The Lawfare Podcast: Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet

[Introduction]

Megan Buskey: Every Ukrainian family has stories that kind of link up to all of these, these different pathways for, you know, for Ukrainian identity, however contested it might, might be. And I think, you know, being able to provide an accounting of all of that in all of its complexity, which is really what my book attempts to do, I hope will allow readers to kind of understand just how, again, how complicated what happened in world, you know, during World War II, what happened in Ukraine, how complicated the Soviet Union was. And you know, with that greater understanding, could therefore be less susceptible to some of the propaganda, particularly coming out of the Kremlin, that all Ukrainians are Nazis or whatever. Obviously, that's not, not true, but there's a, there's some history there. There's a reason that that idea has gotten some traction, and that's also important to talk about.

Tyler McBrien: I'm Tyler McBrien, managing editor of Lawfare, and this is the Lawfare Podcast, June 2, 2023. It's often said that Russia is a country with an unpredictable past. Such distortions of history, though, can lead to trouble, as the world witnessed last year when Vladimir Putin justified his invasion of Ukraine as an attempt to denazify the neighboring country, one with a Jewish president who lost relatives in the Holocaust. As Megan Buskey writes in her new memoir, “Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet: A Family Story of Exile and Return,” quote, how could a country know itself unless it knew all the things it had been?

I sat down with Megan, a nonfiction writer and former Fulbright Fellow to Ukraine, who has studied and written about the country for two decades. We discussed her book, the use and abuse of history in Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the role of family histories in countering those false narratives. We also talked about the best way to get a Polish archive to give you the documents you need for listening. It's the Lawfare Podcast, June 2: Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet.

[Main Podcast]

Megan, your new book is called “Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet: A Family Story of Exile and Return,” but it actually starts with quite contemporary topics. The book opens with the Omicron variant of February 2022, and then shortly after that, the full scale invasion of Ukraine by Putin's armies. But then the book quickly goes back into your childhood and your own family history. So I'm curious if you could just set up the book for the readers. What story and stories are you trying to tell with this new book?

Megan Buskey: Yeah, thank you so much for that question. The book was really initially formulated as a story about the life of my grandmother, my Ukrainian grandmother, Anna. I grew up in the United States, but very close to my grandmother who had emigrated from the Soviet Union in the 1960s. She had settled in, in Cleveland when she emigrated to the United States with my mother and one of her other daughters. It was because of her that I was able to kind of, I was exposed to a lot of Ukrainian cultural traditions. I went to Ukrainian church growing up and I became very interested in my heritage and started going back to Ukraine when I was in college, started meeting my relatives that my family had left behind when they came to the United States.

And, but it was really only in like the past 10 years, my grandmother died about 10 years ago, that I really committed to this project and it initially was started as just sort of an attempt to document everything that I knew about her life. And it sort of ballooned into something that was bigger than that. It looked at, it started, it became an exploration of the circumstances, more broadly speaking, that she experienced, what some of the experiences of her contemporaries were throughout the 20th century in Ukraine. And I, I think also starts to get into some, some bigger questions about Ukrainian history, public memory culture in Ukraine, and how, sort of Ukraine's difficult 20th century should be remembered.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah. And I definitely want to jump into those bigger questions very soon. But first I wanted to say personally, as someone who's close with their own grandmother, I found many passages, especially in the beginning, quite relatable. You, you mentioned that, you know, from an early age, you did have a strong interest in your Ukrainian background and your grandmother's life. But initially perhaps it wasn't so, and, and something changed and you did develop a deeper interest. So I'm curious, you know, what, what changed in your adolescence to spark that interest?

And then if you could talk about, you know, how long this book has been in the making and, you know, where, where the idea came from. I think someone just glancing at the title and the release date might think perhaps that it was written, you know, solely after the invasion and, and, you know, focused on, on sort of the, the fallout and the aftermath there. But as you, as you tell it, it sounds like it's been a long time in the making.

