The ritualized memory of genocide has been a cornerstone of Roma political mobilization during at least the last three decades. A uniqueness paradigm has been developing for some time, applying a memorial discourse inspired by the Jewish Holocaust model. While paralleling each other in time, the mass murders of Jews and Roma during the Second World War differed on several points. In the General Government of the Occupied Polish Territories and the territories occupied by Nazi Germany after Operation Barbarossa, the persecution of Roma took place largely in local initiatives. Consequently, the Nazi policies varied considerably, leading to territories in which Roma were annihilated and those in which about half of the Roma population survived. Considerable differences could also appear within the same administrative unit. In Distrikt Galizien, the southeastern-most district of the General Government, Roma were persecuted violently in the countryside, while the district capital of Lemberg (Lwów, Lviv) saw a different course of events. The picture that appears from the available documents also diverges from survivor testimonies and general accounts of the persecution of Roma as being similar and parallel to that of Jews. Roma were present in Lemberg throughout the Nazi occupation and the authorities were aware of their whereabouts. Roma were not confined to the ghetto, but many, along with Poles and Ukrainians, remained within the territory of the ghetto, parts of which had constituted areas of Roma settlement in Lemberg since the mid nineteenth century. Several Roma also lived in wagons in various locations in 1942–43, as well as in quarters close to the town’s centre. Altogether, several hundred Roma lived in Lemberg, and their treatment by the local courts was different from that of Jews, bearing more similarity to the way in which Polish and Ukrainian cases were handled.

Beginning in the mid-1930s, Nazi Germany concerned itself with the systematic identification of Roma. In interwar Europe, the ‘Gypsy question’ was, in fact, on many governmental agendas - not only as a matter for the police. Police trouble with Roma was, for instance, repeatedly the subject of discussion within the International Criminal Police Commission. It was easier to identify and register Jews due to the fact that records held by religious communities were readily available to the state. Contrastingly, many Romanies in Eastern Europe were nomadic at the time and did not possess identification cards. At its 1935 Copenhagen Conference, Interpol's participating states backed the initiative proposed by representatives of the SS-dominated German police force regarding the creation of ‘an international registry of Roma’ in Vienna.

As Nazi German domination spread in Europe, so did the registration and identification of Roma take its place as a first stage of the genocidal process. In 1941, the government of Nazi-satellite Croatia ordered local authorities to register ‘Gypsies’ by age, sex and geographical location. Most ended up in the Jasenovac camp. In July 1942, the civil administration of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, which oversaw the territories of modern Ukraine and Belarus, ordered the local authorities to register Roma, in order to prepare for the mass violence to come.

World War II was the largest disaster ever experienced by the civilian population of Belarus and Ukraine. More than 2.2 of 10.5 million people (both civil and military) were murdered in Belarus, exceeding the war casualties of both France and Britain combined.  The population of Belarus did not return to its pre-war level until the mid-1970s. Thousands of Romanies were killed in 1941–44 by the Nazi perpetrators, Axis powers, and local auxiliary police on the spot and were almost never deported to extermination camps. While the ethnic East Slavic majority suffered massive losses, two minorities (Jews and Roma) suffered systematic annihilation by the Nazis. The mass killings of Roma and Jews, recognized as genocide by the international community, differs in nature from the mass murder of other sectors of the population. The notion of genocide has a strictly defined legal meaning. The key notion for a legal evaluation of the genocidal nature of mass crimes is intent. The systematic extermination of Roma and Jews by the Nazis is substantiated by a higher number of victims within the entire ethnic community. While the persecution of the Roma in Nazi-dominated Western Europe has been subject to great scholarly attention, the Nazi genocide of Soviet Roma is still an under-studied field of research. This study focuses on the identification and registration of Romanies taken in the Nazi-occupied Ukraine and Belarus and the role of census takers. The influence of pre-war Soviet governance that predicated the situation within the Romani community during the war must also be considered when looking for an explanation of the genocide. As Bernhard Chiari pointed out, in order to understand the Nazi occupational policy, we have to look more carefully at the pre-war ethnic structure and population changes in Belarusian and Ukrainian territories.

