New President for Estonia
The election of Swedish-born diplomat Toomas Hendrik Ilves as president of Estonia means that all three Baltic States are now led by former exiles from Soviet power.
“It’s a response to political corruption and scandals. These outsiders are free from that, and bring a fresh transparency and honesty to politics,” Andres Kasekamp, professor of Baltic politics at Tartu University, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
All three Baltic States were occupied and annexed by the Soviet Union in 1944–45. Many Baltic citizens fled to the west rather than live under communism but maintained contact with their homelands until the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
Returning exiles have played an important role in the development of Baltic society since independence, influencing local journalism, economics, arts and entertainment, as well as politics. Some have been criticized for not understanding the Soviet past, however.
Toomas Ilves, 52, was born in Stockholm to exiles from Soviet-dominated Estonia, which the Red Army conquered in 1944–45. Like so many Baltic refugees, his parents later moved to the United States, and Ilves was educated at Columbia University, studying psychology.
In the 1980s he began working for the US-funded Radio Free Europe, becoming head of its Estonian desk in 1988. He returned to Estonia after the fall of communism and, in 1993, was appointed ambassador to the United States, Canada and Mexico, becoming foreign minister in 1996.
Elizabeth II made the first-ever visit by a British monarch to the Baltic States in October. There, she praised the Baltic people for their strength in the face of oppression, and their determination to regain independence. “I have seen three very different countries but have seen one feature that you all share. It is that indomitable spirit, which was able to keep alive the flame of independence, despite all attempts to extinguish it, during the very worst of times,” the queen said here Thursday at a state dinner.
“It is this spirit which has driven forward the rapid political, economic, and social change in all your countries, change which is not something to be measured simply by statistics, but in the freedom, peace and prosperity which all your peoples now enjoy.”
Thousands of people packed into Tallinn’s medieval City Hall Square to give Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II a musical send-off from the Baltic states with an open-air concert called “Estonia Sings.”
