Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet: A Family Story of Exile and Return
Date
-
Event Sponsor
CREEES Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies
Location
Encina Commons 123
Growing up in Cleveland in the final years of the Cold War, writer Megan Buskey understood little about her Ukrainian family’s traumatic history. It was only well into adolescence that she learned that her mother had grown up in a gulag exile settlement in Siberia because her grandparents had been deported there from their Ukrainian village after the Second World War. As an adult, Megan spent years researching her family’s experience for her book, Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet: A Family Story of Exile and Return (ibidem, 2023). Praised as “a painfully honest and carefully researched journey of a Ukrainian American into her family’s complicated and difficult past” by historian Jan Gross, it provides a personal tour through essential and sometimes disturbing aspects of recent Ukrainian history, including sexual violence, Nazi collaboration, and Ukrainian nationalism. In this talk, Megan Buskey will discuss the political significance of Ukrainian family histories in light of the restrictions placed on memory during the Soviet period, share what she learned about her family’s experience, and connect their story to current politics, specifically Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Megan Buskey is an independent writer and scholar. She has written about Ukrainian history, politics, and culture for a variety of publications, including The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Scholar, and n+1. She has been traveling to and studying the former Soviet Union for two decades, including a year spent living in Ukraine as a Fulbright Fellow. She has also received fellowships from the German-American Fulbright Commission, the Logan Nonfiction Program at the Carey Institute of Global Good, and the London Library. She was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and currently lives in New York City.
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