“There is no such thing as a hopeless situation.”

After 1941, the history of the independent state of Estonia was considered to be over – only people like Lennart Meri went on believing that independence could have been preserved and was possible to restore.

During the last 60 years or so, I have met a number of statesmen, presidents and prime ministers who have made a deep impression on me. Among them are, for instance, Winston Churchill, John Kennedy, Giscard d’Estaing, Tage Erlander, Francois Mitterand, and Ronald Reagan – but none of them has, to my mind, been as diverse a personality and as brilliant a speaker as Lennart Meri: the child of a diplomat, fluent in six languages, a patriotic cosmopolitan, a writer and film producer, a prophet of the Soviet collapse, and the man who presided over the freedom of Estonia.
It was a long time before I learned to know Lennart Meri – before I learned to know Estonia, in general. As a young schoolboy, I made a trip to Estonia in the summer of 1939. Soon, during that autumn, an iron curtain descended, separating the Baltic States from the world. True, as late as the Continuation War between Finland and the Soviet Union (1941-44) I would come across Estonians – fighting as volunteers side by side with the Finns on the Karelian front. But, towards the end of the war, Estonia and Estonians disappeared from our consciousness. Once the Soviet Union had swallowed up the Baltic countries, the Gulf of Finland became unbridgeable – both, physically and mentally. Finally, in 1941, the history of the independent state of Estonia ceased to exist.
It took 23 years before a new kind of relationship was born between Finland and Estonia. I refer to the surprise visit of President Urho Kekkonen to the university town of Tartu, in March, 1964. That made a profound impression on the Estonians. Kekkonen’s visit resulted in the opening of a boat service between Helsinki and Tallinn. People began to travel across the Gulf of Finland. Books and magazines from the
West started to flow into Estonia, secretly of course. They were very much appreciated and eagerly consumed. Finnish television, which Estonians on the other side of the gulf were able to see, had a very special impact. Lennart Meri compared his country to a sunken submarine with only its periscope above the surface: no voice could get out from the vessel but voices from the outside could reach those trapped inside.
However, the so-called Khrushchev Thaw did not last long. Brezhnev’s return to more Stalinlike politics had a direct impact on Estonia too. As the mass relocation of Russian workers to this small country escalated, the Estonian Communists were forced to accept Moscow’s humiliating demand that Estonia should become a bilingual country. The long-term aim was completely to replace the Estonian language with Russian.
Lennart Meri, however, never gave up his firm belief that, one day, Estonia would be independent again. ‘There are not many peoples in the world that have remained faithful to their homeland for as long as we have’, wrote Meri in his book ‘Hõbevalge’, which translates as ‘Silver White’. In 1976, the book reached an amazingly large readership, considering the country’s tiny population: 32 000 books were sold in two days.
At the end of the 1950s, Meri organised expeditions to the furthest corners of the Soviet Union where other Finno-Ugric tribes resided, and bore witness to the internal decay of the Communist system. He saw the Soviet Union as a dinosaur, destined to perish. When Mikhail Gorbachev became leader and started to reform the vast country, we in Finland believed he would succeed. Meri, however, said that Gorbachev’s ‘perestroika was just a bundle of cosmetic recipes on how to brush up and make the hide of the starved Marxist-Leninist horse shine’.
In fact, I should say that we wanted to believe in Gorbachev’s success because we assumed that the alternative would be a Stalinist-like regime; whereas the Estonians wanted to believe in Gorbachev’s failure and the collapse of the Soviet Union because that would be their chance to regain independence. We wished Gorbachev good luck whereas the Estonians put their hope in Boris Yeltsin, a Russian nationalist rather than a supporter of the Soviet Union.
In an interview many years later, Lennart Meri said that as early as the beginning of the 1980s, ’40 000 well-paid American sovietologists had failed to notice’ that the Soviet system was on course towards inevitable ruin. Had the Finns understood that, Meri was asked. He replied that when, on his first visit to Finland in 1975, he saw from his hotel window a text written on the wall opposite: Yankees out of Angola! – he then understood ‘that the Finns hadn’t got it either’.
Meri could not help but make razor sharp comments on the extremely cautious approach of the Finns to the Estonians’ and Latvians’ aspirations for independence. From the notes of President Mauno Koivisto, one understands that he had no faith in the success of the aspirations of the Baltic States. Yet the Finns were not alone in that. Neither did the American or European political leaders. Who would have thought that the Soviet Union would break up as Yeltsin pushed Gorbachev aside – only the people in the Baltic countries did, at least they hoped for it.
During his two terms as President of the newly reborn Estonian Republic in 1991-2001, Lennart Meri conducted a remarkable and unique PR campaign with the purpose of making his country known in Europe and the USA. In particular, I remember his ‘performance’ in London where a high-level audience was spellbound by his witty and charmingly ambiguous anecdotes and puns. He was ruthless in exposing Russia’s misconduct. The same happened in Berlin, in March 1998, when the members of the Trilateral Commission from Europe, the USA and Asia, listened all ears to Meri’s hour-long speech.
Back home, Meri took a critical view of the decision of the Estonian leadership during WW II to give in to Soviet pressure. When he was asked if Estonia should have fought back in such a hopeless situation, he said that ‘there is no such thing as a hopeless situation.’ In his view, Estonia should have defended itself against the Red Army. Its surrender did not spare Estonia the loss of so many lives. When we add up the Estonian victims of the ‘cleansings’ and deportations by the Soviet Union as well as the people who fled or emigrated, Estonia lost an estimated one quarter of its population. ‘If in November 1939, the Finnish leaders had lacked courage and the Finnish people had lacked confidence, Finland’s fate would have been just as tragic as that of Estonia’s in 1940’, said Meri in May 1995.
Of course, in 1939-1940, Estonia would have had no chance of achieving the kind of success
Finland was capable of in its defensive war. Resistance in Estonia would have amounted to a mere gesture. But Meri’s condemnation of the decision to surrender by the former Estonian statesmen was a statement of principle, made so as to emphasise Estonia’s sovereignty and enhance its people’s sense of national unity.
Lennart Meri will remain in the history of Estonia as the leader who presided over the settled establishment of Estonia among the other nations of Europe. His remarkable work is also part of Finnish history.
Translated from Finnish by Evelyn Höglund