With Danse shoes in Siberian Snows

For a person born in 1952 in a Siberian village to parents banished for life from their native Latvia by the Soviet regime, the author ‘Sandra Kalniete’ has come a long way. After Stalin’s death, her parents and she were allowed to return to Latvia in 1957. Educated as an art historian, she has devoted the last seventeen years more to diplomacy and politics than to art. As Deputy Chair of the Latvian Popular Front and Secretary General of its Coordinating Council, she became a fore fighter for the renewal of Latvian independence in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She served as Latvian Ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva (1993-1997) to France (1997-2002) and to UNESCO (2000-2002). In 2002, when the final talks were conducted about Latvia’s joining the NATO and the European Union, she became Latvia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. In 2004 she was appointed the first Latvian Commissioner of the EU. She has received many Latvian and foreign distinctions for her service. Her book is an eloquent and moving testimony to her family’s and the Latvian nation’s fate under 51 years of occupation and an indictment of the inhuman repression by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. It has become the most translated recent Latvian book.