Politics & Power Quote by Lennart Meri

A radio, in Meri's telling, isn’t a gadget; it’s a lifeline. The image of “swimming with the current political streams in the West” turns information into a physical environment you either move through or drown in. For a man who lived under Soviet domination and later became the first president of a re-independent Estonia, that metaphor carries consequence: Western broadcasts weren’t entertainment, they were orientation. To be “never stranded” is to avoid the most dangerous condition of life behind the Iron Curtain - not simply censorship, but isolation so thorough it makes alternative futures feel unimaginable.

The intent is quietly defiant. Meri isn’t bragging about savvy news consumption; he’s describing a private act of geopolitical belonging. The subtext is that the West existed for him as a moral and political reference point long before Estonia could publicly claim it. “Always” hints at discipline, even risk: listening could be a habit practiced in the margins, in kitchens and bedrooms, where a citizen rehearses a different civic identity than the one the state demands.

Context sharpens the line’s sting. In late Soviet life, official media specialized in manufactured inevitability. Meri’s radio punctures that spell. It lets him track “streams” - plural - suggesting he understood the West not as propaganda’s cartoon enemy but as a contested, living political ecosystem. The quote works because it frames freedom as a flow of information: not abstract rights, but a current you can enter, and a map that keeps you from being washed into silence.