Join the CUNY Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies Workshop for a book talk with author Megan Buskey on Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet: A Family Story of Exile and Return.

When Megan Buskey’s grandmother Anna dies in Cleveland in 2013, Megan is compelled in her grief to uncover and document her grandmother’s life in Ukraine. A Ukrainian American, Buskey returns to her family’s homeland and enlists her relatives there to help her in her quest—and discovers much more than she expected. The result is an extraordinary journey that traces one woman’s story across Ukraine’s difficult twentieth century, from a Galician village emerging from serfdom, to the “bloodlands” of Eastern Europe during World War II, to the Siberian hinterlands where Anna spent almost two decades in exile before receiving the rare opportunity to emigrate from the Soviet Union in the 1960s. In the course of her research, Megan encounters essential and sometimes disturbing aspects of recent Ukrainian history, such as Nazi collaboration, the rise and persistence of Ukrainian nationalism, and the shattering impact of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Yet her wide-ranging inquiries keep leading her back to universal questions: What does family mean? How can you forge connections between generations that span different cultures, times, and places? And, perhaps most hauntingly, how can you best remember a complicated past that is at once foreign and personal?

Megan Buskey writes about Ukrainian history, politics, and culture for a variety of publications. Her work has appeared in outlets including The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, n+1, NPR’s All Things Considered, The American Scholar, and The New York Times Book Review. She is a former editor at The Wilson Quarterly, the flagship publication of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, including editing longform journalism and wrote a column that covered trends in scholarly publications. She has been traveling to and studying the former Soviet Union for almost two decades, including a year spent living in Ukraine as a Fulbright Fellow. She has received fellowships from the German-American Fulbright Commission, the Logan Nonfiction Program at the Carey Institute of Global Good, and the London Library. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of Chicago and an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction from Goucher College.

Brigid O’Keeffe is a Professor of History at Brooklyn College. O’Keeffe is the author, most recently, of The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise (Bloomsbury, 2022) – a compact and accessible history that explains the centrality of ethnic politics to the rise and fall of the Soviet empire.  She is also the author of Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia and New Soviet Gypsies: Nationality, Performance, and Selfhood in the Early Soviet Union. O’Keeffe is as at work on her next book, The Family Litvinov: A History of the Twentieth Century.

September 29, 12:30 pm

For in-person attendance, RSVP by emailing cunyreeeskruzhok@gmail.com

For online attendance via Zoom, register here

HOSTED BY

• Merrill Sovner
• Mark A. Lewis
• European Union Studies Center