Who represented the Council of Lithuania in Sweden?

Abstract

The research reveals who and when was authorized to represent the Council of Lithuania in Swe-den, and how the German Government and the military leadership reacted to the documents published by the Lithuanians on the 3rd and the 6th January, 1918 in Stockholm, which were published in the Swedish and Danish press. After the research, we can state that until May 27th, 1918, the Council of Lithuania was unrepresented in Sweden. However, the nation of Lithuania was represented. This function was carried out by the representatives of the Lithuanian Society who have received Charges d`Affaires certificates. They were under the supervision of the Russian Imperial diplomatic service. Neither Jurgis Savickis, nor Ignas Šeinius, nor Jonas Aukštuolis had the authorization from the Council of Lithuania to represent the Council of Lithuania in Sweden. They were correspondents of the Lithuanian Information Bureau (LIB), meaning that they supplied information to the bureau under the leadership of J. Gabrys. After May 27, 1918, the representation of the Council of Lithuania could have been (however it does not mean that it actually was) a component of the representation of the Council of Lithuania in Germany. The reaction of the German government and the German military authorities to the demands set by the Lithuanian Conference in January 3, 1918, in Swedish and Danish press, was very unfavourable, and they have sought for ways to convince the Lithuanians in Stockholm of the „correct way of thinking”. Immediately they have sent J. Šaulys there from Berlin. Until the 6th of January, 1918 – the declaration of independence from Russia as announced in the Swedish press, the German government and the German military authorities were not seen to have a reaction. The research on the representation of the Council of Lithuania in Sweden was carried out on the basis of published (press, published documents) and unpublished sources (from the Lithuanian Central State Archives, the fund of the Political Archive of the German Foreign Office (RZ 201), and the Manu-scripts Department of the Vilnius University Library (F. 155–366)). The research resorted to the methods of qualitative analysis and synthesis (the new material of the sources was supplemented with the infor-mation circulating in historiography), the comparative method (the facts found in Lithuanian and German archives and the press are compared), and the descriptive method. To process the primary sources in Lith-uanian and German languages, the logical–analytical method was applied (the notional content and infor-mation analysis was conducted).