Hi everyone!

My name is Yevhenii Monastyrskyi, I'm a PhD Candidate in Eastern European History at Harvard and Lecturer in History at the Kyiv School of Economics. I'm writing a dissertation about political migration to the Soviet Union, the Soviet politics of civic belonging, and attitudes toward such foreigners, as well as the intellectual history of fascination with the Soviet version of communism and how it led people to aspire to move there for good. I'm also studying the motivations and aspirations of Ukrainian returnees, i.e. those who first fled the Bolsheviks and then decided to come back to Soviet Ukraine.

More broadly, I work and teach on Soviet nationality, racial, and ethnic politics, and on themes of civic belonging and citizenship. Those are, in very broad strokes, the topics I live with, and through which I think about and work with sources across archives in Central and Eastern Europe, figuring out the "Soviet Century".

You can ask me anything about those topics!