Megan Buskey: So the, sort of the shift for me, I, you know, as I mentioned, grew up in the Ukrainian diaspora, grew up going to Ukrainian church and kind of being subjected to various Ukrainian customs and cuisine and traditions, whether I liked it or not. And I think, you know, as an American kid growing up in the suburbs, I didn't want to go to, you know, a church on Sunday morning and, you know, stand and listen to this sort of ancient liturgy that I didn't understand. I didn't want to eat copious amounts of sauerkraut and kielbasa and stuff like that, which is what my grandmother always seemed to be offering us. So I think as a kid I had a like, you know, I just wanted to like kind of hang out and play Nintendo.

But as I got older, and sort of my grandmother's experience became sort of more clear to me, I think there were things even as a child that I, I observed about her that puzzled me, that she was, she was extremely frugal, that she was incredibly, incredibly hardworking, difficult early life that sometimes she would talk about and she would, she would break down. And she was the only person in my life who I ever saw cry, whoever knew had lost, you know, she lost her, her brother tragically fairly early in World War II. And I was curious about those things as a kid. And I think as I kind of got into adolescence, sort of my fuller appreciation of who she was as a person led me to have just sort of more questions about her and what it was, what this place was that my family had left. And all of those things were sort of what propelled me into going to Ukraine and starting to unravel this, this very long story.

In terms of like how long I had been working on this. You know, deliberately and intentionally. It's been, I would say, like, you know, since my grandmother died about 10 years ago, I started to really try to put this together in some kind of form, and initially wasn't necessarily thinking about it as, as a publishable book, but as I, you know, gathered more and more material and started to see these linkages across the my family's experience and how it sort of spoke to, I think, a kind of quintessential Ukrainian experience during World War II. I started to feel like it would have more value for, for the public.

But I ended up, you know, I did copious amounts of research for this book. I went to Ukraine, I don't know, innumerable times to do interviews with people. And I spent a lot of time doing research in archives to get materials pertaining to my family. I did a lot of reading of scholarship on 20th century Ukrainian history. You know, people like Timothy Snyder, John-Paul Himka, Jan Gross, like Jared McBride, all of these people were, were people that were so important to really shaping my understanding of that time period. And so it took a long time to put it all together. And, and it was definitely, I actually finished the first draft, like, right before the full-scale invasion started. I was like, oh my gosh, do I have to redo this book? But I think I was able to, to sort of put a frame on it that would help people understand, you know, that there is relevance between these, these past, the past, you know, the recent history and kind of what's unfolding now in the region.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah. And before we get too far away from this sort of methods discussion, I wanted to make sure to, to, to touch on the piece of advice that you got when you were in the Polish archive to sort of, I guess entice or to better elicit a response. Could you, could you talk a little bit about that?

Megan Buskey: Yeah. I mean, I was working with you know, I had to submit an art, you know, my family was from Ukraine, what is now Ukraine, but documents about Ukraine are sort of scattered all over Eastern and Central Europe. And so, I was doing a request to a Polish archive and I was working with a, an archivist or a librarian at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C., who was super helpful to me throughout all my research.

And he was, you know, informed me that as you like structure this, you know, the records request that you kind of want to pull on the heart strings of whoever might be you know, be reading the records request. And so we put in some language about, you know, like sort of referring to, you know, the fact that my family had been like repressed under the Soviets and then also put it all in like all caps. So make it seem like it was coming from someone who wasn't very technologically savvy and therefore like somebody would maybe have a little bit more empathy for them. And it worked. So, was good advice, I guess.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah. Once I, when I read that passage that you said that it makes you seem less savvy and more pitiable. I thought about trying it out with my own colleagues to see if, to get some empathy from them. But no, I, I think one thing that really drew me to the story, especially initially was the secrecy that surrounds that surrounded your family story and this sort of unspokenness. And you write yourself that, and I'm quoting here from your book, it was precisely the story's murkiness that made me feel that it contained something worth knowing. So I'm curious, you know, what were some of the more difficult things you found? And why do you think it, it was initially so murky to you and sort of, sort of unspoken about?

