Profile : New Leader Seeks to Jolt Estonia Out of Time Warp : An academic who didn’t enter politics until he was 60, Meri is determined to jump-start capitalism in the former Soviet republic.

Five days into his term as the first post-Soviet president of Estonia, Lennart Meri found himself fixating on one thought: escape.

“I already hate being president,” the stately 62-year-old intellectual said, only half in jest, as he prepared for another 12-hour day of meetings. “What I would really like to do right now is curl up between my pillows with a cup of tea and read ‘Huck Finn.’ ”

A film director and nonfiction writer, Meri was tapped by Parliament last month to lead this nation of 1.6 million. And for all his talk of escaping to Mark Twain’s carefree world, the tall, beak-nosed Meri seems to relish the challenge of rebuilding Estonia.

A year after this Baltic Sea state regained its independence from the Soviet Union, Meri is determined to jump-start capitalism here. He dreams of turning Estonia, a kidney-shaped country the size of Denmark, into a kind of European Hong Kong--a mecca for investors eyeing the vast Russian market.

But Meri faces daunting problems.

Among them: energy shortages that threaten to cripple industrial production; half a million Russians furious about citizenship laws that deny them basic rights; tens of thousands of Russian army troops entrenched in 50-year-old garrisons, and a tangled mess of laws that effectively bar meaningful land reform--including legalizing the buying and selling of land--until the government can sort out who owned what in 1940, before Josef Stalin’s Kremlin annexed Estonia and converted all private plots to state property.

“Estonia’s fate reminds me of a fairy tale in which an entire kingdom was frozen for a century, from the queen on down to the cook making pancakes,” Meri said in fluent English as he paced around his elegant office, limping slightly but still spry.

“Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were all frozen like that for 50 years,” he added. “But during that time, the world around us was changing. Now we’re moving again. But the world today is different from the world of 1938, and we’re having some difficulty adjusting.”

A scholar who devoted much of his career to writing ethnographic studies and directing documentary films about the Finno-Ugric tribes that have populated Estonia since the third millennium BC, Meri would seem an unlikely candidate to lead Estonia through this critical transition.

Although undeniably charming, the new president seems more professorial than statesmanlike. With his white hair and stooped shoulders, he looks the part of an absent-minded intellectual. And his tendency to arrive at least an hour late for everything from campaign rallies to meetings with foreign ambassadors reinforces that image.

Fluent in English, German, French, Russian and Finnish, Meri first entered politics at age 60, serving as minister of foreign affairs in 1990-91 and then as ambassador to Finland for a year.

Despite his limited political experience, Meri compares himself to President Bush and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Like them, he says with a theatrical sigh, he has relinquished his personal freedom to serve his country.

“I remind myself that our Father, God, must also have had to work very hard in the first seven days of the world,” Meri said, characteristically using humor to temper a touch of arrogance.

Meri’s blend of politics and scholarship mirrors the career of his father. Famous in his country for translating Shakespeare’s works into Estonian, Georg Meri also made his name as a leading diplomat during Estonia’s short-lived independence between the first and second world wars.

Apparently because he had avidly promoted a free Estonia from his posts in London, Paris and Berlin, the elder Meri was arrested by the Soviet police shortly after the Red Army swept into the Baltics. He spent five years in a Moscow jail; his family, including the school-age Lennart, languished in exile in Siberia.

During the bruising presidential campaign this fall, Meri’s opponents released documents purporting to show that Georg Meri, despite his record as a nationalist, had spied for the Soviet secret police.

Although Meri vehemently denied the accusations against his father, the mud-slinging seemed to stick. Meri won only 29% of the popular vote in general elections last Sept. 20, placing well behind Arnold Ruutel, a former Communist Party leader and outgoing chairman of Parliament who was well liked for managing to assert Estonia’s independence without provoking a Kremlin crackdown.

But even Ruutel failed to win an absolute majority, so under the Estonian constitution, lawmakers chose the new president. The 101-member Parliament, dominated by groups aligned with Meri’s vehemently nationalist party, chose Meri for the top post, which demands both substantive and ceremonial duties during a four-year term.

Backed by at least one-third of the legislators, Meri’s Pro Patria Party has vowed to “clean house” by ousting the Soviet bureaucrats and Communists who controlled Estonia for 50 years.

“It feels like we’re in the middle of a revolution that we have had to start from scratch,” an exhausted Meri said after his first week in office.

But while he may feel as though he’s starting from square one, Meri actually has more to work with than leaders of most other ex-Soviet republics as he prods his country toward a free-market economy.

Ruutel’s government introduced a significant reform in June, ditching the worthless Russian ruble in favor of a new Estonian currency, the kroon (pronounced crown), which is pegged to the German mark. Given a $40-million boost by the International Monetary Fund, Estonia’s monetary reform has stimulated small-scale capitalism almost unmatched elsewhere in the former Soviet Union.

Mannequins wearing lace lingerie and ankle-length fur coats beckon from store windows along the winding cobblestone streets of Tallinn’s Old Town. Foreign car dealerships sell Audis, Toyotas and BMWs. Sparkling cafes offer pastries and pizza for prices that most Estonians, who earn an average of 500 kroons ($40) a month, find reasonable.

And many young Estonians are eager to enter the business world--including Meri’s younger son, 25-year-old Kristian, who studies marketing in the Finnish capital, Helsinki. Meri’s older son works at Estonia’s Language and Literature Institute. The president also has a kindergarten-age daughter by his second wife, 35-year-old Helle.

In an emotional inaugural address, Meri described his country as a “frail and troubled Estonia, with many scars, some of which still bleed.”

But he expressed optimism that his country, which preserved a sense of national identity through the half-century of Soviet occupation, will pull through.

“These economic hardships will end as quickly as you, the men and women of Estonia, begin to believe in your own strength and begin to stand on your own two feet,” Meri told his constituents. “You have been servants; you will become masters.”

Biography Name: Lennart Meri Title: First post-Soviet president of Estonia. Age: 62 Personal: Film director and nonfiction writer. Entered politics at age 60. Served as minister of foreign affairs and as ambassador to Finland. Son of a leading diplomat during Estonia’s short-lived independence between the first and second world wars. Has two sons; also has a kindergarten-age daughter by his second wife, 35-year-old Helle. Quote: “I already hate being president. What I would really like to do right now is curl up between my pillows with a cup of tea and read ‘Huck Finn.’ ”