Why the Secret Police?

Totalitarianism was composed of concentric circles of power. Secret, inner, and conspiratorial cores controlled outer layers, in an onion-like political structure. The secret police and the Party cut through the onion-shaped structure of the state where bureaucracies within bureaucracies held increasing yet parallel powers (Arendt Reference Arendt1973, 430). For example, the Nazi Party-controlled front organization, the SA, was formed within the Nazi Party, and then the SS was formed within it, followed by the formation of special units within the SS, the Shock Troops and then the Dead Head units, which later formed the Waffen SS, and finally, the Security Service and the Office for Questions of Race and Resettlement controlled the special units. Except for those at its highest echelon, SS members remained in their civilian jobs and controlled society. Himmler, the head of the SS, also became the head of the Gestapo in 1934 and replaced Gestapo men with SS members. New controls were always needed to control the controllers, and those who controlled them. The system of control and actual distribution of power had to be shrouded in secrecy and mystery, so nobody knew who exactly controlled whom and everybody lived in constant terror of the unknown informer and controller (Arendt Reference Arendt1973, 368–369).

In Arendt’s opinion (Reference Arendt1973, 420) the domination of the secret police rather than the military in revolutionary totalitarian societies reflected the regimes’ claim to global domination, marked by the abolition of distinctions between home and abroad, domestic and foreign. The Soviet secret police controlled and homogenized not only the Soviet Communist Party, but also foreign Communist parties and front organizations. The military in totalitarian states, by contrast, was trained to fight exclusively foreign military forces rather than its own people. After the liquidation of all the real enemies of totalitarianism in Russia by 1930 and Germany by 1935, the secret police eliminated the “objective enemies,” people who did not fight the regime or even considered themselves its enemies. The military was purged as well, but did not participate in the purging.

The late-totalitarian elite limited the powers of the secret police. Some post-Stalinist Communist leaders themselves survived the “hospitality” of the secret police. They knew that in order to be secure in power, they had to control the secret police. Institutionally, controlling the secret police was achieved by prohibiting it from recruiting agents in the Communist Party without the permission of the Party elite. The last country to institute this control of the secret police by the party was Romania in 1968, though the Securitate maintained relative independence in comparison with other Soviet Bloc comparable institutions. The struggle between the secret police and the Communist Party in Romania came to a decisive and violent end there only in 1989 when the military allied with the Communist Party fought the Securitate secret police.

During late totalitarianism the secret police and its network of informants continued to control society, though only rarely through the physical elimination of potential or imagined enemies. The task of the secret police was no longer the transformation of society, but the preservation of the late-totalitarian system and its elite. The secret police continued to shadow all social institutions and interactions and controlled all external relations including trade and the issuing of visas and passports, employing a vast army of informers. Outside the Soviet Union, a Soviet “advisor” was attached to each secret police department and a regular flow of information was channeled to Moscow. The totalitarian system of control was eventually conducive for the collapse of totalitarianism in East-Central Europe because the local secret police lacked the experience of acting without instructions from the KGB. When the KGB and its local agents in the local secret services and Communist party did not resist, if not actively assist, the downfall of totalitarianism, the local leaders tumbled like marionettes whose strings were suddenly severed. As Bunce (Reference Bunce1999, 70–71, 134–135) noted, the three countries where the fall of Communism was not painless and peaceful, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Albania, were also the three countries where Soviet troops were not stationed, and where the local security forces and Communist Party did not take orders from Moscow.

It may appear puzzling that the center of power in totalitarianism and late totalitarianism was the secret police and not the military. The power of the military in authoritarian regimes is easy to understand: those with the biggest guns, artillery, tanks, airplanes, and so on “call the shots.” In totalitarian regimes, the military is subdued and controlled, even purged during the revolutionary stage, by a smaller institution equipped mostly with light weapons. The secret weapon of the secret police was its vast clandestine army of informants, an army of conscripts and volunteers that was much larger than itself. The lethal weapon of this unarmed army of informants was its anonymity. Since it was impossible to distinguish friend from foe, every person was a possible foe and could not be trusted. Like any minority in power, the totalitarian elite sought to rule by dividing its subjects and encouraging mutual conflicts and mistrust. It carried this method to extreme by dividing society into its constituent individual or later familial atoms. This originally Chekist Russian Communist model has since been emulated in all totalitarian societies. The effect was the division and dissolution of all opposition. Without mutual trust there could be no resistance movements, groups, or parties. The secret police had to confront only a collection of disaffected individuals (McAdams Reference McAdams2001, 62–63; Waller Reference Waller, Berman and Waller2006).

Since the totalitarian secret police consisted mostly of hidden networks, political and institutional reforms could not eliminate them. The experience of networks overcoming, subverting, or negotiating with institutions has been universal in post-totalitarian societies (Howard Reference Howard2003, 26–28). The weakness of the post-totalitarian state, the underdevelopment of political institutions, and the weakness of the rule of law have made informal networks with access to the state more powerful than in established liberal states.

The secret police had by far the widest, thickest, and most clandestine social network. Since the center of power in totalitarian regimes was the secret police, any change in the distribution of power in society required weakening not just the secret police as an institution, but also its informal networks and structures. Levitsky and Way (Reference Levitsky and Way2010) explained the failure of democracy in “competitive authoritarian” regimes partly by the organizational power of the ruling elite. The organizational power of late-totalitarian ruling elites was closely linked to their connections with the secret police. A purged and weakened secret police favored the consolidation of democracy.

By contrast, the authoritarian center of power and control was the military rather than the secret police.Footnote ¹ As much as all post-totalitarian societies had to come to terms with the former secret police and attempt to somehow curb its powers, all post-authoritarian regimes had to come to terms with the military and curb its powers. There were considerably fewer secret policemen and informers per population in authoritarian than in totalitarian countries (Gonzáles Reference Gonzáles, Higley, Pakulski and Wesołowski1998, 280). When the authoritarian military initiated intensive terror against its political opponents, including executions without trial, torture, and imprisonment, it did not involve other branches of government. Even anonymous death squads were composed of soldiers or sailors who wore uniforms during their day jobs. They used military bases for jailing and torturing their perceived enemies. Authoritarian regimes did not usually corrupt most of the judiciary or even the civilian police. After authoritarianism, the military was clearly distinguishable from the other branches of government and the rest of the population, unlike the omnipresent totalitarian clandestine secret police. The distinctions between “us” and “them” were therefore clearer during and after authoritarianism. Post-authoritarian societies could therefore afford to be less paranoid than post-totalitarian societies.

When deposing authoritarian regimes followed military defeats that weakened the military, as in Greece and Argentina, the transition was rapid. In Greece it took 142 days in 1974 to try, convict, and jail the officers of the Junta and their minions (Linz and Stepan Reference Linz and Stepan1996, 132–133). The weakened Argentinean military could not limit the power of the new parliament and the political parties and their combined ability to change the constitution (Linz and Stepan Reference Linz and Stepan1996, 190–193). The internal divisions within the Argentinean military allowed human rights violators to be prosecuted, tried, and jailed, despite four coup attempts between 1987 and 1990 and necessary temporary concessions to the military. When the military remained united and undefeated, it acted as guarantor of its own amnesty (Geddes Reference Geddes1999; Nalepa Reference Nalepa2010, 37–39). For example, the Chilean military remained united and had some popular support following the successful economic reforms it had introduced. The military retained sufficient authoritarian powers after the return of free and fair elections in 1990 to consider Chile then a late-authoritarian country rather than a post-authoritarian one. The military appointed nine of forty-seven members of the senate and controlled the Supreme Court. The junta leaders kept control over the military. Most significantly, the autonomy of the military from civilian control was assured by budgetary independence and control over property and guaranteed 10 percent of the value of Chile’s primary source of hard currency from copper exports. Pinochet relied on a nomenklatura-like system of loyal appointments in the military and civil service, and controlled some of the mass media (Linz and Stepan Reference Linz and Stepan1996, 205–212). It took more than a generation for Chile to begin to confront its past, until Pinochet and his generation became old and feeble.

Once democratically elected post-authoritarian political elites became strong enough and the late-authoritarian elite became sufficiently enfeebled, the new elites could attempt to replace the old authoritarian elite at the head of the military, exclude it from power, and even punish authoritarian perpetrators of human rights violations. This happened only recently in Chile and after the failed coup in Spain in 1981. The secret police was not the mainstay of these military authoritarian regimes and therefore its destiny was not significant in the transition to democracy.

Post-Totalitarian Actors and Their Motives

Former perpetrators who worked for the secret police either as officers and agents or as informers had an obvious personal interest in avoiding retributive justice. They enjoyed the support of reformed and orthodox Communist parties. Facing a hostile society, the totalitarian elite developed class consciousness and “solidarity.” The totalitarian ruling class took care of its own members and concealed its internal divisions from outsiders. A bonding experience of collaboration, sacrifice of innocents, internal purges, and closing of the hard-line Communist ranks, such as those of 1956 in Hungary, 1968 in Czechoslovakia, and 1981 in Poland, served to solidify this solidarity. Since infiltrating the Communist Party itself required its approval in late-Communism, the large majority of members of the Communist Parties of the Soviet bloc were not informers for the secret police. Nevertheless, Communists and former Communists protected their institutional siblings. This solidarity could extend to former Communists with non-Communist political affiliations, but also special interests. For example, Alexander Dubček, the former Communist leader of the 1968 Prague Spring, refused to sign the Czechoslovak Lustration Law of 1991 that excluded former employees and informers of the secret police from positions in the higher echelon of government administration and the parliament, in his capacity as Chairman of the Federal Parliament. He then complained to the International Labour Organization claiming that a million Czech and Slovaks would lose their jobs because of the law. His critics pointed that he must have known that the figure of a million was exaggerated about twentyfold. Dubček was implicated in the purges that followed the Soviet invasion in 1968, because he signed as Czechoslovakia’s President in 1969 the law that enacted the purging of reformed Communists from their positions, before he himself was purged (David Reference David2011, 71). When a former or reformed Communist party regained power in post-Communist Europe, lustration processes came to a halt or were reversed (Welsh Reference Welsh1996, Stan 2009c). If a former Communist government could predict losing the election, it enacted a feeble and sometimes impossible-to-implement lustration law to strategically preempt a vigorous and effective lustration law after the elections (Nalepa Reference Nalepa2010). Williams et al. (Reference Williams, Szczerbiak and Fowler2003) counted ten cyclical attempts at lustration in Hungary and several cycles in Poland. When post-Communist parties returned to power in these countries, they did not abolish lustration legislation altogether, but limited its scope and applicability.