Megan Buskey: Yeah, I mean, I think this is a really important and fascinating question. And I think there's a political dimension to it, which is, is really important to understand, which is that history under the Soviet Union was, was very manipulated at the political level, at the institutional level, but also kind of, as a result, that had a lot of consequences too in terms of what people shared, you know, personally within their own families. So, you know, during the Soviet Union, there were some large swaths of things that were taboo to speak about. So, the Holocaust, you know, Stalin-era purges, Ukrainian nationalism, et cetera, all of those things were various times throughout the Soviet Union.

You just couldn't speak about them without fear of some kind of repercussion. And so obviously that created a lot of blank spaces and people's understanding of the history of their, their country and their time and their, their recent history. But it also informed, you know, what people were willing to share. And I heard over and over again from people that I spoke to that their parents did not tell them what had happened during World War II because of fears of repercussions that their children might face for, for knowing that information, for knowing, for example, that, you know, a grandfather had served under the Nazi administration, or that somebody had had a brother that was an UPA or something like that.

And, you know, people were very reluctant to share that information with people outside, like, their, their closest confidants. And so, I think it’s incredibly important. That's one of the reasons that there is so much silence, I think, around certain aspects of Ukrainian history. And I think there's another reason, too, which is that, you know, World War II was horribly traumatic in Ukraine. In, you know, a lot of parts of Eastern Europe, but Ukraine, you know, strongly very, very traumatic. And I think it was very difficult for people to, to talk about some of the most horrible things that they had seen. And I think that that's a more kind of universal phenomenon. But both of those, those factors I think created a, a lot of silence within families about what had happened during World War II, and I think there's also people just, needed to survive. I think that was also in large part what influenced in my own family the silence was that my grandmother, who ended up getting deported to Siberia because her brother had been a member of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, had, you know, been working in coal mines at the order of the Soviet state, spent about 20 years doing that and faced often very difficult conditions for herself and her family.

And I think she, as a result of that was just so focused on like what needed to happen in order for her to survive, in order for her children to be secure that was for, you know, at the top of her, her list of things to think about. And then I think, to the extent to that, like, you know, when I remember, you know, there was a couple of times when we started to get into some of, some more difficult material, things that had happened during World War II, I remember I was talking to her at a car wash in Cleveland, and we somehow got onto the topic of the war, and she started telling me about how she had, she would have been maybe 17, 18 at this time, how she had gone with some of her peers to retrieve the bodies of, of some of her friends who had been killed by Soviet forces because the, they kind of kept the bodies, you know, away from the community, but they were able to like retrieve the bodies so that the, they could be buried by their families.

And I remember she just started to like break down as she was talking about that. And I think there was a sense for her, she, it was very difficult to kind of manage. discussion of those things with the sort of overwhelming pain that remembering those things often brought up. So there's a lot of different factors, I think, that go into, at least in my case, my family's sort of reluctance to talk about the past. But I think there's an, you know, and, and that's true in terms of your question about like, what did I find? And, you know, I found a lot of different kinds of things that I was, you know, not really, I mean, I think there were things that I, I didn't quite, it was sort of clear that I didn't quite know. Like one of the things that I, the stories that I tell in the book is the story of finding and meeting my own grandfather, who I, I didn't know or hear anything about growing up.

I just knew that he had been left behind in the Soviet Union. My grandparents had divorced and that was the, there had been, it had been a very acrimonious relationship and that, that, that tie was cut. And I ended up when I started going back to Ukraine. Finding him and developing a relationship with him, which was also quite complicated because obviously there was a reason that my family, you know, my grandmother decided to cut off relationship, a relationship with him. I also found out about the terms of her first marriage that preceded her marriage to my grandfather, which was also, I think a very complicated and difficult one. Which involved, you know, her, you know, possibly being I don't know, forced into a sexual relationship, which with a much older man, only for him to then be arrested by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz and later dying at a different concentration camp.

