Lennart Georg Meri (born March 29, 1929), is a writer who served as president of Estonia from 1992 to 2001.
He was born in Tallinn, a son of the Estonian diplomat and later Shakespeare translator Georg Meri. With his family, Lennart left Estonia at an early age and studied abroad, in nine different schools and in four different languages. His warmest memories are from his school years in Lycée Janson de Sailly in Paris. The family was in Tallinn when Estonia was occupied by the armed forces of the Soviet Union. In 1941, the Meri family was deported to Siberia along with thousands of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians sharing the same fate. Heads of the family were separated from their families and shut into concentration camps where few survived. At the age of twelve, Lennart Meri started his career as a lumberman. He has also worked as a professional potato peeler and a rafter.
The Meri family survived and found their way back to Estonia, where Lennart Meri graduated cum laude from the Faculty of History and Languages of Tartu University in 1953. The Soviet administration did not allow him to work as a historian, so Meri found work as a dramatist in the Vanemuine, the oldest theatre of Estonia, and later on as a producer of radio plays in the Estonian broadcasting industry.
After the trip to the Tian Shan Mountains in the Central Asia and the old Islamic centres in the Kara Kum Desert in 1958, Lennart Meri wrote his first book, which met the warm reception of the readers. Already as a student, Lennart Meri had had to earn his living with writing, after his father had been arrested by the Soviet powers for the third time. With the help of his younger brother who had to quit his studies and take a job as a taxi-driver, he managed to support their mother and to complete his studies. The film The Winds of the Milky Way, shot in co-operation with Finland and Hungary, was banned in the Soviet Union, but won a silver medal on the New York Film Festival. In Finnish schools, his films and texts were used as study materials. In 1986, Lennart Meri was awarded the Honorary Doctorate of the Helsinki University. He had become a member of the Estonian Writers’ Union already earlier, in 1963. In the Seventies, he was elected the Honorary Member of the Finnish Literary Society.
After more than twenty years of expectations, the Soviet administration finally gave the permission for Lennart Meri to travel behind the iron curtain, and Meri persistently used the opportunities open to him in Finland to remind the Free world of the existence of Estonia. He established trustful relationships with the politicians, journalists and the Estonians who had fled from the occupation. He was the first Estonian to take abroad the protest against the Soviet plan of mining phosphate in Estonia, which would have rendered a third of the country uninhabitable.
In Estonia, environment protection soon grew into “the Singing Revolution”, which was led by the Estonian intellectuals. Lennart Meri’s speech “Have Estonians Got Hope” focused on the existential problems of the nation and had strong repercussions also abroad.
As the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lennart Meri’s first task was to create the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to employ studious young people, and to establish a steady communication channel to the West, and at the same time, to represent Estonia on the more important international conferences. He participated in the CSCE Conferences in Copenhagen, New York, Paris, Berlin and Moscow, on the foundation conference of the Council of the Baltic Sea Countries, had several meetings with the American and European Heads of State and Ministers of Foreign Affairs, and was the first East European guest to give a presentation at the NATO Headquarters in Brussels.
After a brief period as an Ambassador of Estonia to Finland Lennart Meri was elected the President of the Republic of Estonia. Lennart Meri was sworn to the office of the President on October 6, 1992. On September 20, 1996, he was elected the President of the Republic of Estonia for the second term of office.
Lennart Meri is in his second marriage. His wife Helle Meri (born in 1949) worked as an actress in the Estonian Drama Theatre until 1992. Lennart Meri’s first wife Regina Meri emigrated to Canada in 1987. Lennart Meri has three children: sons Mart Meri (born in 1959) and Kristjan Meri (born in 1966) and daughter Tuule Meri (born in 1985), and four grandchildren.\n