By 2014, 113 sites of mass extermination of Romanies were identified on the territory of the Ukraine and 27 locations in Belarus. However, due to the lack of reliable statistics, it is not possible to give an exact number of the victims of the genocide. The general number of the Romani victims of the Nazi genocide across the whole of Europe vary greatly from 96,000 to 500,000. Of them, according to the previous research, about 30,000 were murdered on the territory of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus: around 20,000 of them perished within current Ukrainian borders; about 3,000 in Belarus; and approximately 6,500 in northwestern Russia and the Russian Caucasus. As Mikhail Tyaglyy noted, these estimates are approximate, for they are based solely upon available archival records and often do not include nomadic Roma. In order to clarify this question, this study will take on the issue of how many Roma were on the territory of Belarus and Ukraine prior to the Nazi occupation and how many of them survived the genocide.

Overarching research questions of this study are as follows:

• Was there continuity between the governmental registration of Romanies in interwar and wartime Belarus and Ukraine?

• How many Roma were on the territory of Soviet Belarus and Ukraine by 1941?

• How many Roma were murdered in the Nazi genocide in the Ukraine and Belarus?

• What governmental factors created during the Soviet period were then crucial for the death or survival of Roma under Nazi occupation?

• Why did the Nazi registration not proceed smoothly and allow for part of the Roma to survive the genocide?

Thousands of Soviet Roma were killed in 1941–1944 by Nazi Einsatzgruppen andlocal collaborators. They were almost never deported to extermination camps,but instead their bodies were left at the scenes where these crimes were committed.In the protocols of the Soviet Extraordinary Commission for Investigation ofWar Crimes, the Roma were often counted as murdered civil citizens, withoutspecifying their ethnicity. Despite the existence of a small number of accountsidentifying the victims of these murders as Romani, the Roma part of the Holocausthistory is still little known in post-Soviet space.In 1976 an official memorial at Babi Yar was erected in Kyiv on the locationof the largest massacre during WWII of Eastern European Jews and Roma. However,the Soviet leadership discouraged placing any emphasis on ethnic aspectsof this tragedy. The Nazi policy of extermination of Roma was neglected; the warwas depicted as a tragedy for all Soviet peoples.The discussion of the Romani identity cannot be isolated from the memoryof the genocide during WWII, which makes the struggle over the past a reflexivelandmark that organizes the politics of commemoration.

Thousands of Roma were killed in Ukraine between 1941 and 1944 by Nazi einsatzgruppen and local collaborators. The Romani victims were practically never deported to extermination camps but instead their bodies were left where they had been murdered. Babi Yar (Babyn Yar in Ukrainian) in Kyiv is considered a single largest Holocaust massacre in Europe. The place is a chine of seven deep ravines in the north-western part of the city. There on September 29-30, 1941, more than 33,000 Jews were exterminated by Nazis in a single mass killing. In 1941-43 hundreds of Ukrainian Roma were also murdered there. The total number of victims (Jews, Roma, underground fighters, mentally ill people, Ukrainian nationalists) killed in Babi Yar is estimated to 100,000 people. However in the postwar report published by the Extraordinary Commission for Investigation of War Crimes (ChGK), the Roma were not specified, they were rather counted as ”murdered civil citizens”. The Soviet leadership discouraged placing any emphasis on the ethnic aspects of this genocide. In April 1945 the leading Soviet newspaper Pravda informed their readers that according to the party decision a memorial and a museum will be built in Babi Yar. Nothing was done. The Nazi policy of extermination of Roma was neglected; the war was depicted as a tragedy for all Soviet peoples.  Until 1966 the site of mass killing in Babi Yar was unmarked and the first monument was built only in 1976 after a number of protest actions.Despite the silence on the Jewish and Roma genocides, the 1976 Soviet memorial legalized practices of memory. Every year September 29 the monument was visited not only by Jews but also Roma. It was then that the Romani tradition was born to bring to the monument the photos of relatives murdered by the Nazis. This practice continues to this day. By this ceremony the Roma are trying to overcome the problem of de-personalization of the genocide victims.