And then the other thing that I look at in great depth in the book is the life of my grandmother's brother, Stefan, who was someone that she loved very, very dearly, and I think was probably the person that she, the man she loved most in her life. And he had died very young at the age of 23, just after the war ended. And I discovered that he had been in the Ukrainian auxiliary police under the Nazis and then also in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army's security service, which was not a good thing to be involved in, which was kind of going around and kind of vanquishing anyone that they believed wasn't supporting the Ukrainian nationalist cause, including civilians, women and children. So, obviously that was a very difficult discovery.

Unfortunately, not uncommon in that region by any stretch of the imagination. I go into a lot of depth trying to understand, you know, why the Ukrainian nationalist movement was so powerful in that region at that time, you know, why it really spoke to people who had traditionally been poor, oppressed, and sort of without the means to enact their futures that they wanted to see for themselves. And how, you know, the Ukrainian nationalist movement ended up being able to appeal to people like Stefan, who had so much promise and so much to give, he was sort of seen as a leader in his community, but how, like, those, those gifts were sort of twisted into, you know, service in these terrible, terrible entities.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah. I think one thing that your book does so well is to show how this silence and perhaps failure to come to terms with the past just among families sort of serves as a microcosm for those same dynamics at play on the national level and then often at the international level. So I'm curious what you think the, the repercussions of silences like these have today in terms of maybe the, the use or an abuse of history, not to load up the question too much and then what role you see family histories like yours playing in either adding to or countering these narratives.

Megan Buskey: I also, I think there's another important, like, contextual element to, to be sure to include whenever you're talking about Ukrainian history and Ukrainian public memory, particularly in World War II, and it relates to the conditions that I was setting up before, which is that, you know, this is a really kind of a recent event set of ideas and histories that people are grappling with. I mean, Ukraine's only been independent for, for 30 years. And, you know, there was sort of an explosion of revelations and public information that really just became available when Ukraine became independent.

And also in the ‘90s, in certainly in the ‘00s as well, I think there were a lot of, you know, with the fall of the Soviet Union, society had to be restructured in every single level, at every single level, and so this idea that, like, history was kind of lower on the list of priorities, I think. And it's really only been, within, I would say, the past 10 years that there's been an appreciable number of, of people that are, you know, there certainly were, were starting in the ‘90s, but it's really been in the past 10 years that there's, there's been some momentum that's been developed around kind of critically examining Ukraine's history.

So I think it's really important to, for people to know that this, this work is still maturing, it's still evolving. It's just kind of getting its bearings, I would say now, but I do think like work, you know, like this, my book is very helpful because I think it, and I really hope, I mean, one of the things that I think is important to stress is that my family's story is by no means extraordinary, that every Ukrainian family has stories that kind of link up into all of these, these different pathways for, you know, for Ukrainian identity, however contested it might, might be. And I think, you know, being able to provide an accounting of all of that in all of its complexity, which is really what my book attempts to do, I hope will allow readers to kind of understand just how, again, how complicated what happened in world, you know, during World War II, what happened in Ukraine, how complicated the Soviet Union was. And you know, with that greater understanding could therefore be less susceptible to some of the propaganda particularly coming out of the Kremlin that all Ukrainians are Nazis or whatever. Obviously, that's not, not true. But there's a, there's some history there There's a reason that that idea has gotten some traction and that's also important to talk about and discuss too

Tyler McBrien: Yeah. Your book does a great job of tearing down at least the idea of a sort of monolithic or centralized narrative of Ukrainian history, especially in the 20th century. And so, I do see it as, as a sort of corrective. And I'm, I'm really curious of your experience especially over the past year and a half of, you know, your own sort of identity and family history and country of, of your forebears being thrust into the spotlight on the international stage, seeing misconceptions really aired out or corrected. So what has that been like to, to really I guess, you know, sort of the, the traumas of the war aside, but just the, the idea of Ukraine now, you know, having so much visibility.

