Lennart Meri served two terms as president of Estonia, from 1992 to 2001. An ardent nationalist who advocated free-market policies, he was one of a small handful of leaders of newly independent former Soviet republics who had no serious Communist past. He forged close relations with several world leaders, among them President Clinton and Pope John Paul II. Originally trained as a historian, Mr. Meri was for decades one of Estonia's most prominent public intellectuals, an authority on the history, languages and cultures of the Finno-Ugric peoples of northeastern Europe and Siberia. From 1990 to 1992, he served as foreign minister, and for a brief period in 1992 was ambassador to Finland. Lennart-Georg Meri was born in Tallinn on March 29, 1929. His father, Georg-Peeter, was a prominent diplomat who in his later years translated the plays of Shakespeare into Estonian. Lennart Meri was educated in Paris and Berlin, where his father's postings took him.In 1940, the elder Mr. Meri was appointed Estonia's first ambassador to the United States, and the family prepared to move to Washington. But the Soviet invasion followed shortly afterward, and in 1941, the Meris were deported to Siberia. With his father in a labor camp, Lennart, then 12, supported the family by working as a lumberman and as a potato peeler in a Red Army factory. The Meris were able to return to Estonia in 1946, and in 1953 Lennart Meri graduated from Tartu University with a major in history. Prevented by the Soviet government from working as a historian, he spent the next two years as a dramatist with the Vanemuine Theater, Estonia's leading repertory company. He later worked as a producer for Estonian radio before becoming a documentary filmmaker. For more than two decades, Mr. Meri traveled to the farthest corners of the Soviet Union, capturing the lives of remote ethnic communities in print and on film. His books, which have been translated into many languages, though not, apparently, into English, include ''Silverwhite'' (1976), a study of the ancient history of Estonia and the Baltic region. Several of Mr. Meri's films, which made plain the hardships of ethnic peoples behind the Iron Curtain, were banned in the Soviet Union. But they earned critical praise abroad, where they were shown in smuggled copies.