Some former dissidents subsumed the problem of the former secret police and its agents under a general analysis of irresponsibility in totalitarian societies. The mechanization of the person led to loss of moral responsibility, as Havel analyzed in The Power of the Powerless (Havel Reference Havel and Wilson1985; cf. Tucker Reference Tucker2000, 135–169). As Havel put it at the end of totalitarianism:

The practical implication of Havel’s analysis was not to hold anybody responsible because everybody was responsible. However, Havel had to revise this conclusion within a year. By August 1990, Havel called for the removal of “incompetent and sabotaging nomenklatura” (Rupnik Reference Rupnik2002a).

Adam Michnik, the former dissident and political prisoner, and the chief editor of the main Polish quality daily newspaper, went further in his forgiveness and even semifriendship with the former totalitarian rulers of Poland (Michnik Reference Michnik, Gross and Cave1998, 260–285, 294–295). Nalepa (Reference Nalepa2010) speculated that dissident organizations in Poland and Hungary were extensively penetrated by the secret police. Consequently, in her opinion, dissident leaders such as Michnik and post-dissident political parties such as the Hungarian Free Democrats had an interest in suppressing knowledge of the past and avoiding retributive justice. She further claimed that the Polish and Hungarian negotiating Communist elites used their files, the “skeletons” in the dissident “closets,” and the dissident leaders’ suspicions of extensive secret police penetration of their movements to extract a secret and credible promise to abstain from retributive justice after the transition. Nalepa’s evidence was mostly circumstantial; her game-theoretic model assumed extensive Polish and Hungarian versus limited Czechoslovak penetration of dissident circles by the secret police to explain the differences in lustration policies between the Czech Republic and Poland and Hungary. There is no proof that most of the dissident leaders had second jobs as informers with personal interests in burying their own skeletons in their closets. I doubt that dissidents with clean conscience and “light and airy closets” had an interest in suppressing retributive justice: They would have had to believe that they or their political parties would be discredited should it be discovered that members of their parties informed in the past for the secret police. For an electorate to make an inference about the properties of a party from the properties of some of its members, the electorate must believe that they are representative. For example, widespread corruption of party members in government usually discredits the party; the Watergate scandal discredited the Republican Party and contributed to the Democratic victory in the 1976 presidential election. I do not think it is likely that dissident leaders would have been concerned that voters would have projected the properties of some informers on post-dissident political parties. Would their voters have voted Communist in protest? I believe that most of the post-dissident arguments about retributive justice were not reducible to interests, but were sincere expressions of ethical convictions.

Most dissidents were republican in the philosophical sense; personal integrity and virtue were more important for them than for liberals, who rely on institutional designs. Kaniowski (Reference Kaniowski, Krygier and Czarnota1999) implied that the intellectual distinction between supporters and opponents of lustration in post-Communist Poland was between republican individualists and liberal social holists. Republican individualists took the individual to be the primary social unit and institutions such as the secret police and the Communist Party to reflect the moral character of their members. Immoral people did not change their skins after their institutions were reformed or their links with them severed. By contrast, liberal social holists took groups and institutions to be the primary units. Their locus of immorality then was institutions and not people. Once the institutions were abolished there was no need to prosecute any individual. Elster (Reference Elster2004, 234), a liberal individualist, interpreted the holistic denial that totalitarian offenders were moral agents who could be prosecuted as a form of contempt, withdrawal of recognition from people as moral agents.

Under conditions of severe scarcity of justice, personal integrity and virtue were the only barriers to misuse of office and corruption. Consequently, Kis (Reference Kis and Miklósi2008), who had a similar philosophical and political background to Havel’s and who, like Havel, was a successful former dissident (both in politics and in international academia), supported broad criteria for lustration, but only for the topmost political leadership. He advocated the resignation of Hungarian Prime Minister Medgyessy for concealing that he was a secret agent for Hungarian counterintelligence during the Communist era. Though the Prime Minister’s coyness about his past did not break Hungarian law,Footnote ² Kis thought that he had a moral obligation to let the voters know morally relevant information about his past; and since he did not, he should have resigned (Kis Reference Kis and Miklósi2008).

Some dissidents overcame the social and economic effects of past injustices. Victory led to magnanimity. Less successful former dissidents and other victims of Communism felt that the revolutions of 1989 were great carnivals after which everything remained pretty much as it used to be because they still suffered the effects of past economic and educational discrimination, especially in comparison with the ostentatiously wealthy late-totalitarian elite. Two years into his presidency, Havel was aware of both standpoints: “I feel no need to persecute my security officers or informers. I feel no need for revenge. But as a state official, I don’t have the right to declare a general amnesty on behalf of everyone else” (Michnik Reference Michnik, Gross and Cave1998, 231). “There are people whose entire lives, and the lives of their families, were destroyed by the regime, people who spent their whole youth in concentration camps and who are in no state to reconcile themselves to this. All the more so, as many of their former persecutors are now much better off than they are” (Michink Reference Michnik, Gross and Cave1998, 230).

Fears of ordinary people can favor retributive justice (Nalepa Reference Nalepa2010, 115–116). Before the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union and then during the years of instability in Russia under Yeltsin, people feared a counterrevolution, perhaps following a restoration of Communism in Russia. The Czechoslovak State Security (StB in Czech acronym) instructed its agents to attempt to penetrate the new institutions of government and the media by manipulating their existing networks to prepare a counterrevolution (Huyse Reference Huyse and Kritz1995; Kritz Reference Kritz1995, Vol. 3, 349). The August 1991 anti-Gorbachev coup in the Soviet Union gave the final push for lustration in Czechoslovakia. Soviet troops were still stationed in Eastern Europe during the first years of post-totalitarianism and successful negotiations with the Soviets over the pullout of their troops could have been compromised by informers. As President Putin put it, there is no former KGB agent. Dormant or retired agents could be and were reactivated by their handlers by threatening to make public their past collaboration (Lucas Reference Lucas2012).

Totalitarian society was terrorized by the state and its secret police. The fear of the knock on the door at 4 a.m., of the informer, of the phone call to one’s employer that could end one’s career and one’s children’s chances for higher education ruled society. Many ordinary people, including new judges and policemen, did not want to be involved with retributive justice because they were afraid of post-Communist “mafias.” These fears were not irrational; paranoids could be persecuted. For example, Polish judges presiding over the case of the secret police murder of Father Popiełuszko were victims of intimidation, burglary, and arson that led to the death of the mother-in-law of one of the judges (Łoś and Zybertowicz Reference Łoś and Zybertowicz2000, 69–71). The FSB, the successor to the KGB, has been terrorizing and killing journalists, opposition leaders, and businesspeople that it considered were threatening its privileges (Lucas Reference Lucas2012).

Since the large majority of voters were neither Communists nor dissidents, the dissidents represented a silent reproach against them for their unheroic behavior during the Communist era, like a national bad conscience. Even worse, dissidents such as Havel spread the responsibility for totalitarianism by implying that most ordinary people tolerated if not accepted and supported the totalitarian system. Rupnik (Reference Rupnik2002a) suggested that the Czech law that criminalized the Communist Party had an adverse effect on transitional justice in a country of ten million where the Communist Party had six million different members between 1948 and 1989. If everybody is guilty, nobody is culpable (Nino Reference Nino1996, ix–x, 124, 166–170). To avoid universal national responsibility, a small group had to bear the blame. Short of blaming it all on “Asian-despotic” intrusion into Europe to exculpate everybody (Kopeček Reference Kopeček and Kopeček2008, 77), lustration constructed a clear distinction between a minority of perpetrators and everybody else who were thereby absolved of culpability.Footnote ³ Applying Girard’s (Reference Girard and Gregory1977; Reference Girard, Bann and Metteer1987) anthropological theory about sacrifice and scapegoating as the foundation of society and civilization, Wydra (Reference Wydra2007) and David (Reference David2011, 43–61) emphasized that a process of purification and even scapegoating may contribute to social cohesion and trust after generations of conflict.

