Arnold Ruutel
Arnold Ruutel signed Estonia's declaration of sovereignty as a Soviet official and its accession to the European Union as its president, sixteen years apart. He was an agronomist who ran a large state farm and rose through the Estonian party apparatus to chair the republic's Supreme Soviet in 1983. That made him the senior official in Estonia when the independence movement began, and he chose to work with it rather than against it - the declaration of sovereignty in November 1988, which asserted that Estonian law took precedence over Soviet law, was the first such declaration in the union and was passed under his chairmanship. What he was chairing was the Singing Revolution. From 1987 Estonians held mass gatherings at the Tallinn song grounds where hundreds of thousands sang national songs that had been effectively banned, and in August 1989 some two million people across the three Baltic republics joined hands in a chain from Tallinn to Vilnius. None of it was violent, and all of it was deniable enough to be difficult to suppress. He was head of state through the restoration of independence in 1991 and the withdrawal of Russian troops that followed, then lost the presidential elections of 1992 and 1996 to candidates from the exile and dissident tradition, who held his Soviet career against him. Lennart Meri, who beat him in 1992, was the consequential Estonian president: a writer and film-maker who defined the country's turn west and secured the troop withdrawal. Ruutel won on the third attempt in 2001, at seventy-three, largely on rural votes. His term is the one the corpus narrates because Estonia joined NATO in March 2004 and the European Union in May, thirteen years after leaving the Soviet Union and having spent them building an administration that digitised faster than any of its neighbours. He declined to seek a second term after a coalition partner's funding scandal and died in 2024.
- Lived: 1928 CE – 2024 CE
- Nationality: Estonian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
