Kaja Kallas — politician with roots in the USSR
Kaja Kallas was born in Tallinn on 18 June 1977, when Estonia was a republic of the Soviet Union. She was fourteen when it restored its independence in 1991. Her father, Siim Kallas, worked in the Soviet financial administration in Estonia and later became prime minister; her mother, Kristi, née Kartus, is a physician.
Her mother's family history belongs to the Soviet period in its hardest form. In March 1949, in the mass deportations from the Baltic republics, Kristi was deported to Siberia at the age of six months, together with her mother and grandmother, all three classed as enemies of the state. They travelled in a cattle wagon and lived in exile for about ten years before they were allowed to return to Estonia. Kallas has marked the anniversary of the deportation publicly in the years since.
On her father's side, her great-grandfather Eduard Alver was born in 1886 in Valga, then in the Livonia Governorate of the Russian Empire. A lawyer, he commanded the Estonian Defence League during the War of Independence of 1918–1920, which separated Estonia from the former empire, and became the first chief of the Estonian police. He died in 1939, the year before the Soviet annexation.
Kallas studied law at the University of Tartu and worked as a lawyer specialising in competition law. She was elected to the Riigikogu, the Estonian parliament, in 2011, sat in the European Parliament from 2014 to 2018, and led the Reform Party, which her father had founded, from 2018 to 2024. In January 2021 she became the first woman to serve as prime minister of Estonia, and she held the office until July 2024.
In December 2024 she became the European Union's High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and a vice-president of the European Commission. In February 2024, while she was still prime minister, the Russian interior ministry placed her name on its wanted list.
The two strands of her family are records of the same century from opposite ends: a great-grandfather born a subject of the tsar who helped found the independent Estonian state, and a mother deported from that state to Siberia after its annexation by the Soviet Union. She herself was born a Soviet citizen and grew up in the last decade of Soviet rule in Tallinn.
Tracing the roots — Tallinn (Estonia)
She was born in 1977 in Tallinn, then in the Estonian SSR of the Soviet Union, and was fourteen when Estonia restored its independence. In 1949 her mother, aged six months, was deported to Siberia with her grandmother and great-grandmother.
Born in 1977 in Tallinn, Estonian SSR. Her mother was deported to Siberia in March 1949 at six months old with her own mother and grandmother. Her great-grandfather Eduard Alver was born in Valga in 1886, in the Livonia Governorate of the Russian Empire.
Tallinn (Estonia). At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.