Which world leaders read TRP

[William Moore]

How about an each-way bet on Lennart Meri, president of Estonia? 

His CV looks quite promising:
 
"Lennart Meri graduated cum laude from the Faculty of History and Languages
of Tartu University in 1953. As a student, Meri published articles and
essays in the press. In 1963 he joined the Estonian Writers' Union. He has
written a number of books based on his expeditions to Siberia, the Soviet
Far East and the Arctic. Perhaps the best known of them is "Hõbevalge"
(Silverwhite, 1976), an extended historical, literary, geographical and
ethnographic reconstruction of Baltic prehistory. The book was a bestseller
not only in Estonia, but in Finland as well. Lennart Meri's work played a
pivotal role in maintaining the Estonian national identity during the long
years of Soviet annexation and the attendant campaigns of russification.
His books have been translated into about a dozen
languages. There are also numerous translations and publications of his
newspaper writings and essays. 

Lennart Meri has made a number of films about the fate of Finno-Ugric
peoples, such as
"Veelinnurahvas" (The Waterfowl People, 1970), "Linnutee tuuled" (The Winds
of the Milky Way, 1977), "Kaleva hääled" (The Sounds of Kaleva, 1986) and
"Toorumi pojad" (The Sons of Thorum, 1989), which have won international
renown: for instance The Winds of the Milky Way won a silver medal at a New
York film festival. Meri's films have been used as visual study-aids at
schools; so has his Finnish-language booklet on shamanism (Otava, 1981). 

Fluent in French, German, English, Finnish and Russian, Meri has translated
into Estonian works by Remarque, Graham Greene, Vercors, Solzhenitsyn and
Boulle." 



I'll drop him a note and ask him.

W.