Ruska Roma Erotic

The Ruska Roma are Roma who became Russian without ceasing to be Roma. Their ancestors came east out of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 18th century. They share Northern Romani roots with the Polska Roma, and over the next three centuries they spread from Russia's western provinces all the way to Siberia. Several Roma groups live in Russia today, including Kalderash, Lovari and Crimean Roma, who came by other routes. The Ruska Roma are the largest of them and the most at home in ordinary Russian life: Orthodox by baptism, fluent in Russian, and Romani in family, speech and custom. Their own language is a Northern Romani dialect, often called Xaladytka or North Russian Romani. Like every form of Romani it is Indo-Aryan at its root, with a thick layer of Polish and Russian words picked up along the road. In the 1920s and 1930s the Soviet state chose this dialect as the basis for a written Romani. It printed primers and a literary magazine in Cyrillic and set up Roma collective farms and craft cooperatives. That experiment was shut down before the war. Orthodoxy is still the default faith and shows most at baptisms and funerals, though Pentecostal and other evangelical churches have gained a real following in recent decades.

To most Russians, though, the Ruska Roma first meant music. From the late 18th century aristocrats kept Roma choirs, and by the 1800s the Moscow choirs had become part of the national culture. They played seven-string guitars and sang in a style Russians still call tsyganskiy romans. Pushkin and Tolstoy both spent long nights listening to them, and more than one nobleman married a singer from a choir. Teatr Romen in Moscow, founded in 1931, carries that line forward as one of the very few permanent Roma theaters in the world. Away from the stage, most families lived by horse trading and seasonal travel, spending winters in rented village houses and going back on the road in spring. The 20th century broke that rhythm twice. Nazi occupation brought the mass murder of Roma across western Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, and a 1956 Soviet decree banned nomadic life, forcing the last traveling families into fixed homes and state jobs. Most Ruska Roma now live settled lives, many of them in cities. What holds the community together today is less the road than the extended family and a strong shared sense of how a Rom should behave.