The career interests of ambitious late-totalitarian professionals, new politicians, some former dissidents, and young people were to create vacancies in elite positions. Generational changing of the guards in the guise of political purges was a prominent legacy of totalitarianism. Of all the arguments for lustration in Parliamentary debates in Czechoslovakia in 1991, elite replacement was the most common (David Reference David2003). This was post-Communist “affirmative action.” Loosening the “old comrade networks” with their monopoly over resources, most notably state patronage, subsidies, and bank credit, was excruciatingly difficult and any new vacancy helped. The late-totalitarian bureaucracy attempted to protect itself and block external appointments by requiring relevant work experience for senior bureaucratic positions, since the only way to obtain such relevant experience would have been to be members of the late-totalitarian elite. Junior appointments could not require experience, but forced the applicants to seek patronage and be approved by the late-totalitarian office holders (Łoś and Zybertowicz Reference Łoś and Zybertowicz2000, 123). Excluding the upper echelons of the previous regime from desirable positions in the state bureaucracy opens these positions for members of new political parties:

By contrast, the decolonization of post-Soviet states, especially Estonia and Latvia, opened up their elites without having to initiate additional screening for secret police officers and informers, merely by the exclusion of Russians from position of power, often by using language competency criteria. Since decolonization performed much of the work that screenings did elsewhere, lustration in Estonia was mild and affected only a single individual, a city council member (Tamm Reference Tamm2013).

In the framework of political competition, political parties had a short-term interest in associating their opponents with the former secret police. Gonzáles (Reference Gonzáles, Higley, Pakulski and Wesołowski1998), Rupnik (Reference Rupnik2002a), and Williams et al. (Reference Williams, Szczerbiak and Fowler2003) suggested that lustration was a shibboleth for right-wing parties to distinguish themselves from their opponents to the left and from the Communist past, and, for Czechs, from Slovaks. Nalepa (Reference Nalepa2010) suggested that political parties whose leaders were not likely to have been informers were the ones to push for lustration. These political parties did not have to share much ideologically. Rather, they were composed of politicians who were neither Communists nor dissidents and so were not interesting for the late-totalitarian secret police, of former dissidents who were members of small clandestine and conspiratorial groups that were less likely to have been infiltrated, or of politicians born after 1970. Democratically elected post-totalitarian governments had an interest in winning popular trust. An obvious way was through purging the officials who worked previously against the citizens. A public opinion survey conducted in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland discovered that trust in government leaps significantly as a result of a policy of dismissal of totalitarian wrongdoers. Trust does not change significantly as a result of exposure of the identities of wrongdoers without dismissing them, and improves somewhat following confessions (David Reference David2011, 165–193). As Williams et al. (Reference Williams, Szczerbiak and Fowler2003) noted, the first lustration measures in Czechoslovakia were proposed after exposures of the shady pasts of elected politicians were aired in the media. The discovery in December 1995 that Polish Prime Minister Olesky was a KGB spy made the case for lustration in Poland (Szczerbiak Reference Szczerbiak2002). In Romania, where the files remained the property of the secret services, names of collaborating politicians were leaked to their opponents. In 1992 President Iliescu used the files of the interior ministry against Prime Minster Roman, who used in return the files in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Beyme Reference Beyme1996, 72). In Lithuania, the leaked names of collaborators with the KGB included two prime ministers and a president (Skucas Reference Skucas, Berman and Waller2006, 101–103). If parties use such “negative campaigning,” they may all lose by convincing the voters that the whole new democratically elected political class is a covert extension of the totalitarian elite. The initial legislation about collaboration with the Secret Police in Czechoslovakia assumed that parliamentarians who had collaborated would quietly resign, faced with the evidence against them. Surprisingly for the legislators, ten MPs denied the accusations and refused to resign. All non-Communist parties had an interest in resolving such issues quickly without mutual recrimination to maintain trust in the new regime. Lustration in this respect has been a way to quickly resolve a game where initial gains for some players threatened to evolve into loses for all. It was in the interest of all the democratic political parties to cooperate on some version of popular trust building lustration.

During late Communism, rapacious greed was constrained by hierarchy and envy. As the elite adapted its rights to its interests, the intrasystemic barriers to corruption disappeared, and it proceeded to steal anything that could be moved. Some of the measures that were presented as “transitional justice” were actually crude attempts by an otherwise helpless government to limit the late-totalitarian elite’s access to hard currency and liquid assets to protect the national currency and the economy, or more cynically, to leave something for the new politicians to steal too. When the state was too weak to control its bureaucracy, a rough measure for crime prevention could masquerade as retributive justice. For example, the Bulgarian parliament attempted to prohibit former members of the nomenklatura and secret police from holding responsible positions in the banking industry. The Bulgarian Constitutional Court overturned this measure (Kritz Reference Kritz1995, Vol. 3, 293–295). Then, the Bulgarian banking and credit system collapsed. Much of the motivation in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and later in Lithuania and Poland for lustration was the hope that the elite would be prevented from stealing the economy if excluded from offices with access to liquid assets.

Passion for revenge has often been attributed to victims (Schwartz Reference Schwartz1994). Nino (Reference Nino1996, 121–124; cf. Elster Reference Elster2004, 220–223) suggested that the degree of political passion for vengeance can be influenced by the intensity of the injustice, the number of victims, and the time elapsed since the injustice. The severity and extent of injustices were far worse during revolutionary totalitarianism than during late totalitarianism. Consequently, the older generation of victims may have a stronger tendency to demand revenge than the younger generation, despite the elapsed time. By 1989, revenge against retired Stalinist perpetrators still alive would have required trials rather than noncriminal exclusion from jobs. There were almost no such trials and no revenge. Elster (Reference Elster1998) and Rupnik (Reference Rupnik2002a) suggested that the desire for revenge correlated with the degree of desire for denial of cooperation with the regime. Rupnik explained the earlier and more extensive Czech and East German lustration by the greater passivity and collaboration of the two societies in comparison with Hungary and Poland. According to opinion polls, between half and three-quarters of Poles, about half of the Hungarian population, and 80 percent of Czechs supported some kind of lustration (Williams et al. Reference Williams, Szczerbiak and Fowler2003). Yet, a quarter century after the end of totalitarianism, Poland and Hungary have caught up with the Czech legislation. The Polish and Hungarian delay had other explanations, such as the earlier exit from Communism and the periodic return to power of reformed Communists, unlike in the Czech Republic.

The Central European experience with waves of fanatic utopian politics, after the absurdities of Habsburg authoritarianism celebrated by Musil and Kafka, generated societies that elevated irony and cynicism to high art forms. Revenge is a passion that may appeal to a romantic temperament. But an ironic narration of history cannot be romantic (White Reference White1973). The ironic approach to revenge in Kundera’s novel The Joke (Reference Kundera and Heim1982) is representative: In the revolutionary fifties, a young man was betrayed and informed against and consequently was consigned to slave labor in a work battalion. In the liberal sixties he decided to avenge himself against the treacherous friend-turned-informer by seducing his wife. Having successfully realized his plan, he was congratulated by the former informer, who was involved with a younger woman and was delighted that somebody relieved him of the wife he did not care for – revenge turned sour. As Nalepa (Reference Nalepa2010) argued, emotional revenge should have exploded immediately after the end of totalitarianism, and not be dragged for decades in delayed lustrations, as it was.

The Communist regime encouraged egalitarian envy as a method of social control; atomized individuals who were envious of anybody who seemed a bit different, smarter, wealthier, or luckier made excellent informers on each other and could not bond together to oppose the well-organized totalitarian bureaucratic machinery that divided and ruled. After 1989 envy turned against those who encouraged it in the first place, members of the late-totalitarian elite who became conspicuously prosperous. Once economic transition and restructuring began in earnest, all other issues became secondary for ordinary people (Holmes Reference Holmes1994). Demands for retributive justice reemerged when it became clear that the old elite further impoverished the population through theft and asset stripping in the process of privatization. The political revolutions prepared expectations for social revolution and mobility. When these hopes were dashed, when the economic gap between the elite and ordinary people conspicuously widened rather than contracted, pressure for political measures to achieve the elusive social revolution rose. The popularity of lustration in Poland rose from 57 percent in 1994 to 76 percent in 1997. By contrast, 73 percent of East Germans supported lustration in 1990, but only 48 percent supported it in 1994. As the economic transition progressed, the popularity of lustration did not reflect a popular reaction to the past anymore, but a reaction to the present. When it became clear that the late totalitarian elite did not suffer from the economic transition but profited from it at the expense of society, voters pressured politicians to do something. As Letki (Reference Letki2002) argued, “transitional justice” in Poland was not retroactive, but prospective. By contrast, in the former East Germany, new elites from West Germany replaced the old local elite that did not prosper. East German resentment was directed then at the new West German “foreign” elites and not at the local former elite. In Germany, uniquely, recidivism was impossible, following the complete replacement of the East German elite and even government employees who were not members of the elite. Without popular demand and West German elite need, the number of criminal indictments for political crimes in the former East Germany was small and the sentences were suspended or short. Even the commander of the Border Police, responsible for shooting people fleeing across the Berlin Wall, was pardoned after serving three and a half years (McAdams Reference McAdams2001, 166–176).

To sum up, the late-totalitarian elite, former Communist party members, reformed Communist parties, the judiciary and state bureaucracy, some successful former dissidents, and Kantian deontologists as rights activists tended to object to post-totalitarian retribution. The new formerly “gray” political center-right political elites and governments, upwardly mobile non-Communist professionals, workers who entered the workforce after the end of totalitarianism, and ethical consequentialists tended to support it (cf. Elster Reference Elster1998, 44–45; Kaniowski Reference Kaniowski, Krygier and Czarnota1999, 216). Decommunization was mostly a struggle between elites (Holmes Reference Holmes1994; Nalepa Reference Nalepa2010, 99–125).

