Toomas Hendrik Ilves
Toomas Hendrik Ilves, born in 1953 in Stockholm. Fought for the freedom of Estonia in exile, now the third president of the restored Republic of Estonia.
Just as Mari-Ann Kelam, Toomas Hendrik Ilves was born in exile. Despite a childhood spent abroad, though, he grew up as an Estonian and as a patriot of Estonia. Toomas Hendrik Ilves studied in the United States, where he graduated from the University of Columbia. After this he obtained an M.A. degree in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. After graduation he worked for years as a researcher, until 1984 he used the opportunity to start working for the research institute of Radio Free Europe in Munich and thus to become engaged with the problems of his home country. In 1988-93 Toomas Hendrik Ilves was the chief of the Estonian section of Radio Free Europe. He has said the following about the role of Estonians living in exile: “Exile Estonians are those who kept alive the traditions of a democratic literature free of censorship and an impartial view of Estonia's history. Without us both of these traditions would have been lost.“
President Ilves remembers the difficult task of breaking the Western indifference towards the Baltic independence movements: “I do not know to what extent this had been cultivated by the Soviet Union and to what extent this was a spontaneous Western reaction, but the message to us was that do whatever you want but do not start destabilising the Soviet Union!”. Despite the official line, the Estonian section worked not as ordinary journalists, but as a “Fighting unit Estonia”, as it was called by their colleagues, which aimed for nothing less than Estonia's freedom.
In 1993 Toomas Hendrik Ilves was chosen as the ambassador of Estonia to the United States. In this office he became the successor of Ernst Jaakson, a diplomat who had served as the representative of the Republic of Estonia in the US since 1965 and who had been in the Estonian diplomatic service for 79 consecutive years. But the career of Toomas Hendrik Ilves was different. In 1996 he became the foreign minister of Estonia, after this he began his political career in the Riigikogu and the European Parliament. In 2006 the Elector's Assembly elected Toomas Hendrik Ilves the President of the Republic of Estonia.
- Estonian SSR
- Latvian SSR
- Lithuanian SSR
- Russian SSR
- Byelorussian SSR
- Ukrainian SSR
- People´s Republic of Poland
- German Democratic Republic
- Czechoslovak Socialist Republic
- People's Republic of Hungary
- Socialist Republic of Romania
- Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
- The Moldavian SSR
- The People´s Republic of Bulgaria