Chrystia Freeland

Based on Wikipedia: Chrystia Freeland

The Woman Who Made the KGB Write a Case Study

In 1989, a twenty-year-old Canadian exchange student was banned from re-entering the Soviet Union. This might seem like a minor footnote in Cold War history, except for what happened next: the KGB produced a high-level case study about her, analyzing how much damage a single determined individual could inflict on the Soviet state.

That student was Chrystia Freeland.

The KGB's internal report, later obtained by journalists, described her as "a remarkable individual"—erudite, sociable, persistent, and inventive in achieving her goals. They assigned her a code name: Frida. They tapped her phone calls. They followed her movements. They watched as she smuggled money, video equipment, audio recorders, and personal computers to Ukrainian activists. They observed her coordinating with Western journalists and organizing rallies to attract international attention.

She was not yet old enough to legally drink in most Canadian provinces.

From Peace River to the Barricades

Freeland was born in Peace River, Alberta, in 1968—a small town of about six thousand people in the province's northwest. Her father was a farmer and lawyer, her mother a Ukrainian immigrant who would later run for Parliament herself under the New Democratic Party banner. The family was politically active and intellectually ambitious.

But there was also a darker thread in this family history. Freeland's maternal grandfather, Michael Chomiak, had been a Nazi collaborator during World War Two—a fact that would later surface in her political career and require public reckoning.

The young Chrystia showed early signs of the tenacity that would later catch the KGB's attention. In grade five, she organized a strike at her school to protest exclusive enrichment classes. She attended a United World College in Italy on a merit scholarship, part of an international education movement founded to promote peace and cross-cultural understanding in the aftermath of the World Wars.

She went to Harvard to study Russian history and literature. Then, in 1988, she did something unusual for an undergraduate: she arranged to spend a year as an exchange student at Taras Shevchenko State University in Kyiv, then part of Soviet Ukraine.

Documenting the Graves

While most exchange students might focus on perfecting their language skills and experiencing another culture, Freeland had other plans. She teamed up with Bill Keller of The New York Times to investigate Bykivnia—an unmarked mass grave site on the outskirts of Kyiv.

The official Soviet story was that these were victims of Nazi atrocities during the German occupation. The locals told a different story.

Freeland translated their testimonies. They spoke of covered trucks rumbling through before the Nazis ever arrived. They described puddles of blood in the roads. The graves, it turned out, were the work of the NKVD—the Soviet secret police, predecessor to the KGB—who had disposed of tens of thousands of political dissidents during Stalin's Great Terror.

This was dangerous work. The Soviet Union in 1988 and 1989 was beginning to crack under Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of glasnost and perestroika, but it remained a police state with a long memory and little patience for foreign students documenting its crimes.

Soviet newspapers attacked her as a foreigner meddling in internal affairs. The KGB compiled their dossier. And in March 1989, returning from a trip to London, she was simply denied re-entry. Her activism in Ukraine was over—for now.

The Journalist Years

Freeland pivoted to journalism, but she never really left the themes that had animated her student activism. She became a Russia specialist, eventually serving as the Moscow bureau chief for the Financial Times during the tumultuous 1990s—the era of privatization, oligarchs, and the wild transformation of a superpower into something no one quite knew how to categorize.

Her first book, published in 2000, captured this era: "Sale of the Century: Russia's Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism." Based on interviews with the young reformers and emerging oligarchs she'd covered as a journalist, the book traced how idealistic free-market advocates found themselves making compromises—like the notorious loans-for-shares scheme—that allowed a handful of well-connected businessmen to seize control of Russia's economy.

These men became the oligarchs: Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Vladimir Potanin, Mikhail Fridman. Some would later fall out with Vladimir Putin and lose everything. Others adapted and thrived. Freeland had documented the origins of a system that would shape global politics for decades.

Her second book, "Plutocrats" (2012), broadened the lens. It examined the rise of the global super-rich—not just in Russia, but worldwide—and what their ascent meant for everyone else. The subtitle captured the argument: "The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else." It became a New York Times bestseller and won the Lionel Gelber Prize for non-fiction on foreign affairs.

The Leap into Politics

In July 2013, at age forty-four, Freeland left journalism entirely. She sought the Liberal Party nomination in Toronto Centre, a downtown riding vacated by Bob Rae—himself a former premier of Ontario and interim Liberal leader.

The transition from observer to participant brought new scrutiny. She was criticized for purchasing a $1.3 million home, though the price was unremarkable by Toronto standards. She won the by-election with 49 percent of the vote.

Within two years, she would be in Cabinet.

The Trade Warrior

When Justin Trudeau became Prime Minister in November 2015, he appointed Freeland as Minister of International Trade. Her first major test came quickly: finalizing the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, known as CETA, between Canada and the European Union.

CETA was Canada's largest trade deal since the North American Free Trade Agreement. It had been initiated by Stephen Harper's Conservative government, but it fell to Freeland to close the negotiations. The deal nearly collapsed in October 2016 when the Belgian region of Wallonia—with a population smaller than metropolitan Ottawa—threatened to veto the entire agreement. Freeland flew to Belgium, negotiated intensively, and helped salvage the deal at the last moment.

In January 2017, she was promoted to Minister of Foreign Affairs.

The timing was portentous. Donald Trump had just been inaugurated as American president, and his administration was demanding a renegotiation of NAFTA—the trade agreement that had governed North American commerce since 1994. For the next two years, Freeland became the public face of Canada's negotiating team, shuttling between Ottawa, Washington, and Mexico City.

