In 1904–1905, Teemant was a member of the Tallinn Municipal Council. He participated in the 1905 Revolution, and was elected head of the All-Estonian Congress, held in Tartu in November 1905. His activities during the revolution forced him into exile in Switzerland; while there, he was sentenced to death in absentia. After the state of martial law imposed after the revolution was lifted and his death sentence was revoked, Teemant returned to Estonia in 1908. There, he was arrested and held in pretrial detention in 1908–1909, and then sentenced to one and a half years in prison. He served his prison sentence in Saint Petersburg, and then spent 1911–1913 in penal exile in the Arkhangelsk province in northern Russia.
Teemant was named an honorary doctor of law at the University of Tartu in 1932.[2] In 1939–1940, he was the Estonian trustee in the German Trustee Government, an organisation managing the property of the resettled Baltic Germans.
Arrest and fate
Following the June 1940 Soviet invasion and occupation of Estonia and the other Baltic states, Teemant was arrested by the NKVD on 23 July. He is believed to have been shot in Tallinn, or to have died in Patarei Prison. According to other sources, he was handed a 10-year sentence in a prison camp on 21 October 1941, with no further information about his fate.[3]