Outside the Box: Two heroes missing from Berlin Wall celebrations
As the world marks the 25th anniversary of freedoms return to Eastern Europe, it is sad that two of the wisest post-communist leaders are no longer with us.
In the extraordinary events that followed the collapse 25 years ago of the Berlin Wall, Poland was the inspiration. It had elected a non-communist government months before the Wall came down. Lech Walesa and Pope John Paul II are true heroes who changed the world. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader who is still alive at 83, courageously allowed the Wall to be opened, sacrificing in the process Moscows loyalist East German communists.
Comprehending the significance of Gorbachevs deed, an astonished British editorialist wrote that all of Stalins wartime territorial gains in Europe were given up without a shot being fired.
Events cascaded rapidly. Czechoslovakias communist government gave up days after the wall came down. Hungary catapulted toward free elections, and the remaining regimes Romania, Bulgaria and Albania toppled like a row of dominoes.
In 1990 East Germans voted to merge their country with West Germany. And late in 1991 the USSR itself collapsed, fragmenting into 15 separate countries.
History, in my opinion, will judge Vaclav Havel of thenCzechoslovakia and Lennart Meri of Estonia to be the most significant leaders to emerge from the wreckage of communism.
Meri, who was Estonias president from 1992 to 2001, warrants increased recognition.
Born into a prominent family, 12-year-old Meri, his mother and younger brother were exiled to the Siberian gulags when the Red Army invaded in 1940. His father, an Estonian diplomat, was confined in Moscows infamous Lubyanka Prison. Miraculously, the family survived, and Lennart was permitted to attend university. He became a respected writer and filmmaker. He was 60 when the Berlin Wall came down.
Meri earned the respect of Estonians during the failed coup against Gorbachev in August 1991. With his countrymen terrified that a Russian invasion would snuff out their drive for independence, Meri took to the radio, assuring citizens that they neednt worry, that he knew the plotters to be clueless and incompetent. There was no invasion, and Meris grandfatherly counsel had an enormous impact.
Fluent in six languages, most learned as a youth during his fathers postings abroad, Meri repeatedly observed that the end of communism was a beginning and not an end. A tall, dignified man, Meri understood the horror of mass deportations. But, remarkably, he championed the cause of freedom for Russians. He died in 2006. Were he alive today, Meri would be aghast at the Russian actions in Ukraine and, equally, comforted that Estonias security is anchored in NATO and European Union membership.
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Outside the Box: Two heroes missing from Berlin Wall celebrations