By PHK
Much has already been written about Estonia’s Lennart Meri and former president who died on Tuesday at 76 after a long struggle with cancer. Much more will be written about him in the days, weeks, months and years to come. He was just that kind of person: remarkable in so many respects.
For me, Meri was the preeminent face of Estonian independence. He metamorphosed - during the years I worked in Helsinki (1988-92) and talked with him and other Estonians who traveled from Tallinn to Finland more frequently as the years wore on – from an almost haunted, suspicious but incredibly proud and cultured individual who nevertheless had the courage to open a minuscule Estonian cultural institute on a side street in Tallinn at a dangerous time to foreign minister of a miniscule ministry of the yet to be freed republic to Estonia’s first ambassador to Helsinki by the time I left. He went on, of course, to become prime minister and then president of his born-again country.
Perhaps Meri’s years as a teenager in political exile in Siberia conditioned his fearlessness. He understood how to maneuver through the thorny political thickets of what was then the Soviet Union. Perhaps instinctively or perhaps through trial and error, Meri knew just when to step back from the brink and how and when to push the envelope – just far enough, but not too far.
Meri’s dream – and it seemed very far away during those tenuous pre-independence years – was an independent, non-communist, western aligned Estonia. Astonishingly, within not much more than a decade, all of his dreams came true.
His challenge: how to help make it happen. Did he, in his heart of hearts, really expect it to come about? I don’t know – but as a Lithuanian professor told me in the darkest days (or actually the lightest nights because our conversation took place in Kaunas over the summer solstice in 1991), “we all dream of an independent Lithuania and we are confident it will happen whether it be in our generation, our children’s generation or our grandchildren’s.” I think this was true for Estonians and Latvians as well.
Less than two months later, miracles did happen. The Soviet Union fell apart, the OMON retreated from the streets, the Soviets stopped burning customs houses that the Lithuanians had erected on their borders and sent the tanks back to the barracks. All three Baltic republics had their dream come true. In 1994, Meri was instrumental in ensuring that those tanks, barracks, active duty soldiers and their bases moved back across the eastern border into Russia albeit with a compromise not to the liking of fervent Estonian nationalists. Not that many years later, the Estonians invited the NATO shield in. The country became a member of both the EU and NATO in 2004.
A dream that turned true
I don’t think Meri – or the other Balts I met at the time – really expected their goals of national independence to turn to reality as quickly as they did. But somehow they sensed – far more than most experienced western observers of the Soviet scene almost all of whom got it wrong – the time was right. Many Finns considered their Estonian cousins fool-hardy – but at the same time they hoped for the best, wished them well and helped in a myriad of quiet, non-official ways. The Estonians told us from their perspective – the dash for the door was then or never.
I also saw the George W. H. Bush Administration play what I still consider a duplicitous great power game – and don’t let anyone try to convince you otherwise. James Baker, Bush’s Secretary of State at the time, and Bush’s “real politick” foreign policy inner circle remained enchanted with the personable Mikhail Gorbachev even after it had become clear to those of us living in Europe that he had long lost the confidence of the Russian people. In Bush and Baker’s desperate attempts to keep Gorbachev in power and - to their credit - the hardliners at bay, as well as the Soviet Union in one piece, the tiny Baltic Republics were seemingly caught in a vise.
Whether accepting the illegality of the pre-World War II Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in which Hitler had secretly ceded Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, to Stalin and letting these three small far northern republics go free would have – in the end – kept the rest of the Soviet Union intact, is debatable. But it might have. It was clear that the Soviets from the top down failed to understand the Baltic peoples and that keeping them in the union against their will was a losing proposition. As it turned out - in a big way.
I remember discussing with Meri at the time, the disconnect between the Bush administration’s verbal allegiance to “Baltic Freedom Day” and its actions that seemingly opposed Baltic independence – one dark evening in late December in downtown Helsinki. I also remember Meri’s deep despair – in a sense – at feeling that the US was in reality selling the Baltics out.
The dilemma was more than the administration’s subscribing to international norms of organizations such as the now OSCE (then CSCE) which accepts the peaceful dissolution of larger states – such as happened in Czechoslovakia in 1993 when the Czechs and Slovaks chose an amicable divorce. The problem was the Bush administration’s blind adherence to keeping the Soviet Union together and Gorbachev in power. At that time, the Soviets would never have allowed even the three tiny Baltic republics to go their separate ways.
I also remember describing to one of Meri’s young assistants who later rose to become a major political figure in Estonian politics how American politics worked and in particular the ways powerful émigré groups effectively used their Congressional representatives to pressure administrations to change political course.
Some of those talks took place at the America Center in Helsinki – our offices and library – that were situated on the third floor of an office building just across from Helsinki’s main railroad station. 
