Was the Romanian Authorities’ Failure to Lucratively Employ Deported Roma in Transnistria Part of a Genocidal Plan?
Vladimir Solonari argues that the Romanian government’s failure to provide profitable employment for deported Roma in Transnistria resulted neither from genocidal intent nor from mere administrative incompetence. Rather, it stemmed from the government’s profound indifference to the deportees’ fate and from the regional administration’s refusal to allocate even a small portion of its limited material or managerial resources to the Roma’s upkeep and survival.
Most Roma reached their final destinations in eastern Transnistria at the end of the 1942 harvest season, when their labor was no longer needed and the collective farms, which had already been subjected to heavy requisitions by the belligerents, had no food reserves to spare. This led to catastrophic mortality among the deportees during the winter of 1942–1943.
During the 1943 agricultural season, Roma were employed as field laborers, but their wages were so meager, barely sufficient to keep them alive, that by late autumn they found themselves in conditions no better, and in some cases worse, than the year before. Only the collapse of Romanian rule in the region as the Red Army advanced provided the surviving deportees with a chance to escape and return to Romania.
Vladimir Solonari
Vladimir Solonari was born in Moldova, the former USSR. He received his Ph.D. in history from Moscow State University in 1986. From 1986 to 2001, he taught history at the universities in Moldova. Since 2003, he has taught Russian and Soviet history at the University of Central Florida, where he is currently a professor. He is the author of Purifying the Nation: Population Exchange and Ethnic Cleansing in Nazi-Allied Romania. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, and of A Satellite Empire: Romanian Rule in Southwestern Ukraine, 1941-1944. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019, and numerous articles and essays on Romanian, Moldovan, and Soviet history. His third book, Uniformed Murderers: Romanian Army and Gendarmerie as Instruments of the Genocide will be released by Cornell University Press in 2026.