Back in 1988, in the days of glasnost and perestroika, when the Estonian intelligentsia was experiencing the first stirrings of freedom, Jaak Jõerüüt was sent on a diplomatic mission to Toronto. He was to talk about the issue that had galvanized the creative intelligentsia: the proposed mining of phosphorite in Estonia, which, if implemented, carried with it the potential of an ecological disaster and would almost certainly lead to an influx of still more workers from Russia. The leaders of the writers, artists and academics, up in arms, met in early April, 1988 and drafted unheard-of resolutions that demanded increased political rights, economic and cultural autonomy, and that the reactionary leadership of the then Soviet republic step down.
Jõerüüt, 41 at the time, brought news of the mood in Estonia and of the resolutions. He had to face an audience of total strangers – all exile Estonians to be sure – but there was a divide of 44 years between those who stayed and those who left, with little face-to-face communication in between. During the question period, some of the audience remained wary, and there was an exchange that went something like this: “Aren’t you in the Party?” asked one man. Without missing a beat, Jõerüüt shot back, “What really matters is not what kind of card you have in your pocket, but what’s up here” pointing to his temple.
The man could think on his feet, but up to that point, had basically been a writer and a poet. Once politicized, he served on the Estonian Supreme Council from 1990 to 1992. In January 1993 he was asked to take on the crucial task of representing Estonia to its closest and most important western neighbour – Finland.
Who were you as an Estonian ambassador? He had no experience in foreign affairs, and there were no role models to pass on the culture of the Foreign Ministry, in fact there had been no viable Foreign Ministry until the restoration of Estonian independence on August 20 , 1991. In the Soviet era Jõerüüt had never used a computer, a fax machine or a copier. Arriving in Helsinki he had to bring himself up to speed and go shopping for the kinds of suits, shirts and ties worn by other members of the diplomatic corps.
This is not a record of Estonian foreign policy and diplomacy, nor is it a description of Jõerüüt’s two tours of duty, the first in Helsinki and the second in Rome. It is an impressionistic portrait of the cultures and the people the poet-writer encountered in his two postings and he leaps back and forth from the one to the other. Jõerüüt feels at home with the Finns and appreciates their pragmatism, but it is Rome that really seduces him.
Of course, Jõerüüt does touch on diplomatic issues – the struggle to abolish visa requirements for Estonians travelling to Finland, the “Estonia” disaster, and the need to establish honorary consulships in various region of Italy, to mention a few. We are also given tantalizing glimpses of the social milieu that surrounds the working diplomat and his wife, in this case the prominent writer Viivi Luik.
There are scenes that today would seem absurd, such as this one. The Finnish Prime Minister Esko Aho makes an official visit to Estonia in the spring of 1994. Among other things, he is taken to Narva, and as he and his entourage are standing on a viewing platform in the corner tower of the Hermann fortress, he looks around, first at the cityscape, then the river beneath him, the bridge, and then east, far into the distance, and says, “I wonder how far it is from here to Russia?” The Finnish ambassador to Estonia hastens to point straight down at the opposite bank of the river, and says “this is where it begins”.
At the end of his book one senses that Jõerüüt has learned how to represent his country, how to be a diplomat and a role model. He has even compiled an informal diplomat’s ABC, where among admonitions to listen to others, do your homework, control your emotions and the like, the cardinal rule to remember is, that you as a person are unique in the world. This is what makes this little book such fascinating reading – it is a writer’s (and self-confessed ex-hippie’s) take on being free at last to explore other cultures and to represent his own rapidly metamorphosing country in its ascent from near-obscurity to the image of “the little country that could”.