Constraints and Scarcities

The most significant constraint on any post-totalitarian justice was the extreme scarcity of human resources necessary for the rule of law, the scarcity of justice that I discussed in the previous chapter. The absence of a democratically trained and loyal police implied that the old and new elites were literally above the law in a social hierarchy. These conditions could not disappear quickly. Most of the judges and prosecutors maintained their employment after 1989, because nobody could replace them. Initially, only 10 percent of Polish Communist prosecutors and one-third of their staff were dismissed, ensuring institutional continuity (Stan Reference Stan and Stan2009d, 80). Though new judges and prosecutors were not personally committed to absolving those who violated human rights under communism, they could still be timid in approaching former and present hierarchical superiors. The Polish government could not find twenty-one judges to sit on a court to adjudicate lustration cases in 1997 because Polish judges were either loyal to the old Communist elite or politically timid (Szczerbiak Reference Szczerbiak2002). The government forced then the Warsaw municipal court to adjudicate lustration cases. That court delayed or dismissed cases because it did not want to be involved. Lustrated Polish politicians who challenged their classification were elected, served their term, and were replaced in democratic elections before their cases were even heard by the court. Consequently, the law became unenforceable (Stan Reference Stan and Stan2009d, 85–86). In Poland “the number of trials has remained low because of flagrant political interference and manipulation, the difficulty to build strong cases resulting in convictions, the legal chicanery employed to prolong or stale the proceedings, intimidation of witnesses, prosecutors and judges, and the judges’ unwillingness to take up such cases” (Stan Reference Stan and Stan2009d, 90). A single trial of Stalinist henchmen led to eleven convictions and prison terms. But the Polish Constitutional Court used an interpretation of the statute of limitations to attempt to block further such prosecutions. Elster categorized such judges as members of the group of transitional justice wreckers. “When the judges or administrators who are to dispense transitional justice were part of the machinery of the former regime, they will drag their feet, produce biased readings of the law, and otherwise obstruct the proceedings any way they can” (Elster Reference Elster2004, 114). Similarly, in post-totalitarian West Germany, local boards of denazification, composed of non-Nazi Germans, such as trade unionists and members of non-Nazi parties, were difficult to establish. Members were afraid of Nazi retribution, intimidated by influential friends and relatives of the accused, subjected to public pressure, and threatened of losing or not gaining jobs controlled by former Nazis (Herz Reference Herz and Herz1982, 27–28). Political decisions about procedures for retributive justice had to be made in anticipation of judicial resistance; they reflected rather than created a state of scarce justice and absence of the rule of law.

Evidence for retributive justice was often scarce. Full-time employment in the secret police was easy to ascertain by examining records for rank, salary, and pension.Footnote ⁴ But what each officer did and the identities and activities of their agents and informers were not as easy to ascertain; the most readily available and cheapest to obtain evidence was found in the files prepared, compiled, and left by the late-totalitarian secret police. The files were underinclusive in not listing the most important agents who had been working directly for the KGB and whose files have been in Russia and who therefore could be blackmailed to continue working for Russia (Lucas Reference Lucas2012). A separate directory of files listed the agents who were also members of the Communist Party and was the first to be destroyed after the democratic revolutions. The secret police agencies remained in control of their archives after the end of totalitarianism for periods ranging from months to years. During that period they could destroy, remove, and “privatize,” the most important or sensitive files, to protect agents, to “sell” them to other interested parties, or to blackmail them as “unemployment insurance.”Footnote ⁵ In Czechoslovakia, the files remained in the custody of the unreformed secret service until June 1990, thus giving it at least six months to work on them. As much as 90 percent of the files on domestic agents were destroyed or removed, according to the Czechoslovak Constitutional Court (Kritz Reference Kritz1995, Vol. 3, 349–350). In Poland, as much as 80 percent of the files were destroyed (Palata Reference Palata1998). The destruction of files may have been a literal smoke screen for the privatization of the files by secret police officers for extortion or sale (Łoś and Zybertowicz Reference Łoś and Zybertowicz2000, 155–159).

It was possible to try to reconstruct some of the files through cross-reference with surviving files, indexing, and digitalization, but that required time, resources, and skills that were also scarce. Once the reformed Communists returned to power, or as long as the old Communists remained in power, access to the files was often blocked, for example in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania. In the Baltic countries, the KGB moved its files to Russia or destroyed them before the independent governments could take charge of them, leaving behind files of exclusively historical interest (Oll Reference Oll, Berman and Waller2006, 83; Skucas Reference Skucas, Berman and Waller2006). During the first few years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early nineties, the Russian authorities under Yeltsin agreed to return some of the surviving files to the newly independent Baltic states, more to Lithuania than to Estonia and Latvia. In Latvia, the KGB left two potato sacks (sic!) filled with cards of its agents. Pettai (Reference Pettai2010) explained the scopes of lustration in the Baltic states, from the broad Lithuanian to the narrow Estonian with Latvia in the middle, by the number of secret police files each government eventually gained possession of.

The files could be overinclusive in listing false information. As Elster noted (Reference Elster1998; cf. Schwartz Reference Schwartz1994; Huyse Reference Huyse and Kritz1995; Skucas Reference Skucas, Berman and Waller2006, 101), the files could include phony agents who were added by secret service officials for career advancement purposes, as in Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana or John Le Carré’s The Tailor of Panama. In Hungary, the bogus agents were called Dead Souls, after Gogol’s satirical novel about dead peasants kept formally alive by their feudal lords for bureaucratic reasons (David Reference David2011, 83). Still, when Nalepa (Reference Nalepa2008) conducted interviews with members of the democratic elite who dealt with the files, they reported finding only few such fabrications in the files, a few more in Hungary than in Poland or the Czech Republic, concluding that the files were generally reliable. In East Germany, as well, the files proved to be reliable sources when critically compared with each other. Investigators used there successfully classical scientific historiographic Rankean methods of source criticism and comparison as they had earlier when investigating the archives of the Gestapo (McAdams Reference McAdams2001, 67–70). I think the extent of possibilities for deliberate falsification in the context of late-totalitarian secret police work was limited. Secret policemen, unlike their informants, worked in teams. Falsification in teams required collusion and trust. In a system founded on distrust and mutual denunciations, the secret policeman (they were almost exclusively male) who proposed the falsification had to trust his fellow team members not to inform on him. It does not seem likely that such trust was very common or rational among secret policemen. Toward the end of totalitarianism, mutual control weakened, allowing all forms of corruption. Whether the same held for the secret police is a mooted question. Disinformation by informants was a different matter. The secret police did not adhere to rules of evidence and did not bother necessarily to corroborate individual testimonies, and so could be and indeed were misled by informers who invented information out of personal interest in denouncing somebody. Another factor that has been overlooked in academic discussions is the limited intellectual abilities of the secret agents in charge of domestic surveillance of dissidents. In Czechoslovakia, in 1956 more than a third of the employees of the interior ministry did not finish basic school. In 1966, 45 percent had only elementary education (Williams Reference Williams, William and Deletant2001). Better-educated agents who knew foreign languages engaged in foreign espionage, so internal surveillance was left for secret policemen who were less, sometimes much less, than the best and brightest. Judging by the quality of the reports they filed, they were not always literate (Placák Reference Placák2007; Shore Reference Shore, Tismaneanu and Iacob2012, 473). Such agents could easily misunderstand or confuse who said what, when, and what it meant. There is evidence that clerical confusions and errors led to misclassifications of people because some files contain different classifications of the same person. Some may refer to different periods of employment of the same person who could have been promoted from candidate to full-time agent. Still, there are also substantial internal inconsistencies in the files (Skucas Reference Skucas, Berman and Waller2006, 100).

These information constraints caused lustrations laws in Bulgaria, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, and Romania to sanction more leniently or not-at-all confessed informers to create an incentive for confession. Confessed informers received state amnesty in the 1997 Polish law and in the Hungarian lustration law (Elster Reference Elster2004, 69). In Estonia, a 1992 law demanded that

The incentive to confess depended then on the perpetrators’ risk assessment of information about them in the extant secret police archives. The more files were reliable and survived intact, the stronger was the incentive for confessions, and vice versa (Nalepa Reference Nalepa2008).

Beliefs

The belief in the technical competence of the Communist era elite managerial class and bureaucracy supported leniency to avoid damaging the economy and the state. Similarly, in post-World War II Western Europe reconstruction trumped retribution (Elster Reference Elster2004, 208–210). Members of the late-totalitarian elite had an interest in promoting beliefs about their technical competence, though the low productivity in Communist countries reflected, among other factors, politically skewed appointments based on expectations of loyalty rather than skills (Schwartz Reference Schwartz1994; Huyse Reference Huyse and Kritz1995; Linz and Stepan Reference Linz and Stepan1996, 251). Effective managers in post-Communist economies needed to initiate innovation, modernization, restructuring, cost cutting, discovery of niches in the global market, market research, introduction of better marketing methods, and so on. By contrast, totalitarian managers controlled monopolies. Except for a handful of companies that competed in the global market before 1989, mostly dealing with weapons and commodities, most firms and their managers had been accustomed to monopoly conditions. Success in a planned economy required political, rather than economic, skills. “Red” managers were experienced in embezzling subsidies and asking for more in return for kickbacks. Promotion in the late-Communist bureaucracy was founded on weeding out the highly competent, intelligent, creative, and ambitious as threatening. Modernization theory’s assumption that Communist regimes had to rely on a new technocratic class of experts, like in noncentrally planned economies, was false (Kotkin Reference Kotkin2009, 145).

