Sweden has unsealed and published around 500 pages of previously classified diplomatic cables describing the period from 1989 and up until the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.
The cables, 89 separate documents sent to Stockholm by diplomats posted in Moscow, Leningrad (St Petersburg), Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius, depict in sometimes breathtaking detail the Soviet Union’s virtually day-by-day demise.
“I don’t want to dramatise, but I must point out that the risk of a civil war is clear,” reads one cable from the then Swedish ambassador in Moscow, Oerjan Berner, dated August 20, 1991.
That was in the middle of the two-day August Coup, when hardline members of the Communist Party tried to oust President Mikhail Gorbachev, an event that ultimately led to the downfall of the Soviet Union a few months later.
“There’s no question that this was the most demanding period for the conduct of Swedish foreign policy since the mid-1940s. It was a time when everything was in flux in Europe and particularly in our part of Euorpe,” Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt told a seminar on the release Thursday evening.
“It was a daily drama ... There were a number of attempts by armed forces to turn things back, (and) things could have gone horribly, horribly wrong. They did not. It ended peacefully,” he added.
Dag Sebastian Ahlander, who was general consul in Leningrad from 1989 to 1992 and the author of a number of the cables, said he was thrilled at Thursday’s release.
“This is a field day for historians,” he told the Stockholm seminar.
Unlike the more than 250,000 classified US diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks has been slowly releasing in recent months, the Swedish documents – 108 pages printed up in book form and the rest posted on the foreign ministry website – are not likely to unveil shocking or scandalous details.
Mr Bildt pointed out that only cables containing Swedish diplomats’ own assessment of the situation had been made public.
“We decided not to disclose what other governments have said to the Swedish government at the time. That is up to the respective governments,” he said.
And unlike other situations where diplomatic assessments might be sensitive, Mr Bildt stressed that “this does not affect our relationship with any existing nation. The Soviet Union is no longer with us, and we are rather happy to note that.”
Sweden’s top diplomat said another reason to publish the documents was to contribute to the current debate linked to the WikiLeaks release: “Do we need diplomats to do secret reporting?”
After going through the Swedish cables, “the answer is obviously yes,” he said, insisting “there is the need for confidential assessment of critical situations, and it has to be confidential, or else it can’t be done.”
While Mr Bildt described the cables as “Sweden’s consular work at its very best,” former charge d’affaires in Riga, Lars Freden, was harshly critical.
At Thursday’s seminar he blasted the lack of support he had received from Stockholm at a time of chaos.
“I spent a lot of time trying to convince the foreign ministry that we were grossly understaffed, and I didn’t succeed,” he said.
“I never received any instructions on what I should say. In retrospect, that was very fortunate,” he said, referring to Stockholm’s slowness in recognising that the Soviet era was ending.