Lennart Georg Meri: Small countries rarely produce statesmen of international calibre; opportunities in this sphere are usually limited to those from states that have the power to make their message heard. Lennart Meri, author, film-maker, linguist and first president of post-Soviet Estonia, was an exception to the rule.
He was also the only national president whose work experience included the post of "professional potato-peeler". He had learned this trade in the most harrowing of circumstances when, as a 12-year-old, he was deported with the rest of his family to a Siberian Gulag.
Before this, he had led a privileged life as the son of diplomat and man of letters Georg Peeter Meri and Alice-Brigitta Engmann. Each of his father's postings in the diplomatic corps, during Estonia's first brief period of independence, led to a new school for the young Lennart. Before the family's return to Tallinn, he had attended nine schools in four languages, but his fondest memories were of his time at the Lycée Janson de Sailly in Paris.
This immersion in linguistic diversity prepared him well for the roles he would play in the future. So, too, did the toughening process of work as a child lumberjack, a raft pilot on the logging rivers of the far east and finally promotion to potato-peeling as a full-time job.
He developed an abiding interest in the culture, languages and traditions of the minority nationalities of the Soviet Union but was not immune to the extreme and not always rational dislike of Russians found in many Baltic Gulag survivors. In his later political career, he once expressed the view that Russians had tendencies towards cannibalism.
After his release, Lennart Meri graduated cum laude in history and modern languages at the University of Tartu in 1953. Five years later, he made the first of his many forays into the more remote parts of the Soviet Union when he visited the Tien-Shan Mountains on the border with China and the Islamic centres of the Kara Kum desert in Turkmenistan.
A man of great personal charm, he relished telling those who met him of his experience on an expedition to the icy wastes of Yakutia where he ended up eating his own horse.
His film Winds of the Milky Way, although banned in the USSR, won a silver medal at the New York Film Festival. His book Hõbevalge (Silverwhite), in which he reconstructed Baltic history and emphasised the historic freedom of Estonia and its people, was extremely popular and influential in his home country as it travelled towards its current independent status as a member of the European Union and Nato.
During one of the political "thaws" in the Soviet Union Meri was given permission to travel abroad and he quickly made strong links with Estonia's close neighbours and ethnic relatives in Finland as well as with the Estonian diaspora in that country and elsewhere. He then took up environmental issues and highlighted a Soviet plan to mine phosphates that would have reduced much of his country to semi-desert.
He founded the Estonian Institute, a non-governmental cultural organisation in 1988, and managed to establish offices in Copenhagen, Stockholm, London, Bonn, Paris and Helsinki. This was a particularly prescient move, for within three years, Estonia would regain its independence and the institute's offices abroad would form the nucleus of the country's new diplomatic corps.
National movements in the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, supported in many cases by local ethnic Russians, pressed strongly for independence, at a time when free speech flourished under Gorbachev's policy of Glasnost. Paradoxically, it was the abortive hard-line coup to remove Gorbachev that led directly to the end of Soviet rule there.
In Estonia's case, the framework for self-government and for representation abroad had already been set up and when western governments sent their representatives to recognise the country formally, Meri was installed as foreign minister. It was in this capacity that he received Ireland's then minister for foreign affairs, Gerard Collins, as the Soviet Union began to unravel.
In building up the foreign ministry he recruited intelligent and energetic Estonians and appointed some of the youngest ambassadors in international diplomacy. The ministry, incidentally, include a large number of Hibernophiles, including a general secretary who played the spoons in an Irish music group and an ambassador who had studied at the Regional Institute of Technology in Dundalk.
Meri himself served briefly as ambassador to Finland before being elected president of his country. He was sworn in on October 16th, 1992, and re-elected in September 1996. His political and diplomatic skills won respect for himself, his office and his country and helped overcome his main personal weakness as an appalling timekeeper. Crowned heads were amongst those kept waiting.
He was awarded many political and literary honours and was voted European of the year in 1998. His final, long and debilitating illness came to an end in his native Tallinn, which he had seen develop from provincial Soviet outpost to capital of an independent and increasingly prosperous Estonia.
Lennart Meri's first wife, Regina Ojavere, emigrated to Canada in 1987 and he later married Helle Pihlak, a former actress in the Estonian Drama Theatre. He is survived also by his daughter Tuule, sons Mart and Kristjan, and four grandchildren.
Lennart Georg Meri: born March 29th, 1929; died March 14th, 2006