Philosophical liberals believe that in liberal institutions, technical skills may be independent of the character of their possessors. Teitel, for example, challenged the connection between past conduct under Nazism, and the likelihood of subverting the cause of democratic consolidation. Competence appeared to her to correlate with prior administrative or managerial experience. Democratic political theory, according to Teitel, considers political structures, institutions, and procedures to matter, not their personnel. Vetting of personnel to establish liberal democracy is, according to Teitel, “incoherent” and transitory, to be rescinded after a few years (Teitel Reference Teitel2000, 157–161). Teitel assumed the rule of law and “Weberian” bureaucrats who follow orders and regulations. But Müller (Reference Müller and Schneider1991) showed that the post-totalitarian West German legal system was run until the seventies by Nazi judges who did not follow the rule of law. Justice was scarce in West Germany even after a dozen years of totalitarianism when most judges had memories of the rule of law. It was much scarcer in post-Communist countries that endured fifty years of totalitarianism. The rule of law cannot possibly be established for quite a while after totalitarianism. In mature liberal democratic systems, when the system works, the moral background of technically competent personnel may be of secondary significance because of institutional internal controls and external checks and balances that prevent individuals and institutions from straying too far from their prescribed legal roles. Such controls, checks, and balances were missing in post-totalitarian institutions. Virtue was of paramount significance in the absence of external controls and incentives for ethical behavior. Still, beliefs in the technical competence of the late-totalitarian bureaucracy and the irrelevance of virtue were widely accepted and affected post-totalitarian policies.

Policies

Post-totalitarian retributive justice employed both accurate individual-criminal and rough collective noncriminal criteria. Following the scarcity of justice, the scope of justice of the first was very limited while the roughness of the second was considerable.

Individual criminal trials of totalitarian leaders or murderers and torturers were few and resulted rarely in conviction and punishment. The last dictators of Romania, Albania, and Bulgaria and their immediate circles of cronies were tried. The trial of the Ceaușescus in Romania was in the context of a civil war and did not observe due process (irrespective of the couple’s obvious guilt). Bulgaria’s last, long ruling, tyrant, Todor Zhivkov, was not tried for human rights violations but for misuse of state funds for personal purposes or for the use of other members of the nomenklatura, and was eventually acquitted and his associates were pardoned. Economic crimes also served as reason for jailing all the members of the Albanian politburo and the family of the late dictator Hoxha in 1991 (Austin and Ellison Reference Austin, Ellison and Stan2009). An amnesty law then saved and protected the upper echelons of the Communist Party from prosecution (Teitel Reference Teitel2000, 47–49). Since the worst and most of the Communist atrocities were committed during the early revolutionary phase, these crimes were mostly beyond the statute of limitations, leading to attempts to extend it for certain types of crimes or to define the crimes as crimes against humanity that were not subject to statute of limitations. Criminal trials required the cooperation of post-totalitarian judges, which was rare. Generally, “[d]espite the dramatic expansion in criminal liability in the abstract, enforcement lags far behind. Successor practices reveal a pattern of criminal investigations and prosecutions often with little or no penalty” (Teitel Reference Teitel2000, 47). Only a handful of convictions were achieved in any of the post-Communist countries (Elster Reference Elster2004, 66–68). In Poland, “the small number of cases brought to trial and their inept handling … suggests a near-paralysis of the post-communist justice system in cases involving criminal violence by the communist security and military apparatus. They also demonstrate the total impunity of high-ranking officials who were directly or indirectly responsible for the murderous effects of these actions and were actively involved in cover-up schemes related to them” (Łoś and Zybertowicz Reference Łoś and Zybertowicz2000, 189). In Estonia, a dozen cases were prosecuted for crimes against humanity committed during the three occupations of the 1940s (Tamm Reference Tamm2013, 658).

In West Germany, where justice was less scarce, of the more than 1,000 cases of retributive justice between 1955 and 1969, fewer than 100 resulted in life sentences and fewer than 300 resulted in any time served. By 1981, there were 6,000 convictions, 157 of them resulting in a life sentence (Elster Reference Elster2004, 54). German military judges and prosecutors, responsible for the execution of 26,000 Germans in military courts, were never prosecuted and judges in the Nazi “people’s courts” were never convicted. Herz (Reference Herz and Herz1982, 20) concluded, paraphrasing Marx, that denazification was a farce that followed a tragedy.Footnote ⁶

In the Czech Republic, between 1995 and 2007, three thousand criminal investigations were opened against abusers of human and civil rights between 1948 and 1989. These resulted in just thirty prison terms of between six months and five years. The low rates of conviction were attributed to Communist-era judges. In Slovakia there has been a single prosecution that resulted in a suspended sentence for Alois Lorenz, the last chief of the Communist secret police (Nedelsky Reference Nedelsky and Stan2009, 58–61). In Hungary, the Supreme Court annulled a law that would have abolished the thirty years statute of limitations to allow prosecutions for the suppression of the 1956 revolt. Attempts to legislate the possibility of trials against totalitarian era perpetrators were rendered futile by continuous interventions by the Constitutional Court (Stan Reference Stan and Stan2009b). In Romania, Communist leaders and policemen involved in the violent attempt to suppress the 1989 transfer of power were released after two years. The Romanian judiciary protected the former members and agents of the secret police; there were only few trials against human rights abusers and very few convictions and prison sentences (Stan Reference Stan and Stan2009e).

Membership in criminalized totalitarian organizations, most notably the secret police, served as a category for bureaucratic noncriminal exclusions from some public, political, and civil service, or even private, positions. The scope of excluding past memberships and excluded future positions varied from country to country. In West Germany, membership in the SS and the Gestapo led to being categorized in one of five categories, from major offender, through offender, lesser offender, and follower, to exonerated. Since the categorization was based on self-identification in a questionnaire (required for receiving food rations), deception was rampant and could be found out only through informing. Nazis found it easy to be recategorized as mere “followers” or even to be exonerated by German appeal boards (Herz Reference Herz and Herz1982, 26–27).

In post-Communist Europe, lustration laws targeted the employees of the secret police and their agents. The constraints on information forced the legislators to use the rough bureaucratic criteria of the secret police itself in the post-totalitarian legislation. In the groundbreaking Czechoslovak case, there were four categories: Residents were career officers of the secret police who handled networks or fulfilled other functions in state security. Establishing their identity was easy because their security job was their principal employment. Collaborators were secret informers of residents. Collaborators usually signed a Faustian contract formalizing their relations with the secret police, chose a cover name, and received financial or other remunerative benefits for their services such as the right to travel abroad, promotions at work, and coupons for buying imported products. Candidates were considered by the secret police to become collaborators. Some candidates were collaborators on a trial period, others did not know the identity of the resident who was debriefing them and considering them for full-time collaboration; in still other cases, they knew the identity of the resident, but refused to collaborate and were filed away as candidates. Confidants or Contacts either were part-time collaborators or could be people who indiscreetly but unintentionally once provided information to a resident or a collaborator, not realizing with whom they were gossiping.Footnote ⁷

The documentary evidence for people who belong to the last two categories is less than conclusive. The secret police classification was functional; it did not consider the motivations of the spies, agents, and informers. Elster (Reference Elster2004, 141–142) distinguished the motivations of informers: gain motivated opportunists, maliciousness motivated “losers,” fear of material loss motivated conformists. Fanatics and principled persons had impersonal motives. Thoughtless people harmed others without any motivation. I should add to these motivational categories fear and blackmail.

Some informers made only a formal compromise with the regime by agreeing to provide it with information they knew the regime already had, or seemed uselessly harmless. Inevitably, becoming an informer involved personal indignity, but it could have appeared justifiable on utilitarian grounds if the balance of effects seemed to the informer to be positive. For example, the informer may have reported on opposition groups he or she met while on an academic trip abroad that the regime knew of already and could not harm, while in return the informer and his or her family would be spared the wrath of the totalitarian state and be allowed to travel abroad again. In Germany, where unlike elsewhere in the former Soviet bloc justice was not so scarce, it was possible to consider and evaluate the motivations of informers and distinguish “accommodation” from “over-accommodation” (McAdams Reference McAdams2001, 77). Elsewhere, secret police functional categories served as post-totalitarian categories irrespective of motivation and individual circumstances.

People who fell under the rough collective criteria could suffer three rough justice types of sanctions. First, and most severely, they could be barred for a period from holding high offices or working in certain managerial position in various sectors of public life, the economy, politics, government service, banking, education, or the mass media. What would be called lustration after Communism was practiced by the allied occupation authorities after the Second World War. In Japan, the American occupation forces issued on January 4, 1946, instruction to the Japanese to initiate a purge of high positions in the public and private sectors. The purge had future-oriented reasons, to prevent the resurgence of aggressive militarism and clear positions for upper mobility for democratically oriented officials. The criteria were collective: membership in prescribed organizations or the holding of certain bureaucratic positions between certain dates.

Penalties of up to three years imprisonment and fines were attached to breaking the law. However, the implementation of the purge was left to Japanese authorities. When institutions and offices were abolished, there was little the local elites could have done to countermand the orders. But if the institutions survived, office holders were rarely removed because the Japanese authorities interpreted the U.S. instructions narrowly. In the first year after the war only 1,067 Japanese were removed from public office. Many of them continued to exert influence informally, through relations of patronage with those who replaced them. Purged officials even had office space in or near the organizations they were purged from, colloquially known as “the geishas’ waiting room.”

Fewer than 10 percent of Japanese Home Ministry Officials were removed. Few hundreds were removed from private and public firms but, as in Eastern Europe half a century later, they found similar jobs; for example, the president of Mitsui bank was removed from his position only to become the CEO of Sony. In April 1952 all those who were purged received an amnesty. By the end of the fifties all the Japanese war crimes prisoners were transferred to the Japanese authorities and released.Footnote ⁸

Post-Communist states differed from the Axis powers after the Second World War in their inability to abolish institutions. The SS, the Gestapo, and the Nazi Party were abolished and declared illegal after the fall of Nazi Germany. Japan was forced to become a pacifist nation and its security services and almost all its military were disbanded. But none of the secret police forces of Communist Europe was or could have been simply abolished because democratic governments needed the services of spooks to protect their countries from terrorism, international crime, and drugs, and to spy on the countries’ enemies. Some democratic politicians were also tempted by the competencies the secret services offered them: Information about and surveillance of their opponents, knowledge of methods and execution of political manipulation, and so on. Some politicians who struggled to obtain or keep power in a competitive political environment found such offers of assistance irresistible.

