Yevhenii Monastyrskyi

I am a historian of the Soviet Union and modern Eastern Europe, and a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Harvard University. I also teach history at the Kyiv School of Economics.

My work turns a familiar question around. We know a great deal about people who fled the Soviet Union; I study the ones who went the other way — the communists, refugees, and fugitives who crossed into the USSR between 1918 and 1991 and asked to be let in.

Before Harvard, I studied at Yale, the Ukrainian Catholic University, and the Luhansk Taras Shevchenko National University, and spent half a decade working in Ukrainian civil society on displacement, human security, and the documentation of children’s wartime experiences.

My dissertation, provisionally titled They Chose the USSR: Migration Regimes, Political Asylum and Belonging in the Soviet Union, 1918–1991, reconstructs how the Soviet state received foreign asylum seekers — the politemigranty — and what that reception did to the people who passed through it.

The category itself was of consequence. A political migrant was not a labor migrant and not a defector (sometimes called perebezhchik, Überläufer), and the distinction governed who received housing and support through state and Comintern-adjacent organizations such as MOPR or the Red Cross, who was issued documents, who was watched, and, by the late 1930s, who was arrested. I argue that Soviet asylum was a volatile constellation of practices — improvised, revised case by case, frequently at odds with itself. At its center I find a mechanism I call two-key asylum: admission required the assent of both party and state organs, and neither could turn the lock alone.

Two problems organize the project. The first is durable ambivalence — the long-lived Soviet uncertainty about whether the foreign comrade was an asset or a liability. Nothing ever settled it, and that is what made it usable: the same man could be a valued specialist in 1931 and a suspect in 1937 without a single rule having changed in between. The second is juridical homelessness, and the work that passportization and citizenship performed as instruments of belonging determination — deciding not merely who could stay, but who counted.

The questions I put to the sources follow from these. Who held the authority to declare an arrival a political migrant rather than something else? What did the category actually deliver — a room, a ration, a party card, work — and what did it cost to hold? What repertoires did migrants develop for petitioning, for editing a biography, for marrying into legality? And when the terms shifted under them after 1935, what remained available to a person who had already crossed?

Methodologically I read the archive centrifugally, setting Soviet records against the files of the states these people left. I have worked in archives in Germany, Poland, Austria, Ukraine, Latvia, and Moldova; Central Asian collections are next. Those files preserve traces of people whose Soviet paper trail was destroyed or remains closed, and they show how news of arrests travelled back across borders and changed what emigration meant to those still weighing it. They also make plain something the center obscures. Consular correspondence from Ashgabad or Vladivostok records the regime’s reasoning more legibly than anything filed in Moscow.

Beyond the dissertation, I am increasingly drawn to the question this material opens onto — the Soviet Union in the world, and what it might mean to write the history of Soviet internationalism from the position of the people who moved.