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I was born together with Lahemaa National Park and grew up in Linnaserehe, an outbuilding of Palmse Manor. My father Juhan Lepik was a nature conservation inspector in Lahemaa and my mother a soil geographer. Obviously Lahemaa National Park has played a big role in my life. Five years ago, when Lahemaa National Park celebrated its 50th anniversary, the tape recordings made by my father Juhan Lepik, which I digitised with the help of friends, were published. To my surprise I found them online even now: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFW8aj9BiIoyeIT7qvugGAIOcvH-FvZ26

What the situation with Lahemaa National Park is at the moment has remained a little unclear to me. At some point I got the impression that the term national park in the Republic of Estonia meant a subpage on the Environmental Board’s website. These subpages were kept alive by the wish — tiresome to others — of the Environmental Board employee Ave Paulus and a couple of other enthusiasts to post something on them from time to time. Now Ave lives in Norway and the current situation is even less clear to me.

I had long been thinking of marking the 55th anniversary of Lahemaa National Park somehow for myself. As I remember it, Lahemaa, the first national park of the Soviet Union, began with the idea of Jaan Eilart, one of the founders of organised Estonian nature conservation. As was fitting for that time, a Lenin quotation was needed to carry out the idea. A little unusual and strange in today’s European Union. Many Estonian nature people know the fact — before the revolution Lenin was in exile in Switzerland, and in an article written there he said an appreciative sentence about the need for nature reserves and parks. For this Lahemaa anniversary I thought I would find the exact source and wording of that sentence.

To help with the work I took Claude AI, a tool using Anthropic’s LLM, the obvious flagship of the 21st-century mathematics of June 2026 that also reaches my desk, and a couple of friends to whom I could put questions. Lenin’s Russian-language works are relatively well digitised and indexed. Searching for articles written in Switzerland and for a similar quotation, the result was zero. It seemed that Jaan Eilart was a brave man. He bluffed, counting on how extremely difficult it was to check at the time. Had the bluff come out, a long prison sentence would probably have awaited him.

I was already resigning myself to the result when I put on the cap of the boy from the special mathematics and physics class of Rakvere Secondary School No. 1. I tried to find the words park and Lenin in one document, article, book or whatever published text. And that search was successful. In one Russian-language text corpus there was a general decree issued by the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) on 16 September 1921, entitled “On the protection of natural monuments, gardens and parks”, with Lenin’s signature under it.

The second point of this decree says word for word that larger natural areas remarkable for their monuments are declared zapovedniks and national parks (объявляются заповедниками и национальными парками). The third point adds that land under zapovedniks and national parks may not be taken for cultivation or for the extraction of natural resources without the permission of the Commissariat of Education. Sources: REGNUM (news agency), the project “Исторические Материалы” (istmat.info), where the full text of the decree is available, and Юнциклопедия. That this is not a later edit: activestudy.info confirms that in 1920 Lenin signed the decree establishing the Ilmen mineralogical zapovednik and on 16 September 1921 Sovnarkom issued, with Lenin’s signature, a general decree on the protection of natural monuments, gardens and parks.

The existence of such a decree in the Russia of 1921 is so-so. For example, the REGNUM reference comes from a 2022 article glorifying Putin. Having lived in the Estonian SSR, I remember that it was not quite the Republic of Estonia in the European Union of 2026. Here, now and then, even I have noticed that newspaper articles have the faintest connection with reality. In the Estonian SSR, as I remember it, things were not so good.

So go figure what Jaan Eilart actually based Lahemaa National Park on in his time.

A happy anniversary year to all my acquaintances connected with Lahemaa.