Inside Estonia's presidential palace in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a lanky, white-haired man could occasionally be seen bent over a broken coffee maker or light fixture, screwdriver in hand, dutifully making repairs.The man was President Lennart Meri. Statesman, survivor and sage, Meri was buried Sunday, dead at 76 after a life that encompassed the disasters and triumphs visited upon his tiny Baltic country, from being shipped to Siberia in a cattle train when he was a boy, to leading Estonia out of the shadows of Soviet oppression as president from 1992 to 2001.
His skills as a handyman had a political overtone. The intellectual writer-turned-president was waging war on all vestiges of Soviet-era sloppiness and neglect, and his weapon of choice was the screwdriver he kept in his pocket ready to pounce on the next flawed appliance. "It was the Soviet way that if you saw one light switch that didn't work properly, you'd say, 'Let's plan to fix all the light switches in a month's time and let's form a committee to organize it,'" he explained in one of several interviews with this reporter during his presidency.
Like Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who went on to become president of the Czech Republic, Meri was enlisted to run for president for his cultural pedigree and the moral stature he had won speaking out against the Soviet regime. He displayed encyclopedic knowledge and playful spontaneity, and shunned the blow-dried image of a modern Euro-politician. He liked to break with little warning into discourses on everything from astronomy to Shakespeare.
But he proved to be more than just a man of letters. Meri applied his fix-it-now philosophy to market reforms. He groomed youthful policy makers who speedily privatized state property, slashed subsidies and unilaterally abolished trade tariffs.
It worked; annual growth roared from minus 14 percent in 1992 to plus 11 percent by 1997. He also lobbied hard for Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia to join NATO, ensuring the security of the three small, historically vulnerable Baltic states. "Security is like virginity," Meri explained with characteristic wit about why full membership was essential. "You're either a virgin or you're not. You either have security or you don't."
He also scolded Western governments for offering aid to Russia before Estonia's giant neighbor had shown a commitment to democratic reforms. "They thought that by feeding a tiger more and more meat, it would eventually turn into a vegetarian," he said.