not easy, the job of diplomat these days ... Your telegrams and other reports deemed to be confidential may land on the site Wikileaks or elsewhere. Internet and social networks mean that information - verified or not - runs so fast that your analysis might appear stale overnight. Even in dictatorships, in principle, very little open to the outside world, where once the diplomat had the advantage of being there, even when the Western media were not allowed. And then there is the politicization some of your leaders, ambassadors appointed to represent less a state that President and (try to) correct any errors in controlling the latter. Interestingly, the yardstick then, to read the reports laid by Swedish diplomats about the Baltic republics of the USSR, when they emancipated from Moscow to regain their freedom. The Swedish government has decided to publish them with 30 years ahead of the law, and at the 20th anniversary of the return of Baltic independence. This reconquest was not an easy task and if it went ahead without great bloodshed, it was, too, its share of tension and drama. This video shows, performed by the Latvian Juris Podnieks and his team in a (vain) attempt to regain control by OMON, police Soviet, January 21, 1991 in Riga:
Twenty years.
I have the impression that there was much longer. The Baltic countries have changed considerably since then, deep and surface. Working conditions also: watch digital copies of the Swedish diplomatic notes typed on typewriters antediluvian, it returns us to the era before the Internet, before cell phones (I'm glad to have known that time in my early days in journalism, even if the end was close).
admit having, for now, read a small part some 90 documents - in Swedish - is now available to the public . Having traveled some, I'm not sure of the real interest they represent for me, while I have no time to even half of what I want. In addition, the proposed method of reading is not easy. It was thought in the Internet age, it is sometimes inconvenient or inappropriate. The digitization of old typed reports tend to make more blurred characters, I assure you: do the test yourself (unless my view has fallen!). * * * Rather than break me eyes, I'm going back into a book written by one of the Swedish diplomats stationed in then USSR. Dag Sebastian Ahlander was Consul General in Leningrad during these critical years. Since 1992, he recounted in a book its field missions, the climate of suspicion
, travels and his meetings in Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius to decrypt the outcome of the standoff, a priori imbalances that had hired independent pendants with Moscow. To write his book Spelet om Baltikum ( game around the Baltic , Norstedts), Ahlander drew on the wealth of information he passed to his superiors in the form of telegrams. The same, at least in part, as those made public (so very readable ...) by the Swedish government. Another diplomat, consul in Riga from 1989 to 1991, also largely reproduced in a book the raw material he had accumulated on site (Lars Freden, Förvandlingar , ed. Atlantis, which was followed by another on the period 1991-1994, cf. this article in Swedish). From all this, Stockholm refrained from speaking with his initiative. In a statement , the Ministry of Foreign Affairs evokes "a lot of diplomatic relations remained secret until then, from the period drama of the fall of the Soviet Union" . After all, it's fair game, even if one would rather expect this kind of practice and rhetoric on the part of newspapers and publishing houses ...
Visiting Riga a week ago, Fredrik Reinfeldt, Swedish Prime Minister ( left in the photo curator actually) , has used the same method to tout the release of archives "secret" Swedish. Dombrovskis, his Latvian counterpart, was apparently unaware of the existence of books of the two diplomats. He praised the initiative as constituting Swedish "a major step in deepening our knowledge and the process was ongoing at the time" . And it is quite possible, indeed, said that diplomatic notes have historical value for researchers working on the subject. Most interesting are they now available? Not sure ... For Stockholm has kept an unknown number in her cupboards. Again, it's fair game. A little transparency okay, all the transparency, good damage. * * * 
Later, during the official visit, Fredrik Reinfeldt held a speech (in ang-lais) more on the ELO-religious recipe "economic success" Swedish to students at the Stockholm School of Economics Riga (long-financed by the authorities). Once the applause exhausted, I met Carl Bildt, the chief diplomat of the kingdom, to trays of petits fours. Why be "declassified" - oh the anglicism - Swedish archives? Answer: "The time was dramatic: the end of the USSR ... Sweden, as a neighboring country, followed closely what was happening in the Baltics. The reports sent by our diplomats were highly significant and of great quality. make public today is our contribution to the writing of a history fair in those years. " 20 years ago, Carl Bildt was not yet familiar scenes of diplomatic meetings between "senior" leaders of this continent, even in this world. He was beanpole who, as head of the Conservative Party, led the opposition "bourgeois" with the hope of dislodging the Social Democrats from power. In autumn 1991, he succeeded at the age of 42 years. In his role as prime minister, he was particular to manage the Swedish policy vis-à-vis the new Russia of Boris Yeltsin and the Baltic which, it still does not remember, had to tolerate the presence of elements of Russian army (ex-Red Army) until 1994.
Carl Bildt was also forced to work to make people forget about some unfortunate decisions or other Swedish politicians against the Baltic states. Stockholm was one of the few Western capitals to recognize their annexation by the USSR during the second world war. Much later, during a visit to the USSR in the fall of 1989, the then Minister (Social Democratic) business, Sten Andersson fire, had the misfortune to say that Estonia was " not busy " and activists Baltic proindépendantistes constituted only a" minority " (it would explained in his memoirs, extracts of which here in Swedish). In the joyous atmosphere that prevailed cocktail at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga, I remembered Carl Bildt these less stellar for his State: "It should not be very easy for you [ we are familiar terms in Swedish] at the time, go behind and pick up the pieces ... "
Bildt lowered his head a little - it's bigger than me - and said, planting his blue eyes on mine: "It was a challenging period ..." .
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