbeks who had lived there prior weren't terribly happy about the sudden arrival of hundreds of thousands of foreigners, but at Stalin's decree their complaints were silenced. The Romani would still make some effort to try and respect the customs and cultures who had lived there prior, notably many ancient necropolises and mosques and burial sites. Infrastructure was in no way prepared for this massive influx of people which only continued throughout the 1950s, even after the death of Stalin, leading to frenzied construction of the infamous "commieblocks" and the sudden emergence of Parnibur as a city with more than 100,000 people which had prior been almost entirely undeveloped. The discovery of new uranium deposits did help bring more resources from the Soviet core, though, and even when the population crested 1 million in 1955 Romanistan was by then better able to handle its influx.

Even then the situation was growing so dire that in 1954, after Khrushchev declared that the Romani would have to settle down and abandon wandering, RSSR leader Matéo Maximoff had to publicly plead to the Eastern Bloc to stop sending their Romani into Soviet territory. His arguments were largely ignored. Romanistan hadn't been intended to enable the ethnic cleansing of the Roma from Eastern Europe, but as far as the European states were concerned that the Romani now had "somewhere to go" meant that they had carte blanche to send away a despised minority. Khrushchev himself had to eventually intervene and curtail the efforts of the Eastern Bloc to continually displace the Romani into Soviet territory, but when he was ousted in 1964 the floodgates were re-opened and a continual flow of Romani kept moving eastwards as communist regimes happily used the existence of Romanistan to exile them, using their own homeland as a cudgel against them as yet another form of the discrimination which had helped spawn Romanistan to begin with.

Which wasn't to say that there was nothing good that came out of Romanistan, far from it. Being one of the first large Romani-majority territories in the world meant that for the first time in a very long time, the Romani now formed a dominant group in a state, even if that was under the Red Banner. Under such circumstances a Romani national identity had begun to flourish and develop, and while the many languages of the Romani remained a vernacular a new form of "Standardized Roma" was created to serve as a bridge language to avoid having to rely on Russian. Ironically in the officially atheist USSR, a major step towards preserving and codifying the new Standard Roma was the publishing of a Christian bible translated with assistance from state resources. Where Stalin had hoped that Romanistan would become an anchor for Moscow's power in the region, it instead became as much of a wild card as one might have expected, and with a population surpassing 2 million by 1970 many Romani were now voluntarily leaving the Eastern Bloc.

Romanistan was not without controversy, notably that the Kazakhs had loudly protested the loss of the Mangystau region, but at this point most were coming to simply accept the new status quo if it meant staying in Moscow's graces even when the USSR was stagnating and declining. Given the nature of its existence, Romanistan was perhaps the most actively nationalistic SSR, much to Moscow's dismay, and even as Gorbachev took power he struggled to keep Romanistan in line. When the New Union Treaty was put forward, Romanistan was one of the SSRs to reject the treaty even before the disaster of the August Coup and had begun to actively agitate towards independence. As the USSR went to pieces, Moscow was eventually forced to relinquish its hold over Parnibur, and when the country declared independence in 1990 there was little they could do about it. The transition from the Romanistan Soviet Socialist Republic to the Republic of Romanistan was, all things considered, rather gentle.

Then again, it was "gentle" inasmuch as the country was able to peacefully separate and find its existence unchallenged by territorial disputes or the threat of reprisal from surrounding nations, much as was the case for much of the Caucasus Mountains and for the newly-formed nation of Karakalpakstan immediately next door, which quickly became just about the only nation in the region that was properly friendly towards Romanistan. Surrounded by Turkic nations that had no fond feelings towards the interlopers, Romanistan was politically and diplomatically isolated almost immediately, and any effort to try and reach towards Europe or the United States was hobbled by the fact that Russia was crippled but not broken, and even as the Chechens seceded in an orgy of violence the Russian Empire was still more than able to play kingmaker in the former Soviet Empire. Once Putin rose to power and solidified a wave of anti-Western resentment, Romanistan's foreign policy was soon one of simply keeping its head down and trying to avoid notice.

This has been the delicate game played by Romanistan ever since independence, attempting to balance a full embrace of its culture and identity with avoiding the potential of aggravating Moscow's designs in the region. Unlike Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, Romanistan (and Karakalpakstan) have never fully bent the knee to Russia's attempts at re-ascendancy, but their isolation and weakness compared to their neighbors means that they can't actively go about defying Moscow's will. Surveys taken since 2022 show an immense opposition to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but the government has offered tepid support at best for Kyiv. In comparison, Romanistan has been a furiously loud voice in opposition to the Israeli invasion of Gaza, being one of the many governments in the "Global South" to rightfully and actively label Israel's actions as a genocide. Much of this has as much to do with their own experience of ethnic cleansing, with the deportations of the Cold War still within living memory for a vast portion of Romanistan's population.

The future does not look ideal. The continued strain of Russia's attempts at dominating Ukraine might hobble Russia's ability to act against Romanistan, but if Russia were to somehow collapse then the sudden power vacuum could potentially send the politics of the region into utter chaos, leaving Romanistan at the mercy of belligerent neighbors. And even if matters remain politically stable, the climate is growing worse. The drying of the Aral Sea has negatively impacted the entire region, even if Romanistan doesn't border the former sea, and the Caspian in turn is starting to dry. Even then, if sea level rise grows out of hand then a flooding Black Sea could spill across into the Caspian and leave even the doubly-landlocked Romanistan vulnerable to rising sea levels. Even then, though, the idea of possibly just picking up and moving as they did in the past is no longer feasible. Not only is the nation now a nation of 3 million people in a region with poor access to water and arable land, but the cultural attitudes have changed.

Diaspora is a cultural condition that changes alarmingly quickly. The Romani spent the better part of 400 years wandering, and in the span of a mere decade that was almost entirely abandoned. Romanistan came at the price of the old wandering ways, as did many other things. The old communities they'd once been part of have now spurned them. Yet for some, it's acceptable. For the first time, the Romani have access to the same mechanisms of self-determination that so many other nations do. For the first time in their existence, the Romani can dictate their own affairs the ways that the Germans and Turks and Kazakhs can without relying on the mercies of their host nations. When sovereignty and self-determination matters more than ever, the Romani are not willing to give it up. Their adopted land is harsh and unforgiving, but they have weathered worse, and no matter what it takes they will make it work. The world may swirl around them, but Romanistan will endure.