Secret identity
Nikolai Bugai, foreign relations counsellor at the ministry of regional development, says that Roma are able to live in harmony with the rest of the community.
Can reviving traditions improve the image of the Roma?
He recently visited a village in the Krasnodar region in the south of Russia, where out of a population of 13,000, at least 5,000 were Roma.
"There is a farm there of 220 hectares, which is headed by a Roma and the workers are also Roma," says Mr Bugai.
Nikolai Bessonov believes that Roma people themselves are partly responsible for their negative image, in that they prefer to keep their identities secret.
"When I try to write about Roma who work, I ask a Roma doctor if I can talk about him, but he refuses, saying that he doesn't want his patients to find out who he really is because that might create work-related problems. I approach a teacher and she tells me the same thing," he says.
It has been said that those Roma who have assimilated into society have therefore partly lost their Roma identity.
But Mr Bessonov disagrees.
"When Russians stopped wearing beards and woven bast shoes, stopped farming and went to work at a factory or became, for instance, engineers, no one said that they 'assimilated'. So why when a Roma goes to work in a mine or study at a university, do people say that he has assimilated?" asks the historian.
"Our women want to work, but they can't find anything because they are illiterate"
Elza Mihai
He says it is important that Roma continue to respect their traditions, no matter what they do in life.
Many Roma are afraid to assimilate and so they don't send their children to school. And if they do, it's only for a year or two, so that children learn to read and write.
But the lack of a complete education makes it difficult for these children to find a job later on in life.
"Our women want to work, but they can't find anything because they are illiterate," says Elza Mihai, a teacher from a Roma village in the Leningrad region.