The article analyses various instances of the memory politics of the Nazi genocide of Roma in Ukraine during wartime, Soviet and Post-Soviet periods of times through the prism of the theory of “path dependency” and the concept of “sites of memory“. One of the aims of this study is to interpret recent trends in contemporary memory politics in Ukraine, with focus on the Roma genocide memorials, and the documentation of the victims. The author shows how Soviet ‘path dependency’ designed the limits of commemoration of the Nazi genocide of the Roma in Ukraine.

During World War II the leading Soviet newspapers informed the public about the mass killings of Roma by the Nazis on the occupied territories and stressed that the systematic extermination of this group was motivated by racial goals. However, after 1945, the systematic extermination of the Roma population by the Nazis became a taboo and was ignored by Soviet historiography and memory politics. The absence of an educated strata within the Roma group and the aggressive forgetting politics made impossible the recording of testimonies of the Soviet Roma tragedy immediately after the war. Today it is simply impossible because of a lack of witnesses and archival records.

The author draws interesting parallels with memory politics in Ukraine, and its conciliation with Belarus and Russia. In recent years, about twenty monuments commemorating victims of the genocide of the Roma have been erected in Ukraine. According to decision of the Ukrainian Rada dated 8 October 2004, the International Day of the Holocaust of the Roma is held annually on 2 August. Following the countries of the European Union, Ukraine abandoned the official use of the word ‘Gypsies’ in favour of the more politically correct name ‘Roma’. At the same time, in Belarus there only three sites of memory devoted to the Roma genocide and in Russia – no one. In Ukraine, over the last few years, a number of conferences on the genocide of the Roma were held, collections of scientific papers were published, and research centres were formed. At the same time, in Belarus and in Russia, not a single scholar specializes in this subject.

The author explains such contradiction by the radical change of memory politics of World War II in the contemporary Ukraine, which influenced by both the internal and external factors. The most important internal factor is the humanization of memory politics that is the diversion of memory politics from heroes to the sufferings of ordinary people. The revising of the Soviet myth of World War II opened the previously closed topics. The author shows how the realignment of Soviet history around new narrative axes is taking place in the memory politics of today's Ukraine. The main external factor is a process of the integration of the Ukrainian state into the EU. It is worth noting that in contrast to the Soviet era, memory politics in the present-day Ukraine are being built on the basis of a European concept of reconciliation.

However, the memorialization of the victims of the Nazi genocide of the Roma has a number of objective obstacles related to the Soviet period. The problems related to commemoration of the genocide of the Roma, as this article has demonstrated, are limited by ‘path dependence’ and not by deliberately discriminatory politics towards the Ukrainian Roma. The politics of forgetting and poor integration into Soviet society did not give the Roma an opportunity for public recognition of their tragedy in the Soviet Union. One of the main problems of contemporary memory politics is the de-personalisation of the victims of the Roma genocide. The Roma traditionally avoid contact with the authorities, and the official data and the real number of the Roma can differ greatly. It is important to stress a number of factors which differentiate memory work on the Jewish and Roma tragedies. If today the Holocaust is remembered not only through monuments but also through deserted synagogues, the former Jewish ghettos and cemeteries, the Roma do not have any of these. With the genocide, almost all their physical space of memory was destroyed. For a long time the Roma minority did not share in the building of the Ukrainian nation. The commemoration of the Roma Holocaust has the possibility of changing this situation, boosting the inclusion of Roma in contemporary Ukrainian society.

The article examines contemporary memory politics in Belarus as exhibited by new monuments to Holocaust victims, the genocide of the Roma people, and the mass killings of representatives of the Polish minority during World War II. It analyses various instances of the exploitation of the mythology of World War II for daily political purposes. Dr Kotljarchuk draws parallels with memory politics in Ukraine, and its conciliation with Poland and Russia with which Belarus shares similar problems, namely the very limited commemoration of the genocide of the Roma and the swift rate of memorialisation of the Holocaust.