David Miliband — miliband with roots in the Russian Empire
David Miliband was born in London in 1965, the elder son of the political theorist Ralph Miliband and Marion Kozak; his younger brother is Ed Miliband. His connection to the Russian Empire runs through his father's father.
Their paternal grandfather, Samuel Miliband (1895–1966), a leather worker, grew up in the Jewish quarter of Warsaw, then in Congress Poland, part of the Russian Empire. He was a member of the Jewish Labour Bund by most accounts (the Polish Socialist Party in his son's recollection). A catalogue note at the Hull History Centre describes him as a former member of the Red Army; the writer Tariq Ali gives that service to one of his brothers instead. In 1922 he and his future wife, Renia, left Warsaw separately for Brussels, where they married the following year and where their son Adolphe, later Ralph, was born in 1924. In May 1940 Samuel and Ralph reached Britain on the last boat from Ostend, while Renia and their daughter remained in Belgium and survived the war in hiding.
Ralph Miliband became a political theorist at the London School of Economics and later at Leeds. In 1961 he married Marion Kozak, born in 1934 in Częstochowa, a city that had belonged to the Russian Empire until 1915; her parents' birthplaces are not recorded.
David Miliband studied at Oxford and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was elected Member of Parliament for South Shields in 2001 and held the seat until 2013. Under Tony Blair he served as Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and when Gordon Brown became Prime Minister in 2007 he was appointed Foreign Secretary, a post he held until 2010; for part of that time his brother sat alongside him in the Cabinet.
In 2010 he stood for the leadership of the Labour Party and was narrowly defeated by his brother. He left Parliament in 2013 and moved to New York as President and Chief Executive Officer of the International Rescue Committee, the humanitarian organisation which under his leadership works in more than forty countries affected by conflict and disaster and runs refugee resettlement programmes in Europe and the Americas. He is the author of Rescue: Refugees and the Political Crisis of Our Time and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018. In 2026, when his brother became Foreign Secretary, he remained at the head of the IRC.
Tracing the roots — Warsaw (Congress Poland, Russian Empire) — paternal grandfather Samuel Miliband
His paternal grandfather, Samuel Miliband (1895–1966), grew up in the Jewish quarter of Warsaw, then in the Russian Empire, and left for Brussels in 1922; his father, Ralph, born there in 1924, reached Britain with Samuel in 1940.
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Warsaw (Congress Poland, Russian Empire) — paternal grandfather Samuel Miliband. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"My family were refugees. That is not abstract for me."