Nowhere to belong: After the USSR collapsed, I became stateless in Estonia

Per Global Voices, Estonian writer Siimo Kaasik has lived as a stateless person for thirty-five years. When the Soviet Union collapsed in nineteen ninety-one, Estonia restored its independence and automatically granted citizenship to those who had been citizens before the nineteen-forty Soviet occupation. Kaasik was born and raised in Tallinn, spoke the language, attended school there, and spent his first twenty-six years in the country—yet when independence returned, he fell through the cracks. He did not automatically receive citizenship and failed to naturalize. For three and a half decades, he reported to immigration authorities, unable to be deported and unable to settle permanently. He later spent over thirty years in the United States in the same suspended limbo. The essay comes as Global Voices spotlights statelessness: an estimated two hundred thousand people in the United States alone may be stateless or at risk of it. For Kaasik, statelessness has meant that every ordinary task—banking, travel, employment—becomes an unexplained bureaucratic complication when you officially belong nowhere.

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