The renegotiated deal, known as CUSMA in Canada (and USMCA in the United States), was signed in November 2018 and ratified in March 2020. Freeland had spent more time negotiating with the Trump administration than perhaps any other Canadian official.

The Human Rights Portfolio

As Foreign Minister, Freeland took positions that sometimes created diplomatic friction. She condemned the persecution of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, calling it ethnic cleansing. She raised concerns about the internment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang directly with the Chinese Foreign Minister. She personally greeted Rahaf Mohammed, an eighteen-year-old Saudi woman who had fled her abusive family, when Canada granted her asylum in January 2019.

The Saudi relationship became particularly tense. In August 2018, Freeland tweeted Canada's concern about the arrest of Samar Badawi, a human rights activist whose brother Raif Badawi had been imprisoned for blogging. Saudi Arabia responded by expelling Canada's ambassador and freezing trade relations. Freeland appealed to allies for support, but few were willing to risk their own relationships with the oil-rich kingdom.

Meanwhile, her history with Russia continued to reverberate. In 2014, she became one of thirteen Canadians personally banned from entering Russia under retaliatory sanctions imposed by Vladimir Putin. Freeland's response, posted on Twitter, was characteristically direct: "Love Russ lang/culture, loved my yrs in Moscow; but it's an honour to be on Putin's sanction list."

Deputy Prime Minister in Crisis

After the 2019 election, Trudeau appointed Freeland as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs. The titles were somewhat misleading—in Canada's parliamentary system, the deputy prime minister role is largely ceremonial, with no fixed constitutional duties. But Trudeau loaded the position with actual responsibilities.

Freeland was tasked with managing relations between Ottawa and the western provinces, where Liberal support had collapsed. She retained oversight of Canada-U.S. relations. She was given major domestic files including climate policy, firearms regulation, and child care.

Then came March 2020.

Freeland was named chair of the Cabinet committee on the federal response to COVID-19. As the pandemic shut down the economy, she developed an unlikely working relationship with Doug Ford, the Progressive Conservative Premier of Ontario. The Liberals had spent the previous election campaign attacking Ford's record; now Freeland and Ford appeared at joint press conferences, presenting a united front.

In August 2020, Finance Minister Bill Morneau resigned amid the WE Charity scandal—a controversy over the Trudeau government's decision to award a contract to an organization with close personal ties to the Prime Minister's family. Trudeau appointed Freeland to replace him.

She became the first woman to serve as Canada's Finance Minister.

The Budget Years

Freeland's tenure at Finance was dominated by pandemic spending. The government deployed hundreds of billions of dollars in emergency support: wage subsidies for businesses, income support for workers, loans for struggling companies. The deficit ballooned to levels not seen since World War Two.

She delivered four federal budgets—exercises in fiscal projection that became, during the pandemic, exercises in managing uncertainty. How quickly would the economy recover? How long would emergency supports be needed? What would inflation do?

The last question became increasingly pressing. By 2022, inflation had surged to levels not seen in decades, driven by pandemic disruptions, supply chain problems, and the economic shock of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Central banks responded with aggressive interest rate hikes, and governments faced pressure to rein in spending.

The Resignation

On December 16, 2024, Freeland was scheduled to present the government's fall economic statement. Instead, she resigned from Cabinet.

The departure was not quiet. In her resignation letter, Freeland made clear that she disagreed with the Prime Minister's fiscal direction. Coming at a moment when the government was already weakened by low poll numbers and internal tensions, her exit triggered a political crisis.

Within weeks, Trudeau himself announced his resignation.

Freeland ran in the subsequent Liberal leadership race, but the party chose Mark Carney—a former central banker who had headed both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England. Freeland finished a distant second.

Carney brought her back into Cabinet as Minister of Transport and Internal Trade. But that tenure lasted only until September 2025, when she resigned again—this time to take up a new role as special representative for the reconstruction of Ukraine.

Full Circle

There is a certain symmetry in Freeland's trajectory. The twenty-year-old who smuggled recording equipment to Ukrainian dissidents, who documented the mass graves of Stalin's victims, who was banned by the KGB—that woman would eventually become her country's point person on rebuilding Ukraine after Putin's invasion.

In July 2026, she will take on another role: warden of Rhodes House and chief executive of the Rhodes Trust. The Rhodes Scholarship, which she herself held as a student at Oxford, has been sending promising young people to study in England since 1902. Freeland will lead the organization that administers it.

It is a curious endpoint for someone whose career was defined by urgency and crisis—trade wars, pandemics, resignations, and the long shadow of Soviet crimes. But perhaps it makes a certain sense. The Rhodes Scholarship was founded, at least in part, to shape future leaders. Freeland, having been one, will now help select the next generation.

The Complications

No account of Freeland's life would be complete without acknowledging its complications. Her maternal grandfather's collaboration with the Nazis during World War Two became public knowledge during her political career. She has not denied it, though her handling of the revelation—and questions about how much she knew and when—has drawn criticism.

Her economic policies as Finance Minister remain contested. Supporters credit her with steering Canada through the pandemic without the mass unemployment that some had feared. Critics blame her for runaway spending and the inflation that followed. The truth likely lies somewhere in the combination of factors that no single minister could have controlled.

Her departure from the Trudeau Cabinet, and the manner of it, raised questions about whether she was positioning herself for the leadership race that followed—or genuinely acting on principle. Perhaps both. In politics, these motivations are rarely separable.

What seems clear is that she has been, throughout her life, willing to take positions and accept consequences. The grade-schooler who organized a strike, the student who defied the KGB, the minister who tweeted about Saudi human rights abuses—there is a through line of willingness to act, even when the response is unpredictable.

The KGB was right about one thing: she is remarkably persistent.