Long-serving Maardu mayor dies in office
Georgi Bõstrov, mayor of Maardu from 1996 to 2013, and again from this year, died in his office on Thursday from heart failure.
Maardu is considered a satellite town of Tallinn, but is in fact Estonia's seventh largest town with 17,500 people, roughly the same size as Viljandi.
Bõstrov complained of health problems on Thursday and his heart stopped at 16:10. Medics were unable to resuscitate him. He turned 71 five days ago.
Bõstrov was the mayor from 1996 until 2013, after which he held the chairman of the council seat in Maardu city council. He became mayor again at the beginning of the current year.
He was born in 1944 in Petseri County between Pskov and Võru. He studied at a technical university in Tallinn, before studying administration and law in St. Petersburg and in Moscow, graduating in 1993 and 2001 respectively, Delfi reported.
Bõstrov was never a member of any of the large party. At the 2004 European Parliament elections, he won 6,183 votes, promising to make Russian one of the official languages in the EU. He was criticized by the Language Inspectorate for weak Estonian-language skills at the beginning of 2015.
Editor: J.M. Laats