Peeter Mei

Peeter Mei (until April 8, 1935, Mey; until April 30, 1935, Peter Friedrich Eustachius; April 24, 1893 – November 27, 1941) was an Estonian military officer.^[1][2]

Peeter Mei graduated from the Russian Naval Cadet Corps^[2][3] and was a coastal defense commander and artillery expert.^[1] He served in the First World War from November 1914 to May 1916 as an officer in the coastal batteries of Peter the Great's Naval Fortress (in coastal batteries nos. 5 and 6 on Naissaar and in coastal battery no. 35 in the village of Lepiku in the southern part of Hiiumaa); from November 1915 to May 1916, he was the commander of coastal battery no. 37 in Dirhami.^[2]

On August 22, 1921, he was arrested in St. Petersburg as a counter-revolutionary and an Estonian secret agent, and he was exchanged as a prisoner for Estonia on March 16, 1922. On May 9, 1922, Mei joined the Estonian Navy and served as an officer and commander of the coastal battery no. 1 on the island of Aegna until December 15, 1924. He was then appointed as an artillery officer of the Technical Department of the Naval Staff.^[2] He held the rank of lieutenant senior grade (Estonian: vanemleitnant),^[3] and he was promoted to captain major (Estonian: kaptenmajor) in the Estonian Navy in 1928.^[1]

After the occupation of Estonia, Mei was demobilized at the end of 1940. On August 8, 1941, Mei was mobilized into the Soviet Army and sent to Leningrad.^[2] He was later assigned to a labor battalion at the Ivdel gulag in the Sverdlovsk Oblast, where he died, apparently from typhus.^[2]

Peeter Mei was the son of the hydrographer Johan Mey.^[1][3][4] His sisters were the artists Kristine Mei, Lydia Mei, and Natalie Mei.^[1]

In 2021, the Estonian Art Museum's Art Lovers' Society presented the Art Museum of Estonia with a bust of Peeter Mei created by the sculptor Anton Starkopf in the 1920s.^[5][6]