Ballet led Heidi Kronvall (née Hoogerbeets) to Russia—and eventually to a career monitoring human rights, economic warfare, and disinformation

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Heidi Kronvall (MARS-REERS ’08) has been immersed in issues surrounding U.S. sanctions against Russia. Working in the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control gives her a first-hand view of the complexities of sanctions and their impact—on the sanction targets, as well as on others in Russia. It’s a long distance from what first sparked Kronvall’s interest in the region.

That happened in her early teens, in Tucson, when her father brought home a VHS tape of a documentary about the students at Leningrad’s world famous Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet. Kronvall, mesmerized, enrolled in ballet lessons. A year later she moved to Washington, DC, to study with Russian instructors at the newly founded Kirov Ballet Academy. In 1995, she was accepted to Vaganova, the St. Petersburg ballet school she’d first seen in that VHS tape a few years earlier.

In St. Petersburg, Kronvall stayed with a Russian family, which exposed her to how grim life could be beyond the privileged dance studios at Vaganova. That experience inspired a broader interest in Russia. “I realized that, as much as I love to dance, there was so much more out there for me,” she said in a recent interview. She studied Russian history and language at St. Petersburg State University, returned to the United States for undergraduate Russian studies, and worked at NGOs in New York City. A stint at the Committee to Protect Journalists exposed her to the great risks facing independent reporters in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, like Novaya Gazeta’s Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered in 2006.

Kronvall enrolled at the Harriman the following year and received a Harriman research grant to travel to Russia in the summer. There, she met human rights activist Natalia Estemirova, a friend of Politkovskaya’s, whose grave they visited together. “She said, ‘I’m going to be next,’” to which Kronvall replied: “Oh, no way.” But two years later Estemirova was dead—one of six Novaya Gazeta journalists and contributors killed for their work.

In 2010 Kronvall took the first of several jobs she’s held in the federal government focusing on Russia and Eastern Europe, first at the State Department, then on the White House Threat Intelligence Team, monitoring state-sponsored cyber threats. When she joined Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control in 2022, Russia had launched its full-scale war in Ukraine. Kronvall and her colleagues worked “around the clock,” strategizing ways to “target revenue streams contributing to the regime’s war effort without disrupting civil society,” she recalled.

“I’ve been able to weave in and out of different aspects of international relations, from human rights, to reporting, to economic warfare, to disinformation,” she said.

Currently, Kronvall’s job is to review requests to undo unintended consequences of U.S. sanctions—for instance, if a U.S. citizen tries to send money to an unsanctioned family member in Russia and the transaction is blocked due to sanctions against a Russian bank.

“I’m really excited to be in that office,” said Kronvall. “Sanctions are necessary. But they also affect ordinary people in so many ways.” ◆

Featured photo: Heidi Kronvall with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Photo courtesy of Heidi Kronvall