Ghosts of the Communist Past: Victims, Perpetrators and the Pursuit of Transitional Justice

The pursuit of transitional justice has proven to be a very problematic process in different forms and degrees throughout post-communist Eastern Europe. Since the collapse of the communist regimes in 1989, most governments of these post-communist countries have initiated a mechanism of transitional justice to reconcile past and present and bring perpetrators of communist crimes to justice. While some countries seem to have enacted some form of the process, others are still going through it and some have yet to start. It is difficult to bring the perpetrators of crimes to justice and restore the dignity of a regime’s victims without raising issues of political selectivity of the indicted, flawed evidence and politicization of cases.

The concept of transitional justice itself brings forth legal contradiction. As political systems change and transition, what was legal and even encouraged in one system can become a reason for persecution in the next. Though “perpetrators” might have never broken the law in the previous communist system, they face consequences in the new democratic one subject to new legal structures. Although contradictory by nature, transitional justice is indeed a very necessary process for reconciliation with the past and moving on.

Academics have been actively following and recording the attempts of post-communist governments in Europe to effectively amend the injustices of past regimes. In Transitional Justice in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, a collection of essays on transitional justice in post-communist nations, Vladimir Tismaneanu sums up the attempt of post-communist governments to deal with their criminal past and pursue transitional justice via three steps of de-communization: “1) political lustration of perpetrators and collaborators with the communist system (temporarily banning from public office former members of the party bureaucracy and secret police officers and informers); 2) [give] ordinary citizens access to their own files in Secret Police archives; 3) trials and court proceedings launched against former communist dignitaries and secret police officers/agents charged with human rights abuses.” In this process of transitional justice, they continue, “the boundaries between victims, by-standers and perpetrators have often been elusive, and efforts to bring perpetrators to justice have resulted in frustrating settlings of accounts and hollow rhetorical battles.” After the collapse of communist regimes, power dynamics, flawed documents and biased “truth committees” have raised questions about the legitimacy of the court decisions. These truth committees have been consistently criticized for being politically biased and selective in their application of justice.

One big obstacle and conundrum of transitional justice stems directly from the fact that most of these regimes had a vast number of collaborators. Also cited in Transitional Justice is the fact that the Romanian Securitate employed 15,000 officers and between 400,000 and 700,000 informers; the East German Stasi employed some 90,000 officers and 150,000 active informers; and the Soviet KGB is believed to have counted almost half a million agents. It is necessary to note that even though monetary and non-monetary benefits alike were available to informers, many informers spied out of fear for themselves and the well being of family members, misplaced patriotism or blackmail. Considering this, one must question which of these people voluntarily perpetrated crimes and how they should be brought to justice, as well as how to distinguish and protect the victims.

An interesting critique of the often-flawed pursuit for transitional justice arises from such systematic and bureaucratic power dynamics in political systems that often blur lines between perpetrators and victims. In communist systems, each answered to another of a higher rank, who answered to yet another of an even higher rank. This continued all the way to elite party leadership. Even the Secret Police as an institution, and all its employees, answered to the Party. In light of this power hierarchy, it is almost impossible to correctly distinguish between perpetrators and those who were forced or “were just doing their job.”

Another big obstacle in distinguishing the often fine line between victims and perpetrators is that many files from the Secret Services have been destroyed or are unavailable. In addition, former communists and dissidents have questioned the integrity of such files. This raises the question of which documents contain false accusations and whether former communists and dissidents are trying to exculpate themselves before their own files and crimes go public.

George Orwell remarked in 1984 that “He who controls the past controls the future; he who controls the present controls the past.” The control and manipulation of the historical record can be very well applied to the perplexing situation of transitional justice. This is reflected in the many attempts by post-communist governments to achieve political goals at the expense of transitional justice. Lavinia Stan, the editor of Transitional Justice, writes that Estonia and Latvia marginalized former Soviet party officials and KGB agents by denying them citizenship in the new state, thus depriving them of the important political rights of voting and electoral eligibility. The current Macedonian government has used such political tools in a similar fashion, targeting critically opposed intellectuals, discrediting them and denying them the right to run for a public office. These examples illustrate how those who control the present can manipulate the past and why the pursuit of transitional justice can be problematic.

Under Ion Iliescu, the once right-hand collaborator of Nicolae Ceausescu and first democratically elected president of Romania, “political justice [was] postponed sine die in the name of politically-manipulated and self-serving understanding of reconciliation,” writes Tismaneanu in Transitional Justice. Many documents of the Romanian Securitate are to this day unavailable to the public. A similar situation can be found in Russia. To present, Russia has done very little to deal with its brutal communist past. Even though few victims were acknowledged and even fewer reparations paid, until recently there has been no statewide attempt to acknowledge and compensate for the crimes of the previous Soviet regime. This should not come as a surprise, however, given that a vast number of the post-communist political elites were groomed by communist leaders and or were members of the secret services. Perhaps the most notable example is Prime Minister Putin’s collaboration with the Russian KGB. Recently, President Medvedev has initiated a “Historical Truth Committee” to deal with this issue, a step that has been widely seen and criticized as an attempt to politicize the process, rewrite history, and target political opponents.

The harsh truth is that these regimes were not run by extraterrestrials. Documented crimes took place, and guilty individuals can and should be brought to trial. An even harsher truth is that transitional justice will never be impeccably conducted—there will always be unpunished perpetrators and mistaken victims. Approaching transitional justice must be done prudently, always bearing in mind that all of society needs to participate in national conversations about the past. There must also be nationwide repentance before there can be nationwide reconciliation.

Coming to terms with the communist past is undoubtedly hard and perplexing, but it must be done with trust and openness in order to close one chapter of history and move on to the next. Instead of pointing fingers and passing blame, post-communist countries should, for the sake of a better tomorrow, focus on reconciliation.