“The tragedy of the guilty victims”? The memory of the Roma genocide in the post-war Soviet Union 1

Abstract

This chapter asks why in present-day Ukraine – despite the development of an inclusive memory culture regarding the victims of the Nazi regime – the Roma genocide still stays on the margins of memory. To address this question, the chapter explores Soviet knowledge production about the genocide of Roma during World War II, with emphasis on Soviet Ukraine. It finds that published documents, popular literature, memoirs and fiction about the Nazi annihilation policy presented Roma primarily as an asocial group. Inherited from the Soviet memory culture, this approach prevails in post-socialist Ukraine and prevents the commemoration of Roma as victims of the racially motivated National-Socialist policy.