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

By Siimo Kaasik
This essay was written by Siimo Kaasik, courtesy The Global Movement Against Statelessness (GMAS), a content partner of Global Voices. This post is part of Global Voices’ July 2026 Spotlight series, “Statelessness.” This series offers insight into the issue of statelessness and how it hinders people’s freedom of movement, educational opportunities, political access, and more. You can support this coverage by donating here.
I was 26 years old when my country disappeared.
The disappearance was literal. The Soviet Union ceased to exist. Most people witnessed its collapse through television broadcasts, newspaper headlines, and maps that suddenly required revision. I encountered it through paperwork. Paperwork, unfortunately, tends to outlive governments.
When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, 15 new countries emerged from its remains. Millions of people became citizens of those newly independent states. Others slipped between the cracks.
In Estonia and Latvia, the end of the Soviet Union did not simply create new countries. It also restored the citizenship that had existed before the Soviet occupation of 1940. Those who had been citizens before the occupation, and their descendants, regained citizenship automatically. Many others had to qualify through naturalization instead. Some did. Many did not. Decades later, thousands of people still live with the consequences of those decisions. I was one of them.
I was born in Tallinn, Estonia. I spoke the language. I attended school there. I worked there. I spent 26 years of my life there. Yet when Estonia restored its independence, I did not automatically become a citizen.
What followed was not a dramatic event but something far stranger. Nothing happened. My status remained unresolved for years, then decades.
People often imagine statelessness as something visible. They picture refugees crossing borders or families fleeing war. They imagine tents, checkpoints, and television cameras. The reality is quieter. It unfolds at government counters. An application asks for your nationality, yet none of the available boxes applies. A clerk studies your documents a little longer than everyone else’s. Then the file reaches a computer system built on the assumption that every human being belongs somewhere, only to encounter someone who officially belongs nowhere.
The same question followed me across continents. “What citizenship do you hold?” Sometimes it came from immigration officers. Other times from employers. Bank clerks asked it while staring at screens that seemed unwilling to accept my existence. The answer never became easier.
I learned to recognize what came next. Curiosity. Confusion. A pause. Occasionally suspicion.
Most people think about nationality the way they think about their birth date. Everyone has one. The possibility that someone might not fit that assumption creates a brief silence.
During those silences, I often felt less invisible than exposed. A stateless person becomes an unexpected complication inside systems built for efficiency. A supervisor is summoned. Documents change hands. Someone disappears into a back office. Minutes pass while everyone else continues moving forward, and your ordinary errand becomes an administrative mystery. Nobody intends cruelty. Most people simply have no idea what to do with someone who falls outside the categories their systems were built to recognize. Each delay seems insignificant. Together they become years.
Statelessness rarely arrives as a single locked door. It arrives as thousands of partially open ones. The modern world prides itself on documentation. Governments verify identities within seconds. Banks trace financial transactions across continents. Smartphones recognize faces instantly. Yet for 35 years, governments struggled with a simpler question. Who is responsible for me?
Citizenship rarely occupies anyone’s thoughts. It sits quietly in the background until a passport expires or an election arrives. It resembles plumbing. Nobody notices it until something stops working. Stateless people never have that luxury. Every institution asks the same question in a different form. Without citizenship, ordinary tasks become unexpectedly complicated. Employment opportunities narrow. International travel becomes difficult or impossible. Housing, banking, education, healthcare, and immigration procedures become exercises in explanation. You find yourself telling the same story to people who have never met anyone like you before. Most are polite. Many are confused. A few conclude you must have done something wrong. After all, how could a person not belong to a country? It sounds impossible.
Yet millions of people around the world live in precisely that condition. In the United States alone, an estimated 200,000 people may be stateless or at risk of statelessness. Their circumstances differ. Some belong to ethnic minorities denied recognition by their governments. Others fled countries that later collapsed or transformed. Still others became trapped inside legal contradictions nobody ever resolved. What unites them is uncertainty. A stateless person can spend years reporting to immigration authorities while remaining impossible to deport because no country agrees to accept them. They may follow every rule and still remain suspended between systems.
I know this because I lived it.
For more than three decades, I reported to immigration authorities in the United States. My case occupied a peculiar category. The government could not remove me, yet it could not provide a permanent solution either. Official language made the situation sound almost harmless. Terms such as “out of status” and “order of supervision” possess the comforting neutrality of office furniture. They reveal almost nothing. They cannot describe what it means to spend years unable to answer a question most people never have to consider.
Where are you from? The obvious answer is Estonia. It is where I was born, where I grew up, where my memories live. The legal answer proved far more complicated.
For 35 years, I occupied a space between countries. Long enough to watch governments come and go. Long enough to watch technology transform daily life. Long enough to watch entire generations reach adulthood. The strangest part of statelessness is not the inconvenience. It is the message buried beneath it.
Citizenship is often described as a legal status. After 35 years without one, I have come to understand it differently. It is an acknowledgment of responsibility. A passport is not merely permission to travel. It is evidence that somewhere, a government recognizes an obligation toward you. Most people receive that recognition automatically at birth and never think about it again. Stateless people spend years discovering how much of modern life depends upon it.
Stateless people are not political abstractions. They are not legal anomalies. They are not clerical problems waiting for administrative correction. They are people. They work, study, pay taxes, raise children, care for aging parents, build friendships, and contribute to the communities around them. They live ordinary lives under extraordinary uncertainty.
Thirty-five years is long enough for a child to be born, grow up, attend university, build a career, and raise children of their own. It is long enough for governments to rise and fall, for technologies to become obsolete, and for entire chapters of history to begin and end.
I did not spend 35 years searching for a country. I spent 35 years waiting for countries to decide whether I belonged to one. No person should have to wait that long.
Siimo Kaasik is a writer born in Tallinn, Estonia. After spending more than 35 years stateless, he recently became a citizen of Nauru. His writing explores identity, belonging, and the often absurd intersections of bureaucracy and ordinary life.