The articles in Berman and Waller’s (Reference Berman and Waller2006) fascinating anthology about the fortunes of post-Communist secret police institutions demonstrate an interesting correlation between the degree of institutional reform and the degrees of retributive justice after totalitarianism. In Russia, following the 1991 putsch, reform amounted to the dismantling of the antidissident unit of the KGB and the reassignment of its operatives to the tax policing unit. Accordingly, in Russia, no sanctions were attempted against current or former KGB agents (Waller Reference Waller, Berman and Waller2006). In Poland, both the restructuring and reform of the secret services and lustration were much delayed in comparison with the rest of Eastern Europe and started only in 1997, concluding only with the reforms of the Kaczynski brothers almost twenty years after the end of totalitarianism (Grajewski Reference Grajewski, Berman and Waller2006). The reform of the Czech secret service began in February 1990 when some of its the officers were dismissed and put under de facto four months of house arrest to sever their connections with their agents, the archives were closed, and all the employees were screened. “A lack of information supplied by the intelligence and counterintelligence services was surely less dangerous than having those institutions occupied by former StB [state security] members” (Basta Reference Bašta, Berman and Waller2006, 36). Still, Basta (Reference Bašta, Berman and Waller2006, 39) admitted that the piecemeal, gradual, top-down nature of the Czech reforms allowed some inertia in the security services. Most harmful was their continued cooperation with Russian intelligence that usually trained and recruited the higher echelons and cadres of East Europe’s security services. Instead of creating completely new organizations, “the Czechoslovak political leadership settled for dramatically reducing the size of the existing secret services and stripping them of their technical facilities. Former StB officers, however, continued to occupy top executive positions” (Basta Reference Bašta, Berman and Waller2006, 40). Consequently, once the Czech Republic became a member of NATO, the alliance had to withhold some of its secrets from the Czechs, as their secret services still employed Russian double agents. Even in Estonia, where the secret service was built from scratch, a former policeman who headed the new institution was a double agent (Lucas Reference Lucas2012).

Lustration: The Czech Republic and Beyond

Lustration was the most common measure of rough justice after Communism. Since the Czech case was the first, the purest, and the only one uninterrupted by the return of reformed Communists to power, it deserves a lengthier overview. The initial mood in Czechoslovakia in the first six months after the Velvet Revolution was euphoric. The government was shared by unelected former dissidents and Communists and there was no interest in retribution: President Havel appointed the secret policemen who were in charge of following him as his new bodyguards. After the first elections in June 1990, the Czechoslovak Federal Parliament adopted in early 1991 a resolution to appoint a committee to investigate the files of the Communist secret service (StB) to find whether any of the members of parliament and the higher echelons of the executive branches collaborated. The parliament acted as investigator and judge.

The Czechoslovak lustration law of October 4, 1991, sought to purge all the elites in the public sector; in the legislative, executive, and judiciary branches of government; in the military, police, and security services; in the state media, state industry, and banking; and in the Academy of Science and higher education. The designated lustrated class was extensive, comprising members of the elite of the Communist Party; secret police residents and all three categories of informers; members of the “people’s militia,” the paramilitary force of the Communist Party; and students and teachers at secret police academies that sometimes doubled as schools for foreign terrorists. The law contained waiver clauses. The Ministers of Defense and Interior and the heads of the secret service and the police were allowed to sign waivers for lustrated individuals in “the state interest.” The enforcement of this law was assigned to an independent commission under the auspices of the Ministry of Interior, approved by the Federal Assembly. Two members were appointed by the Minister of Interior, one by the Director of the Federal Security Information Service (the secret service), one by the Minister of Defense, and six were appointed by the Czech and Slovak National Assemblies. In other words, six were from the legislative, four from the executive, and none from the judicial branches of government.

Each employee or prospective employee who wished to maintain or obtain one of the prescribed elite positions was required to present a certificate of negative lustration to a responsible bureaucratic superior, or in the case of elected officials, to an organ of parliament. In case of positive lustration, the persons concerned were to be informed of all the evidence against them. Evidence given to the commission was subjected to the normal rules of criminal evidence. The commission was designated as a first court of appeal against positive lustration. There was a right for appeal and judicial review above the commission with district courts. The lustration and the evidence for it were designated as confidential. Outside government, managers of media organizations and heads of political parties were allowed to request the lustration of their employees and members (Kritz Reference Kritz1995, Vol. 3, 312–321). Most of the enforcement of the law was assigned to bureaucratic supervisors, but there was no sanction against them if they ignored the law.

On November 26, 1992, the Czechoslovak Federal Constitutional Court narrowed the scope of lustration by abolishing the lustration of candidates and confidants, recognizing that it was impossible to ascertain whether they knowingly collaborated with the secret police on the exclusive basis of the files. The court further abolished the right to issue lustration waivers “in the interest of the state” because it did not observe the separation of the executive from the judicial branches of government. Consequently, previous lustrations of candidates and confidants were annulled. No new waivers were issued, but waivers that were issued during the preceding year were respected. The commission was abolished. Instead, a Bureau for the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism was established in Prague in the former headquarters of the Communist secret police, headed by Václav Benda, a former Charter 77 dissident and Christian–Democrat politician who was a political prisoner for five years.

In Slovakia, the lustration law was ignored until it expired in 1996 (Nedelsky Reference Nedelsky and Stan2009, 48–49). Consequently, the Slovak Secret Police went back to business under the new management of authoritarian populist premier, Mečiar: “It placed its opposition parties and politicians under surveillance; monitored churches, trade unions, and journalists critical of the Mečiar government; organized the abduction of the son of Mečiar’s rival, Slovak president Michal Kováč; sabotaged public meetings; and blew up the cars of journalists” (David Reference David2011, 138).

Czech lustration was a measure of rough justice designed to bypass the uncooperative judiciary and police at the price of adopting rough collective guilt. Still, the lustration law did not stipulate sanctions for its violation. Since, with the exception of the president and government ministers, most senior managers had continued their employment from the totalitarian era, they did nothing about lustration and risked no sanction. Consequently, the Czech lustration law was a declarative or hortatory law (Teitel Reference Teitel2000, 171). Other factors diminished further the scope of the lustration law: The large majority of people who met the lustration categories were unaffected because they were not interested in public office and their family, friends, colleagues, business partners, and employers could not care less for what they did during the totalitarian era. By 1992, most of Czech state industry was de jure privatized, that is, de jure beyond the scope of lustration. Salaries in the growing private sector led state employees to resign from the public sector to take better jobs in the private sector. The law granted to people who were lustrated the right to appeal to ordinary civil courts, an option 870 of the 9,000 positively lustrated Czechs took. Usually, judicial reviews overturned positive lustrations. The most common reason was the courts’ demands for evidence on paper with verifiable signatures. Since much of the evidence for lustration was on microfiche copies of destroyed files, courts ruled it inadmissible. Some clearances, including those of senior Czech police officers, were obtained by fraud, for example, by misspelling one’s name on a form, thus obtaining a document that exonerated a nonexistent person with a very similar name (Nedelsky Reference Nedelsky and Stan2009, 49–50). The non-Communist political parties were indeed thoroughly lustrated, because they feared that their political opponents would use lustration scandals against them (Šiklová Reference Šiklová, Krygier and Czarnota1999, 248). The competing political parties acted as agents of enforcement. Five percent of the 200 members of the Czech parliament were forced to resign. Some bureaucrats who were working directly under President Havel, the Prime Minister, or the ministers were also lustrated.

Some former officers of the Communist secret police found their way back to politics through the back door, as private advisors, not covered by lustration, to politicians such as Social-Democratic Prime Ministers Zeman and Gross. The advisors were embedded in networks of former secret police residents and affected government decisions according to their economic interests, such as facilitating the export of weapons to unstable third world conflict zones (David Reference David2011, 137).

The celebrated case of Jan Kavan illustrates the complex issues involved in lustration. Kavan was lustrated while he was a member of parliament for the Social-Democratic Party. From February 1969 to July 1970, when he was a student at the London School of Economics, Kavan provided information about his fellow Czechoslovak students to a spy at the Czechoslovak embassy in London. Kavan had the code name “Kato.” Kavan claimed that he did not know that the Czechoslovak diplomat he was talking with was a spy and that he did not provide him with any damaging information. According to Kavan’s detractors, the file indicated clearly that Kavan was and perceived himself to be a secret police informer. Still, nobody stepped forward to claim that Kavan had informed such and such and therefore that person suffered so and so. Many dissidents distrusted Kavan and were angry at him because of an incident a dozen years later. Kavan remained in Britain after his graduation and founded an independent publishing house that published books and magazines about East-Central Europe. Kavan also organized a smuggling operation of printed materials to Czechoslovakia. In 1981 Kavan was arrested on the Czechoslovak border while attempting to smuggle into Czechoslovakia forbidden printed materials in a van. In addition to the illicit books, Kavan’s van also contained pre-prepared mailing labels of the addressees of these illicit materials mixed with addresses chosen at random from the Prague phone book. The Czechoslovak secret police did not find it challenging to separate the dissident networks from the names that were chosen at random. As a British citizen, Kavan was released and deported. But the mailing list provided the secret police with information for a wave of oppression. People on Kavan’s list lost their jobs. Czechoslovak state television broadcasted a report on Kavan’s capture and focused on some of the names on the labels as the first item on its nightly news. The choice of taking a mailing list with him from London was odd. Former dissidents I talked with in Prague told me that they concluded that he was either a secret police agent, or a fool, so either way they cut contacts with him, though some public dissidents (such as Havel) kept using him as a channel for distributing materials in the West.

