Lennart Georg Meri (Estonian pronunciation: [ˈlenːɑrtː keˈorːːk ˈmeri]; 29 March 1929 – 14 March 2006) was an Estonian writer, film director, and statesman. He was the country's foreign minister from 1990 to 1992 and President of Estonia from 1992 to 2001.
Lennart Meri was born in Tallinn, a son of the Estonian diplomat and later Shakespeare translator Georg Meri, and Estonian Swedish mother Alice-Brigitta Engmann. 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 were from his school years in Lycée Janson de Sailly in Paris. In addition to his native Estonian, Lennart Meri fluently spoke five other languages: Finnish, French, German, English, and Russian.
Meri and his family lived in Tallinn when Estonia was invaded and occupied by the Stalinist Soviet Union in June 1940. In 1941, the Meri family was deported to Siberia along with thousands of other Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians sharing the same fate. Heads of the family were separated from their families and shut into concentration camps where only a few survived. At the age of twelve, Lennart Meri worked as a lumberman in Siberia. He also worked as a potato peeler and a rafter to support his family.
Whilst in exile, Lennart Meri grew interested in the other Finno-Ugric languages that he heard around him, the language family of which his native Estonian is also a part. His interest in the ethnic and cultural kinship amongst the scattered "Finno-Ugric family" became a lifelong theme within his work.
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 the University of Tartu in 1953. On 5 March 1953, the day of Joseph Stalin's death, he proposed to his first wife Regina Meri, saying "Let us remember this happy day forever." The politics of the Soviet Union 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. Several of his films were released and have since gained great critical acclaim.
After a trip to the Tian Shan Mountains in Central Asia and the old Islamic centres in the Kara Kum Desert in 1958, Lennart Meri wrote his first book, which met with a warm reception from the public. Already as a student, Lennart Meri had been able to earn his living with his writing, after his father had been arrested by the Soviet authorities for the third time. With the help of his younger brother who had been forced to leave his studies and take a job as a taxi driver, he managed to support their mother and to complete his own studies. The film The Winds of the Milky Way (Estonian: Linnutee tuuled), shot in co-operation with Finland and Hungary, was banned in the Soviet Union, but won a silver medal at the New York Film Festival. In Finnish schools, his films and texts were used as study materials. In 1986, Lennart Meri was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Helsinki University. He became a member of the Estonian Writers' Union in 1963. In the 1970s, he was elected an Honorary Member of the Finnish Literary Society.
Tulemägede Maale, created in 1964, which is translated as To the Land of Fiery Mountains, chronicled Meri's journey to the Kamchatka Peninsula in the 1960s. Other members of his expedition group included well known scientists Harry Ling, Kaarel Orviku, Erast Parmasto, Ants Raik, Anto Raukas, Hans Trass, the artist Kaljo Polli, and filmmaker Hans Roosipuu. "Traveling is the only passion that doesn't need to feel shy in front of intellect," wrote Meri. Urban people still have an inner urge to see the world, hunger for nature. Meri did not underestimate the drawbacks of mass tourism but concluded that "science will liberate us from the chains of big cities and lead us back to nature".
Meri's travel book of his journey to the northeast passage, Virmaliste Väraval (At the Gate of the Northern Lights) (1974), won him huge success in the Soviet Union. It was translated into Finnish in 1977 in the Soviet Writers series, which also introduced to Finnish readers works by the Estonian writers Mats Traat, Lilli Promet, and Ülo Tuulik. In the book Meri combined the present with a perspective into history, and used material from such explorers as Cook, Forster, Wrangel, Dahl, Sauer, Middendorff, Cochran, and others. When he sees a mountain rising against the stormy sky of the Bering Strait, he realizes that Vitus Bering and James Cook had looked at the same mountain, but from the other side of the strait.
Meri's best known work is perhaps Hõbevalge, published in 1976 (English translation Silverwhite: The Journey to the Fallen Sun by Adam Cullen, published in 2025). It reconstructs the history of Estonia (largely refuted by modern geneticists) and the Baltic Sea region. As in his other works, Meri combines documentary sources and scientific research with his imagination. "If geography is prose, maps are iconography," Meri writes. Hõbevalge is based on a wide-ranging ancient seafaring sources, and carefully unveils the secret of the legendary Ultima Thule. The name was given in classical times to the most northerly land, reputedly six days' voyage from Britain. Several alternative places for its location have been suggested, among them the Shetland Islands, Iceland, and Norway. According to Meri, it is possible that Thule derives from the ancient Estonian folk poetry, which depicts the birth of the Kaali crater lake in Saaremaa. In the essay Tacituse tahtel (2000), Meri examined ancient contacts between Estonia and the Roman empire and notes that furs, amber, and especially Livonian kiln-dried, disease-free grain may have been Estonia's biggest contribution to the common culture of Europe – in lean years, it provided seed grain for Europe.
Meri founded the non-governmental Estonian Institute (Eesti Instituut) in 1988 to promote cultural contacts with the West and to send Estonian students to study abroad. He appeared in the documentary film The Singing Revolution as an interviewee discussing the collapse of the Soviet regime.
After more than twenty years of refusals, the Soviet administration finally gave permission for Lennart Meri to travel beyond the Iron Curtain in the late 1970s, and Meri persistently used the opportunities open to him in Finland to remind the Western world of the existence of Estonia. He established close relationships with politicians, journalists and Estonians who had fled from the occupation. He was the first Estonian to publicize abroad the protests against the Soviet plan of mining phosphorite in Estonia (known as the Phosphorite War), which would have rendered a portion of the country uninhabitable.
In Estonia, environmental protests soon grew into a general revolt against Soviet rule: the "Singing Revolution", which was led by Estonian intellectuals. Meri's speech Do Estonians Have Hope focused on the existential problems of the nation and had strong repercussions abroad.
In 1988, Meri became a founding member of the Estonian Popular Front, which cooperated with its counterparts in Latvia and Lithuania.
After the first non-communist-style multi-party election in 1990, Meri was appointed to the post of Foreign Minister. As Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lennart Meri's first task was to create the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He developed around him a group of well educated young people, many English speaking, to establish an open communication channel to the West, and at the same time to represent Estonia more widely on the international scene. He participated in the CSCE Conferences in Copenhagen, New York, Paris, Berlin and Moscow, and the foundation conference of the Council of the Baltic Sea Countries. He also had several meetings with American and European Heads of State and Foreign Ministers, and was the first Eastern European guest to give a presentation at NATO Headquarters in Brussels.