Lennart Meri

Lennart Georg Meri was born in Tallinn on March 29, 1929, into one of interwar Estonia's most cosmopolitan families. His father, Georg Meri, was a diplomat and literary scholar who later translated the complete works of Shakespeare into Estonian, and the household moved with his postings across Europe ^[1].

Because of his father's career, the boy attended schools in several countries, including Germany and France, and changed schools repeatedly during his childhood. The experience left him fluent in a remarkable range of languages; as an adult he worked comfortably in Estonian, Finnish, French, German, English and Russian ^[2]. That early immersion in European capitals shaped his lifelong conviction that Estonia belonged, culturally and politically, to the West.

The family's world collapsed in 1940 when the Soviet Union occupied Estonia. In June 1941, during the mass deportations that removed some ten thousand Estonians in a single operation, the twelve year old Lennart was arrested with his parents and younger brother and shipped by cattle car to Siberia ^[1].

In Siberia the family was separated from Georg Meri, who was imprisoned, while Lennart, his mother and his brother endured years of forced settlement. The boy took whatever work kept the family alive, including labor as a rafter of timber and as a potato peeler ^[3]. He later spoke of those years with dry wit rather than bitterness, but the deportation marked everything he wrote and did afterward.

The Meris were permitted to return to Estonia in 1946. Lennart finished school in Tallinn and entered the University of Tartu, where he studied history and languages, graduating with distinction in 1953 ^[1]. The Soviet authorities, wary of a deportee with a diplomat father, barred him from working as a professional historian or diplomat.

Shut out of the career his talents pointed toward, he turned instead to the theatre and to broadcasting. He worked as a dramaturge at the Vanemuine theatre in Tartu and later produced radio programs in Tallinn, quietly building the skills in storytelling that would define the next phase of his life ^[2].

Travel became Meri's escape route from Soviet constraint. Expeditions to Central Asia and to the far northeast of the Soviet Union produced popular travel books, beginning in the late 1950s, that mixed geography, ethnography and sly observation. Readers in occupied Estonia understood the subtext: a small nation could still look outward ^[3].

His most influential book, Hõbevalge (Silverwhite, 1976), reconstructed the ancient history of Estonia and the Baltic Sea region, weaving together classical sources, folklore and the meteorite strike that formed the Kaali craters on the island of Saaremaa. The book argued that Estonians possessed a deep and distinct past long predating any empire that ruled them, a message with obvious force under Soviet occupation ^[4].

Meri also became a documentary filmmaker of international standing. His films on the Finno-Ugric peoples, including The Water Fowl People (1970), The Winds of the Milky Way (1977) and The Sons of Torum (1989), recorded the languages and rituals of small kindred nations scattered across northern Eurasia. The Winds of the Milky Way was banned from public screening in the Soviet Union even as it won a medal at the New York Film Festival ^[2]. In 1988 he founded the non governmental Estonian Institute to build cultural ties with the outside world, an organization that functioned in practice as an embryonic foreign service ^[5].

When the Singing Revolution gathered force in the late 1980s, Meri was among the intellectuals who gave the independence movement its voice. His standing as a writer, his languages and his network of foreign contacts made him an obvious choice for diplomacy once Estonia began rebuilding its statehood ^[3].

In April 1990 the transitional government of Edgar Savisaar appointed him foreign minister. From an office with almost no staff, telephones or hard currency, he set about persuading Western governments to treat Estonia's restoration of independence as a legal continuation of the pre war republic rather than a secession from the Soviet Union ^[5]. After full independence was regained in August 1991, he served briefly as ambassador to Finland.

In the autumn of 1992 Meri stood in Estonia's first post Soviet presidential election. Arnold Rüütel, the former Soviet era chairman, led the popular vote, but no candidate won a majority, and the decision passed to the newly elected parliament. On October 5, 1992, the Riigikogu chose Meri, and the following day he was sworn in as president ^[1].

Meri treated the largely ceremonial presidency as a platform for national strategy. His central objective in the first term was the removal of former Soviet, by then Russian, troops still stationed on Estonian soil. In July 1994 he negotiated directly with President Boris Yeltsin in Moscow, and the last Russian units left Estonia on August 31, 1994, an outcome many Estonians count among the defining Lennart Meri achievements ^[4].

He used the office's limited formal powers assertively, returning laws to parliament when he judged them defective and lecturing political parties, sometimes to their irritation, about constitutional propriety. Abroad he was Estonia's most effective advocate, arguing in Western capitals that the security of the Baltic states was a test of Europe's seriousness. He pushed relentlessly for membership of the European Union and NATO, goals Estonia achieved in 2004, three years after he left office ^[2].

Parliament re elected him in 1996 through an electoral college after the Riigikogu rounds produced no winner. His second term ended in October 2001, when, in a turn he accepted with public grace, the electoral college chose his old rival Arnold Rüütel as successor ^[1]. In 1998 a panel of European journalists named Meri European of the Year in recognition of his role in anchoring the Baltic states to the West ^[5].

Meri married twice. With his first wife, Regina, he had two sons, Mart and Kristjan; Mart Meri became a linguist and later a member of the Estonian parliament. His second wife, the actress Helle Meri, served as first lady throughout his presidency, and the couple had a daughter, Tuule ^[3].

Colleagues and journalists remembered him as erudite, mischievous and demanding, a man who might quote Tacitus in one breath and repair a boat engine in the next. He was famously indifferent to protocol when it slowed him down and famously insistent on it when Estonia's dignity was at stake ^[4].

Among the widely repeated Lennart Meri facts is his habit of conducting diplomacy in saunas and over long dinners, where his storytelling disarmed interlocutors from Helsinki to Washington. He remained a heavy pipe smoker and a restless traveler well into his final decade ^[2].

After leaving office in 2001, Meri continued to write, lecture and comment on European security, warning against complacency toward Russia years before such warnings became commonplace. His health declined after surgery for a brain tumor, and he died in Tallinn on March 14, 2006, two weeks short of his seventy seventh birthday. He was buried at the Metsakalmistu cemetery in Tallinn ^[1].

Estonia has honored him on a scale reserved for founders. In 2009 the country's main airport was renamed Lennart Meri Tallinn Airport, and since 2007 the annual Lennart Meri Conference in Tallinn has brought together presidents, ministers and scholars to debate transatlantic security in his name ^[5].

Any serious Lennart Meri biography returns to the same paradox: a man denied a diplomatic career by one empire ended up dismantling that empire's hold on his country through diplomacy. His films preserved vanishing Finno-Ugric cultures, his books gave Estonians a usable ancient past, and his presidency converted a fragile restored state into a committed member of the European mainstream ^[6]. Few small nations have been served so well by a single restless mind.