Megan Buskey: On one hand, I think it's, it's wonderful. I'm, I've been so heartened by the compassion that people around the world have demonstrated to Ukraine in the face of this horrible, this horrible war. I think, I was, I guess, somewhat surprised by that, but obviously, again, just very heartened by it. You know, one thing that, I'm, as a writer, I'm also, you know, really trying to, to do as much as I can is to, to really help people understand Ukraine as an independent country, as a place that has its own rich history, culture, politics, et cetera, now. And I think, you know, as much as we can define Ukraine and create a lasting understanding of what it is, the better for Ukraine in the long run. And this is a country that has so, so, so much to offer that's so rich and so intriguing. And I, I guess I hope that as this war continues that people use their curiosity about Ukraine to not just learn about it as a place of war, but also learn about it as a place that offers much more than that.

Tyler McBrien: One thing you write in your book that really stuck with me is quote, how could a country know itself unless it knew all the things that had been. So I'm curious, you know, with, with that line in mind, when, if ever, the past should stay past, were there any things maybe that you learned that you wish you hadn't known, or was this difficult process of uncovering the truth, a completely necessary one in which you, you sort of have to go all in with.

Megan Buskey: Yeah. I'm, I'm emphatically on the side of, you know, knowing as much as one can. And I think, you know, when one place where I think it's kind of hard to have conversations about this right now because of the war, but there is, you know, there is this, this legacy and the celebration of the Ukrainian nationalist movement and particularly Stepan Bandera, who is the leader of Ukrainian nationalist movement during World War II, or the most radical element of it which has become what has been popular in Ukraine for a while. But, you know, in the, in the face of this war has kind of become even more significant, I think for understandable reasons. But at the same time, you know, knowing the history of his ideas and, and knowing, you know, the track record of the nationalists, which is very complicated, but also I think very dark and that's important to talk about. I hope that that, I mean, we're not in the place where we're doing like a, you know, post, post war reconstruction, but I hope that, You know, Ukraine will be able to define itself that, you know, that people like Bandera were sort of held up as sort of the founding fathers of Ukraine by some segments of Ukraine, of the Ukrainian population.

But what's happening now is, is such a kind of more moving and sort of fair and powerful, I think, sort of founding myth. And as we look to this, this notion of who are the heroes in Ukrainian history, I mean, there's so many people that have thousands and thousands of people who have stepped up for their country over the past year, year and a half in this way that is so incredibly moving and I think will provide such a wonderful guiding light for Ukraine moving forward. And I hope that that will mean that, you know, Ukrainian society will be able to let go of some of these things. these figures and some of these historical movements that have, I think, a checkered history and at various points espouse principles that are in opposition to what Ukraine is fighting for now.

Tyler McBrien: As you mentioned at the beginning, you grew up in Cleveland. You know, one thing that I was curious about reading the book was your experience sort of at the intersection of your American and Ukrainian identities. How do they sort of play on one another? And especially now in, in sort of viewing the war from the United States, assuming you're, you're based here, your sort of intersectional identity as a Ukrainian American, how that's informed your view of the war and your family history.

Megan Buskey: Yeah, that's a good question. I am based in the U.S. I think it's sort of, at least my experience of the war has been kind of like one of dual consciousness a bit in the sense that I'm sort of living my normal life here in the U.S., but I'm also following the war very closely. You know, I'm tracking every day's developments via, you know, a lot of digital means, and there's a way in which I actually feel very emotionally present there, too.

I think even just that kind of distant emotional presence is very powerful and very difficult in the sense of, you know, seeing, seeing what's happening there on a daily basis is something I think that was important for me to do as a Ukrainian American, but also something that's like, I don't feel that distant from, and I don't know if how that will change as the work continues. But I think even just especially over the past month with these attacks on Kyiv, where I lived for some time, it's been very difficult to see that, to see that happening. That seems, that's my immediate reaction to the question.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah, no, the, the idea of a dual consciousness is, is really interesting. As we near the end here, I would love to hear about the reception you've gotten from your book since it's been released, either among the Ukrainian diaspora here and around the world, Ukrainians still in Ukraine experiencing the war, or even non-Ukrainians. Has anything surprised you from people reading the book?