At that time, there was a U.S. Information Service which ran the center and its library. Our offices there were accessible to anyone who could pass through a simple metal detector in our lobby. So too was our open stack library. The library’s collection was something that Meri particularly valued, and William Kiehl, our then public affairs counselor welcomed Meri's visits.
If Mari couldn’t personally make it to Helsinki in those early days, he would send one of his young assistants to our library to carry back to Tallinn copies of the International Herald Tribune or old copies of magazines that we had removed from the shelves. For them these were precious items unavailable at the time in the Soviet Union. Carrying them by hand was the only sure way to see that reached their intended destination.
I also remember Meri asking, almost pleading with the US to open a similar center in the newly free Estonia. For him, at heart an intellectual, leading cultural figure and documentary ethnographic film maker, access to the power of ideas contained in our books was far more important than any Embassy. We did open a USIS library in Tallinn – as well as an Embassy, but sometime before I returned to visit in summer 2004, the Center had been closed in one of those paroxysms of short-sighted USG budget belt tightening fits and after 98/11, the American Embassy turned into yet another fortress ruled by the State Department's myopic Office of Security.
Requesting international recognition of Estonian independence
Shortly after the failed coup in Moscow but several months before the Soviet Union was declared defunct, Meri did indeed perform one of his first acts as Estonian Foreign Minister. As the March 15, 2006 Financial Times described it far more eloquently than I: “Three days after Estonia declared independence, Mr Meri stepped into a limousine provided by a Finnish benefactor and adorned with a miniature Estonian flag held on with paper clips. He drove from one embassy to another, delivering letters requesting recognition of Estonia. In the streets of Helsinki, Mr Meri met applause.”
In that same Financial Times article, the reporters stated: “Eva Lille from Finland's friendship society with Estonia remembers Mr. Meri brimming with enthusiasm to realise Estonia's independence and brushing aside any fears he might have had over how Russia might respond. He told Mrs. Lille: ‘I leant into the corner of the back seat and felt what it was like to recognise the happiest moment of one's life even before it had passed.’”
At the American Embassy, two career diplomats received Meri and his letter that late August afternoon. William Burke and William Kushlis, our administrative and political counselors respectively – were honored to accept Meri’s petition that requested US recognition of independent Estonia on behalf of the US government. The Embassy immediately forwarded the Estonian petition to the State Department for official response. This honor was certainly a highlight of their careers.
The U.S. recognized the new Estonia within the next few days. Robert Frasure, who was later killed in that tragic accident in Bosnia, was appointed the first Ambassador. John Brown came out as interim public affairs officer, and Elokai Ojamaa, a fluent Finnish, native Estonian speaker and former chief of U.S. Embassy Helsinki’s consular section who had maintained contact with the Estonians throughout most of the Gorbachev years, was named head of the political section.
Lennart Meri remained in Helsinki as Estonia’s first official Ambassador to Finland over the next several months. In that position, he attended a farewell party in my husband’s and my honor. It was hosted by the Embassy’s Chargé in the garden of the U.S. Ambassador’s residence in late June 1992. These were indeed exciting and hopeful times.
The good news, of course, is that today’s Estonia is a far more prosperous and peaceful place than the Estonia I first visited in September 1990 and when I met with Lennart Meri in his office in the small Estonian cultural institute that anxious day - just days before Bush met Gorbachev in Helsinki to discuss preparations for the 1991 Gulf War.
The bad news is that Lennart Meri is no longer alive and that the promises the US government made to him about an American library and cultural center in Tallinn were kept for such a short time. Perhaps these institutions are no longer needed now that democratic Estonia is a member of the EU and NATO. This tiny country on the Baltic’s southeast rim has traveled far along the road to somewhere in a remarkably short a time.
Perhaps it’s just fine too – but I don’t think so - that the US Embassy in Helsinki has become an even more restrictive fortress America than its smaller cousin just 40 miles south across the water in Tallinn. This larger embassy perched on a hill overlooking the Baltic Sea is now surrounded by a protruding prison-style fence, and the garden where that 1992 farewell party was held in our honor – indeed the entire compound - is off-limits even to us.
Photo & map identities and credits (top to bottom): Estonia map - 2003, Perry-Castenada Map Collection; Estonian nationalist flag unfurling, Tallinn Old Town Square, September 1990; Interior of restaurant in Helsinki's main railroad station, June 2004; View of Tallinn skyline, July 2004. Photos by Patricia H. Kushlis.
The following link to additional reports and commentary on Lennart Meri:
Helsingin Sanomat (includes a series of excellent photos of Meri)
Bill Keller (a travel article that concludes with a short interview of Meri)
Paul Goble’s obituary on Lennart Meri (here and here)
Carl Bildt’s blog with link to Estonian President Lennart Meri’s 1999 speech, "The Consequences of Communism in the Baltic States"; and Bildt's personal tribute to Lennart Meri.