Bibliotek i Västmanland

Swedish author Mr. Bertil Haggman, LL.M. since 1964 personally knew H.E. Prime Minister Yaroslav Stetsko and his wife Yaroslava/Slava Stetsko of Ukraine. They were leaders in a struggle to set the subjugated peoples of the Soviet Union free. Yaroslav Stetsko survived during the Second World War in a Nazi concentration together with President Stepan Bandera. After the assassination of Bandera in a KGB poison attack in Munich, Germany, in 1959 the Stetskos took over the heavy responsibility to lead the Ukrainians and other peoples in the march toward freedom. Mr. Stetsko did not live to see the collapse of the Soviet tyranny but his wife Yaroslava did. She was even elected to the parliament (Rada) in Kyiv in the beginning of the 1990s.

There were many Scandinavians who supported and worked with the Stetskos. Some of them are remembered in this second volume of Haggman’s political memoirs. Both Sweden and Denmark played an important role in the fight for freedom and democracy of Ukraine and the Baltic countries between 1943 and 1991. The focus here is on the European Freedom Council (EFC).  It was formed in July 1967 to be a coordinating body of organizations fighting for freedom and against communism. The first president of the Council was the former Foreign Minister of Denmark, Ole Bjørn Kraft, former Vice-President of the European Council and member of the Danish Parliament. The author of this book was a board member from 1985 to 1991. EFC worked closely with the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN). It was a co-ordinating center for anti-communist political organizations from Soviet and other socialist countries active worldwide. Formed at an underground conference of representatives of non-Russian peoples on November 21-22, 1943 near Zhytomyr (Ukraine) it was influential in the West during the Cold War.

When the archives of ABN-EFC are made available in the future it will be possible to more in detail describe the struggle that started during the Second World War. Unfortunately the archive of the Baltic Committee in Sweden was lost in the years after 1991. Thus it has only been possible to reconstruct some of its work by way of the unpublished memoirs of it’s first chairman, Professor Birger Nerman. The book ”Baltiska Kommittén 1943 – 2008” (Stockholm 2008) is based on excerpts from the memoirs in manuscript of Professor Nerman. It is available in Swedish only but deserves translation into both English and Ukrainian.