Megan Buskey: Yeah, I've been very touched. I've gotten a number of, you know, letters from people. I, I was like I was quite nervous about the reception of the book because it takes kind of, as I mentioned, like a fairly critical stance towards some aspects of Ukrainian history, which is somewhat controversial. And I was expecting to get a lot of criticism for that. And I have gotten some, that was really what I was expecting, but I've also gotten a number of letters from people who are, particularly of Ukrainian descent here in North America, who have thanked me for the work and have said that they, you know, they see it as like a blueprint for their own investigation into their family stories, that they've had similar questions about what their family's pasts were. And there was a real, like, receptivity for a very complex take on this history, which I really appreciate, you know, have, have found just to be, you know, very, very moving and powerful.

Tyler McBrien: Something I always like to do before we wrap up is to just open up the space to you if there's anything that you wish I had asked or anything that you wanted to add.

Megan Buskey: One thing I really enjoyed doing of a part of the book that I really enjoyed doing was the research around my family's immigration story to the United States and sort of tracing their paths from, you know, coming in as immigrants to New York and making their way out to Cleveland. And I was very moved to start to feel the presence of, particularly my great grandparents, who I hadn't really known, they died when I was very young, to sort of see the presence, their presence in my life, to see that how they had created this architecture of security and sort of flourishing here for my grandmother, for my mother, and then also for me, even though I wasn't, I was just an idea when they were putting that framework together.

And I hadn't ever really anticipated that I would be able to kind of start to, to have an appreciation for who they were as people or their, the sense of the choices that they made that resulted in my own, my own experience of the world, I guess. And so, I just like to highlight that as an element of what was really valuable for me in this process, because I think it's, it's something that a lot of people, you know, it's a sort of universal thing of being able to sense the, the work of preceding generations.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah, that's a really beautiful idea. I think it's very easy to focus on how potentially bad choices can sort of reverberate through generational trauma, but it's really important, as you mentioned, to think about these positive choices and these positive twists of fate, I think you often talk about in the book, that built that architecture or security. So yeah, that, that's a really beautiful idea. I also wanted to, to briefly touch on the sort of myth of Ellis Island. There's some, something that I thought about a lot in the book as, as the descendant of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, is that it's a kind of a one-shot thing. It was, it was unidirectional. It was, you go to Ellis Island, you don't look back, but often this wasn't the case. Could you speak a bit about the Ellis Island myth?

Megan Buskey: Yeah. I mean, I had that idea too. Like I didn't, I was just like, oh, people come through, it's a one-way street. They never go back. But in my family, that was certainly not the case. That people saw the United States as a place that they would come to and just work for a year or two, three, maybe five years, and then they would go back to wherever they came and they would use the proceeds of that work to fund, you know, property purchases, basically, which, and my great-great grandfather had done that, and that was the plan for my great grandfather. He was just going to come to the United States and work temporarily. He left in the fall of 1929, and he basically arrived just as the stock market was crashing and the Great Depression was starting.

And so, his expectations were totally upended about what would be possible. And it was really formative. It was so like, it changed the course of my family's history that he didn't end up going back because he ended up having to stay because the, you know, the financial crisis just wore on and, you know, he needed to be able to make some money to, to send back. And he, he ended up being here. So he ended up staying, you know, 10 years, much longer than he anticipated. And he ended up being here when World War II started and was never able to go back basically. But it was because he was here and had become a citizen that he was able to get his wife, my great grandmother and his daughter, my grandmother out of the Soviet Union in the late 1960s, which was a very, very difficult to do.

And it's, my great grandparents’ story is just so fascinating to me because my great grandfather and my great grandmother were separated for more than 30 years. I think it was 32 years. They hadn't seen each other. He left in 1929 and she arrived in 1961 in the United States. And I just, it's just mind boggling to think about what that separation must have been like for them, how they maintained that, that tie over all of that time. And that he felt so responsible for her. It's really, you know, it's really a beautiful legacy, I think.

Tyler McBrien: I think if nothing else this book is certainly a story of the best laid plans. But the book is called “Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet: A Family Story of Exile and Return.” Megan Buskey, thank you so much for taking the time to talk about it with me.

Megan Buskey: Thank you for having me.

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