After being lustrated and dismissed from parliament in 1991, Kavan sued the Ministry of Interior. A ministry committee convicted him of being a confidant of the secret police. This category of lustration was abolished in 1992 by the Constitutional Court and with it his lustration. In 1994 the court of the Seventh District of Prague concluded that Kavan was an unwitting informer, as he claimed. This conclusion was affirmed in 1996 by the Prague District Court against the opinion of the head of the post-1989 secret police, former dissident Stanislav Deváty, who claimed that Kavan would have had to be incredibly naive not to realize that his London embassy conversations were being reported back in Prague. Following the court ruling in 1996 Kavan ran successfully for elections to the Czech Senate. In 1998, when new Social-Democrat Prime Minister Miloš Zeman announced his intention to appoint Kavan as Foreign Minister, the largest private TV network TV Nova and the daily newspaper Mladá fronta published the materials on Kavan’s alleged collaboration. Mladá fronta gilded the lily by claiming that Kavan was a persona non grata in the United Kingdom. Kavan sued again for libel and lost on all counts except on the persona non grata issue (Drda Reference Drda1998). When Kavan was first lustrated, President Havel displayed public friendship toward Kavan by having lunch with him in a popular restaurant. In 1998, President Havel asked Zeman not to appoint Kavan as foreign minister because of his background. Zeman declined.

While foreign minister, Kavan appointed Karel Srba, a Communist-era military intelligence (not secret police and not subject to lustration) officer, to lead an anticorruption campaign in his ministry. Then, the daily Mladá fronta published an article alleging corruption in the Czech foreign office: A building owned by the Czech Foreign Office in Moscow was allegedly “spontaneously privatized” by corrupt Kavan who collected rent on it. Srba then hired a petty criminal nicknamed Citron (Lemon) to assassinate the journalist who exposed the affair. Citron, however, had his own code of professional ethics; he was a thief and not a murderer. He went to the police and the media to expose the affair, thereby becoming a minor celebrity. Czechs were accustomed to financial corruption among politicians, but they abhorred violence. Unlike in Russia, there were no political assassinations in the Czech Republic and journalists could criticize the government without fear of retaliation. Srba was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to jail for attempted murder. Kavan became a serious embarrassment to the Social-Democratic Party. Srba did not incriminate Kavan and took the blame upon himself. There was no proof that Kavan ordered the hit, and the police did not investigate let alone prosecute politicians. Still, it was widely believed that the contract for the journalist was ordered by Kavan because Srba had no reason of his own to put a contract on the journalist. Kavan then lost his Senate seat in the elections and the Social Democrats got him out of the country by promoting him to work at the secretariat of the United Nations in New York. Václav Havel concluded in a diary entry of May 15, 2001: “In spite of everything I am prepared to recommend (should anyone ask for a recommendation) that Kavan be appointed ambassador to the UN. A shirt is closer to the body than a coat, and the farther that person is from this country, the better it will be for this country” (Havel Reference Havel and Wilson2007, 187). Kavan’s successor as Foreign Minister claimed that confidential files “disappeared” while Kavan was in power.

In Poland, no lustration took place initially. Informally, some prosecutors and judges were dismissed in 1990 (Szczerbiak Reference Szczerbiak2002). In 1997, as elections loomed near, the right-wing opposition presented a bill of lustration according to which the officials in the highest echelons of all three branches of government and the state media would be required to declare in a deposition that they have not been agents of the Polish Communist or any other foreign secret service (meaning the KGB). If they confessed that they were agents, they could keep their jobs. If they lied, they were barred from elected office for ten years. A special court was supposed to enforce the law. Further, victims of the secret police would have had access to their files. The bill was initially threatened by a veto from the reformed Communist president Kwasniewski. Instead of opposing the law, he suggested that the law would be enforced by ordinary courts (i.e., by mostly Communist-appointed judges) and that the files would be open on demand to all. Kaminski and Nalepa (Reference Kaminski and Nalepa2006) noted that such declassification would have eliminated the incentive for former secret police agents to confess. If former agents knew what was in their files, they would only confess to what was in the files. No judges could be found to serve on the special courts, and no politician confessed. In 1998, parliament revised the bill and appointed the Warsaw district court to enforce the law. It also extended the scope of the law to include lawyers in private practice (Łoś and Zybertowicz Reference Łoś and Zybertowicz2000, 145–150). By 2005, the law resulted in 212 voluntary confessions and 65 persons were exposed as having lied on their affidavits. The most represented profession among the liars was the legal profession (David Reference David2011, 90).

Crony capitalism, the corruption of the state by the late-totalitarian elite and the reformed Communists in power, contributed to the rise to power of the radically anti-Communist and populist Law and Justice Party led by President Lech Kaczynski and Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kazynski a decade and a half after the end of Communism, and the rise of the more populist Fidesz Party under Prime Minister Orban in Hungary that embarked on radical lustration policies. The Law and Justice Party led the long-delayed institutional reform of Poland’s secret and intelligence services, especially Military Intelligence, that had not been reformed earlier.

The Polish government attempted then to introduce the most sweeping lustration law in Eastern Europe that still suffered from the same problems of scarcity of justice as the Czech lustration:

In May 2007, the Polish Constitutional Court excluded nongovernment employees, journalists, and academics from the scope of the law and abolished the ten-years exclusion from prescribed positions for those who would lie or not submit an affidavit, the only sanction provided in the law. Supporters of the law pointed out that the composition of the Polish Constitutional Court reflected not just the legacies of pre-1989 Poland, but also the appointments former Communist President Kwaśniewski made of jurists with similar backgrounds.

The Hungarian parliament enacted an extensive Czech-style screening law only two months before the 1994 election that resulted in the return of the reformed Communists to power (Kritz Reference Kritz1995, Vol. 3, 418–425). After the elections, the law was eviscerated. It resulted mostly in demotions to lower bureaucratic hierarchical levels that were not covered by lustration. Half of the handful of Hungarians who actually lost their jobs as a result of lustration got them back later (Borneman Reference Borneman1997, 146). The 1998 elections brought to power the right-wing Fidesz party that broadened again the scope of lustration from 900 to 17,000 positions and extended it until 2004. By 2003, this led to twenty-four resignations and fifteen public announcements of the culpability of officials who refused to resign (David Reference David2011, 84). The 2002 elections brought back to power the former Communists. This led to narrowing back the scope of Hungarian lustration. Unlike in other countries, the archives of the Hungarian secret services were not transferred to another institution. Since 1989, Hungarian secret police, military intelligence, and counterintelligence were able to destroy files, keep some, and pass on to public hands files that would be of interest only to historians (Stan 2009b). The backlash against the Hungarian reformed Communists’ misrule and economic crisis brought Fidesz back to power in 2010 in a political atmosphere that resembled the rise to power of Law and Justice in Poland. With an overwhelming majority and public mandate, Fidesz proceeded with a vengeance to purge the former Communists in positions of power in the Hungarian state. However, rather than depoliticize the civil service, the former Communists were replaced by Fidesz loyalists, maintaining the politicization of the state, which raised the ire of the European Union. Fidesz proceeded then to further alienate the European Union with talk of illiberal state. However, Fidesz has no ideology, liberal or otherwise. It has interests in extracting resources from the state for its members, just like the former Communists it replaced.

The new-old Baltic states granted citizenship to those who were citizens in 1940, prior to the subsequent occupations, and their descendants. Naturalization of later immigrants required passing a language test and bureaucratic review. Consequently, most Russians who chose to stay in the Baltic states did not become citizens, could not be elected, and could not serve in the national bureaucracy. In addition to the consequent decline in the supply of elites, there was increased demand because the new states had to create entirely new nation-state institutions. The extensive elite “vacancies” allowed the Baltic states to satisfy local demand for upper mobility and even invite back émigrés and their descendants to take elite positions, a phenomenon largely absent from other post-totalitarian countries where returning émigrés needed to compete over scarce elite positions with resentful locals. Constraints on information have been particularly acute in the Baltic states. The KGB shipped its files to Russia and the local informers and agents knew it, though some files were returned by Russia following the breakup of the Soviet Union. In Lithuania, some files were left and were used as bargaining chips to encourage the agents to reveal themselves in exchange for confidentiality. The first attempt to lustrate political representatives was at the brief period of non-Communist rule in Lithuania before the return of the Communists to power after a year of independence, the first in Eastern Europe. As elsewhere, the legislators attempted to bypass the courts by establishing a parliamentary committee to review members of parliament, though the lustrated had the right for judicial review. The unique element in the Lithuanian lustration was that lustrated members of parliament would not have been dismissed, but subjected to immediate by-election. A later lustration law broadened the category of the lustrated to include higher government positions and demanded the resignation of members of parliament (Kritz Reference Kritz1995, Vol. 2, 766–769, Vol. 3, 427–431). Following the second return of Communists to power, retributive justice in Lithuania came to a halt again. The third return of non-Communist majority in the next elections led to attempts by the parliamentary majority to enact in 1998 Czech-style lustration, facing obstructions from the reformed Communist president Adamkus. The 1998 law gave former KGB agents eighteen months to register or have their identity revealed. The scope of lustration included people who practiced law and those who worked for the security services, in banking, in education, in the mass media, as private detectives, and in managing state companies. This had a broader scope than in the Czech Republic because it included many positions in the private sector, from where the former secret police enriched itself, in banking, as owners and workers in private security companies and in the legal profession. In another attempt to overcome the scarcity of information, KGB informers could be suspended from lustration for informing on their colleagues by a three-person committee appointed by the president of Lithuania and with the President’s approval. Since the president did not cooperate, the government provided for fines for employers who did not fire their KGB employees in strategic industries such as energy, mass transportation, and communication. Altogether there have been 1,500 confessions that led to 303 court cases. Eventually, 87 Lithuanians were ordered to resign, 20 of whom appealed, 5 successfully (Stan Reference Lavinia and Stan2009a). Appeals before the European Court of Human Rights in 2004, 2005, and 2009 were successful in limiting the lustration law to the public service. The European Court of Human Rights could not understand why a decade after the end of totalitarianism former KGB agents could still be dangerous and could not see how their roles in the private sector be affected by their background. The court therefore ordered the Lithuanian state to pay compensations to the former KGB agents in amounts that former inmates in the Gulags could only dream about (Pettai Reference Pettai2010).

