This article introduces a variety of Romani groups living in Soviet Ukraine and their ways of life—sedentary, semi-nomadic and nomadic—highlighting that semi-nomadism is omitted category in scholarship even though most of the Roma in Soviet Ukraine maintained a semi-nomadic way of life. Through the discussion of the notion of nomadism, the research analyses how the Romani ways of life have changed over time from before and after the Second World War. Examining the Soviet policy towards the Roma in Soviet Ukraine (1930s–1950s), particularly, the creation of the kolkhoz system and the issue of the “Khrushchev Decree”, the paper argues that the changes in Romani ways of life occurred due to suppressive policies of the Soviet state directed to the forced sedentarisation of Roma.