Priit Vesilind, writer who penetrated the Iron Curtain, dies at 80
As a child during World War II, Priit Vesilind escaped Nazi-occupied Estonia with his family ahead of an advancing Soviet army bent on recapturing their homeland and dragging it back into the U.S.S.R.
The family’s flight to the West culminated in a harrowing trek across Germany to American lines, followed by four years in a refugee camp and, eventually, resettlement in Pennsylvania.
Years later, as a senior writer and editor for National Geographic magazine, Mr. Vesilind slipped back into Estonia on one of a series of trips to chronicle life behind the Iron Curtain. He covered the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, even taking a sledgehammer to it as crowds dismantled the barrier between East and West Berlin that physically symbolized the separation of the Moscow-controlled Communist bloc from Western democracies.
“I couldn’t hold back the tears,” Mr. Vesilind said later of the intense experience that heralded the dissolution of the Soviet Union. “I could only scribble and weep, scribble and weep.”
Mr. Vesilind died Nov. 3 in Manassas, Va., of complications from strokes and a cranial fistula following dementia, said his daughter, Emili Vesilind. He was 80.
During a three-decade career at National Geographic, Mr. Vesilind served as the magazine’s adventure and expeditions editor and European specialist. He circled the globe and explored the oceans, diving to the wreck of the battleship Arizona at Pearl Harbor and descending four miles into the Atlantic in a Russian submersible in search of a Japanese submarine sunk by U.S. forces during the war.
He dived deep into fresh water in the Yucatán to explore ancient Mayan caves, hunted seal with Inuits, retraced the travels of the Vikings and chased twisters in Tornado Alley across 10 states of the Plains and Southwest.
In his first major story for National Geographic, Mr. Vesilind journeyed the length of the Ohio River, which he had fished in as a child, and stopped in cities and towns along the way. For that assignment, he worked for a while on a towboat, toiled at a West Virginia coal terminal and sold peanuts at a ballgame in Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium.
But his most impactful reporting took place behind the Iron Curtain, notably his risky foray into his native Estonia on a tourist visa in 1980, followed by trips to other realms of the Soviet bloc.
Those journeys not only helped Americans understand the plight of inhabitants of the Baltic states, but also offered a glimmer of hope to those citizens. His April 1980 piece, “Return to Estonia,” was passed around clandestinely in his Soviet-occupied homeland, inspiring Estonians by capturing their aspirations for freedom.
After Estonia declared independence amid the Soviet Union’s collapse, the country’s new president, Lennart Meri, awarded Mr. Vesilind a medal, the Third Order of the White Star, in recognition of “his contributions to the liberation of Estonia,” a citation said.
“He was like a national hero in Estonia,” Glenn Oeland, an editor at National Geographic, told The Washington Post. “People were very heartened by that story. Priit helped get the word out about what was going on there” under Soviet rule, “and Estonian people felt like they had not been forgotten.”
Priit Juho Vesilind was born in Tallinn, the Estonian capital, on Jan. 4, 1943. His father was an engineer for an automaker, and his mother worked in a bank.
The next year, after Soviet bombers struck Tallinn and Red Army troops attacked, Mr. Vesilind’s mother fled with Priit and his older brother by train to Czechoslovakia. His father stayed behind but later jumped on a ship bound for Danzig (now Gdansk in Poland) and eventually met up with his wife and sons.