Dear Mr. Chairman of the Riigikogu; dear Director-General of the National Library, Mrs. Ivi Eenmaa; dear assistant directors; the personnel; the architect, Mr. Raine Karp; masons and carpenters, printers and bookbinders, old and young readers, electorate of the Riigikogu and those elected to the Riigikogu; in short - dear fellow countrymen and dear fellows of the cultural world!

Today we are opening the Estonian National Library. If the world moves towards human values, this house will be the most solid stronghold in the Republic of Estonia; the most fertile field of the Republic of Estonia; the most productive factory; and the most hygienic maternity home where the nation is going to reproduce itself, for the nation consists of people, and no people can live outside of culture, just as no nation can live outside of culture.

Having said this, I have said everything a president may have to say: here under this roof the future potential of the Republic of Estonia dwells side by side with the past potential of the Republic of Estonia. As always, it is for the people to make the choice. I believe it is the future of the Republic of Estonia they will choose from the bookshelves. This is my belief. But I know that the probability of making the right choice will grow the more the people will read and the greater the variation of books they will read.

Back in the spring I was once strolling down a street. Unfortunately, it does not happen very often any more that I should just stroll along, less so alone. This is a good reason by itself why I remember that happy afternoon, a while when one's thoughts are as free as one's legs or as chance. And the idea that struck me at that happy moment of solitude and which so wildly amused me was this: what would the Soviet Union have been like and how would it have disintegrated if, through an improbable coincidence of chances, Spinoza had been pronounced the prophet instead of Marx? Or Immanuel Kant? I was amused by my fancy of a Politbureau where Kant would be quoted; the boom of speeches through six hours of a party congress where Kant is quoted: and a standing ovation.

However, the outcome of this improbable experiment would have been precisely the same: that utopian Soviet Union would have murdered and devoured its children in precisely the same manner; it would have wasted the capital accumulated by the parents and thereafter devastated and polluted the natural environment belonging to the children and grandchildren in precisely the same manner; upon the loss of its creativity, it would have built up the world's biggest army to prolong its own agony at the expense of the world in precisely the same manner as the Soviet Union constructed on the basis of Marx. This is why utopias are just as dangerous as nuclear weapons: they are based on a single idea, refusing to tolerate another idea before them, to say nothing of the pluralism of ideas. In this sense utopias are as dangerous as half-educated people, called the intelligentsia and who prefer the lazy unconcern of cocksure believing to the pains of choosing, hence to the necessity of thinking. And here we have come close to my perpetual hobby-horse: man lives inside culture and has survived inside culture, since culture is, above all, pluralism - the smiling adversary of all utopias. And further: humankind is the stronger the more it blends the pluralism of cultures. Every national culture is the the aggregate experience of all the previous generations. We may assert without any qualm of sounding rhetorical: today, after the opening of the Estonian National Library, the world will have become stronger, since the Estonian national culture will have become more secure.

What I have just said has a reverse side to it, which can very easily prove my idea.

Towards the end of the Russian era the second edition of the Soviet Estonian Encyclopedia was started. The first volume came out in 1985. People had stood in queues through a whole night to be able to subscribe for the encyclopedia, and the subscriptions amounted to 220,000 - for a population of one million. The propaganda presented this as a triumph of the cultural policy of Soviet power. In actual fact it was a desperate and touching bid at self-defence by a nation doomed to extinction under the massive steamroller of russification. A farewell wave to children and grandchildren. What we should glorify and immortalize is not the mammoth edition of the book - that, actually, was a symptom of a mortal illness - but Estonians' profound conviction of the omnipotence of the printed word. The same conviction has been characteristic of many other threatened peoples. In the middle of last century the three leading European peoples for literacy were Scots, Estonians and Finns.

The book, my dear fellow countrymen, is certainly a wonder. I have watched and filmed illiterate folk singers whose repetoire could fill eighty printed volumes of the size of the Kalevala. I have pondered a lot upon the turning point between two eras. There was an era when all the experience needed for life could be carried along in our brains. And then the era came when a constantly increasing proportion of our memory was placed on bookshelves. The milestone on that boundary is Gutenberg. I have asked myself: who will be the next Gutenberg? He is amidst us already.

But today the mirror image is more important: today we are amidst the Gutenberg galaxy. And the axis of that galaxy is the Estonian culture in its constant renewal.

Congratulations, Director-General Ivi Eenmaa; congratulations, Estonia!

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