MERI, LENNART

born March 29, 1929, Tallinn, Est. Estonian scholar and political leader who was elected president in 1992. Meri's father, Georg Meri, was a man of letters who served the newly independent Estonia as a diplomat between the two world wars, and Lennart was educated in Berlin, London, and Paris. After the Soviet Union annexed Estonia in 1940, Georg Meri was sent to a labour camp in Moscow and the rest of the family to Siberia. In 1946 the family was reunited in Estonia, which had become a Soviet republic. Meri received a degree in history from Tartu University in 1953, and he spent much of his professional life documenting the history of the Finno-Ugric peoples in writings and in documentary films. After Estonia's first free elections in 1990, Meri entered politics when he was named foreign minister. Estonia became independent in 1991, and Meri was appointed ambassador to Finland in 1992. He then ran for president as the head of Isamaa (Fatherland), a nationalist coalition party dedicating to preserving Estonian culture. No candidate received a majority of the votes, and Meri placed second. The parliament, however, was dominated by parties aligned with Isamaa, and it elected him president on October 5, 1992. Although the post was to a large degree ceremonial, he took an active part in Estonian politics and foreign relations. In 1993 he refused to ratify a law requiring Russians who wished to continue living in Estonia to apply for residence permits and to pass an Estonian language exam, and in 1994 he forged an agreement with President Boris Yeltsin on the withdrawal of the remaining Russian troops from Estonia. On September 20, 1996, an electoral college of parliament members and local government officials elected him to a second five-year term.