A 1995 Estonian law required all people living in Estonia who worked for or cooperated with Soviet or Nazi security and intelligence organs, including not just the KGB but also other intelligence agencies, to confess and register with the Estonian authorities within a year. The category of “cooperated” was broad enough to include people who worked with foreigners and so had to report to the KGB, such as tourist guides and long-distance truck drivers. The sanction against those who failed to do so was that their identities would be made public, while the identities of the agents who confessed would be kept secret. “According to the Security Police Board, over a thousand people made a voluntary confession during the stipulated time. As for the rest, 13 lists carrying a total of 647 names of persons who had served in the intelligence or counterintelligence organizations of the security organs or armed forces of the former USSR and ESSR have been published” (Tamm Reference Tamm2013, 658). Most KGB collaborators and employees did not bother to register because the sanction of publication was not sufficiently severe. The last head of the KGB in Estonia who did not register laughed it off, saying that if anybody still doubted that he was the last head of the KGB in Estonia, they could now read it in an official state publication. The names were published with career details, indicating that the source of the information was the KGB’s files; all were full-time resident employees of the KGB. No name of informer or agent was published. Forty percent of the published names were of retired persons and almost all the rest worked in the private sector. Most of the published names were Slavic, that is, not of Estonian nationals. Consequently, only a single person, a municipal council member, was lustrated in Estonia (Pettai Reference Pettai2010).

The short-lived lustration in the mid-nineties in Bulgaria touched only on the banking sector and leading managerial positions in higher education. The first was struck down by the Constitutional Court. The government attempted to enforce academic lustration by linking the financing of state universities and academic salaries to compliance with this law (Kritz Reference Kritz1995, Vol. 2, 703–705, Vol. 3, 296–299). Bulgarian academics told me that the law resulted in the demotion of a few rectors and deans of faculties. Otherwise, lustrated academics merely moved horizontally to other academic institutions. Academic lustration was struck down by parliament following the return to power of the Bulgarian Communists in 1995. A 1997 Bulgarian law would have made public the past secret police affiliations of high state officials, but the Constitutional Court limited it to members of parliament, excluding itself and the president from lustration. A 1998 attempt at Czech-style lustration was struck down by the Bulgarian Constitutional Court in 1999 (Sadurski Reference Sadurski2005, 248–249). As in other countries, Bulgarian former members of the secret police became involved in the Bulgarian economy as businessmen, privatizing the international companies set by the former secret service, merging with organized crime, and becoming involved with weapons smuggling and “advising” politicians by providing them with surveillance and other “black arts” services. In 2002 and then following the 2005 elections a parliamentary committee examined whether political representatives or candidates were connected to the former secret police and published their names, including the name of the country’s president. But these revelations could not make any politician withdraw or resign (Metodiev Reference Metodiev and Stan2009).

In Romania, the elite continuity from late-totalitarianism has ensured that there would be no lustration. The state established a council that should have publicized the secret police connections of politicians and provided Romanians with access to their files, but it had no control over the files that remained in the possession of the uncooperative secret police. Stan (Reference Stan and Stan2009e) considered the actions of the council to have resulted from a combination of incompetence, political biases, and protection of the agents of the former regime. Following the defeat of the Social-Democratic Party (the new name of the Romanian Communist Party) in the 2004 elections, most of the files were transferred to the custody of the Council in mid-2006. However, since the secret police had a decade and a half to destroy, delete, fabricate, and so on, the reliability of the files is questionable.

In Albania, following the 1992 elections that brought to power the anti-Communist Democratic Party, the whole civil service was replaced, unlike elsewhere in East Europe. However, Austin and Ellison (Reference Austin, Ellison and Stan2009) claim that this was not political lustration but a Communist-style purge that had more to do with vengeance and job creation for Democratic Party supporters. The 1996 Verification Law was Albania’s lustration. It had a broader scope than the Czech lustration, covering the Communist Party as well as the secret service and its informers, and it excluded the lustrated not just from higher-echelon public positions, but also from positions in the private sector, especially in finance, banking, and insurance. A Verification Committee was appointed by the government, that is, the Democratic Party. It was able to instruct the government to fire employees and the election committee to disallow candidates if they refused to resign. Ten percent of the candidates for the 1996 elections were banned, mostly from the opposition. Austin and Ellison propose that enforcement was politically selective. Both laws were upheld by the courts, though since judges were expecting Socialist victory in the coming elections, they cleared individual opposition candidates. The financial meltdown of Albania in early 1997 followed by the withering away of the state, fall into anarchy, and new elections, followed by the return to power of the Socialists, ended this attempt at lustration. A compromise political contract between all the major parties brokered by Franz Vranitsky of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) limited the scope of lustration to politburo members and secret police agents. In 2001 the law expired. When the Democrats returned to power in the 2005 elections they promised not to conduct another such purge of the civil service.

Outing

Roman David (Reference David2011) distinguished three types of lustration policies: exclusive, excluding perpetrators from holding high positions in the political hierarchy; inclusive, making public the identities of the perpetrators without demanding their resignation; and reconciliatory, allowing the perpetrators to keep their positions if and only if they confess. He associated exclusion with the Czech Republic, inclusion with Hungary, and reconciliation with Poland. However, all the countries used both exclusion and exposure. Lists were leaked to the press in all three countries. In Hungary and Poland exposures were conceived as threats to force the shamed to resign. The Hungarian and Polish legislators were surprised that exposed politicians did not resign. Only in some cases exposures did lead to voluntary or involuntary resignations (David Reference David2011, 153). The Polish (and Lithuanian, etc.) incentives for confession were not introduced to bring about reconciliation, but in reaction to severe scarcity of evidence. The results of lustration in all three countries according to the public opinion survey that David (Reference David2011, 132–133) cited in terms of personnel change and transparency were very similar. In my opinion, the scarcity of justice, irrespective of the choice of policy, determined the limited effects of all post-totalitarian retributive justice.

The roughest form of retribution was the publication of raw evidence about collaboration and membership in totalitarian organizations. It transferred investigation and adjudication to the public at large. Initially, in several countries, employees of branches of government with access to the files leaked lists or directories of secret police officers and informers with or without the approval of the government and the directors of the institutions in charge of guarding the archival materials left by the secret police. Long lists amounting to 77,000 names (including those of deceased agents) in all four categories were leaked to the Czech press in the early nineties. The fullest list was made available on the net in an interactive, searchable format at www.cibulka.cz. More recently, after the establishment in 2008 of an Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in charge of the files, a few other longer lists were published. One was a registry of people of interest to the Communist secret police that did not distinguish spies from those spied upon. Another list was of agents in foreign countries, including still-active agents. In Hungary, a 1994 law stipulated exposure as the only sanction, expecting in vain that “outed” politicians and officials would resign. In fact, the exposed laughed it off and kept their jobs (Williams et al. Reference Williams, Szczerbiak and Fowler2003). Kis (Reference Kis and Miklósi2008) argued that politicians whose embarrassing past was exposed and did not resign became weaker and could not fulfil their duties. Kis blamed a budgetary crisis in Hungary on the weakness of a compromised prime minister who was too weak to impose necessary austerities against the irresponsibly populist policies of his post-Communist party. In 2005, a list of almost a quarter million names from the directory of the Polish secret service was leaked and published by former dissident Bronisƚaw Wildstein. It did not distinguish collaborators from candidates (Economist 2007; Stan Reference Stan and Stan2009d, 86; Shore Reference Shore, Tismaneanu and Iacob2012). In other countries, partial lists were published, usually to smear political opponents. This measure was effective only against center-right politicians; Communist voters did not care.

Unlike lustration, publishing lists of agents could not be obstructed by court or undone by the return to power of reformed Communists, but it also could not be appealed. Public shaming punishes only people who move among moral individuals. Former members of the elite who did not work for or socialize with former opponents of the regime did not care if their names appeared in some published registry. It hurt most the few former dissidents who were mentioned in the files whether or not they were conscious collaborators (Škvorecký Reference Škvorecký2001). As Šiklová (Reference Šiklová, Krygier and Czarnota1999, 255) put it, “only moral people can receive moral punishment.”

The Age of the Historians

In recent years, most secret police archives in almost all post-totalitarian countries were transferred to the jurisdiction of national remembrance foundations, run by historians. Post-Communist countries attempted to follow the Israeli model of Yad Vashem, combining historical research with national commemoration and education and criminal investigation.Footnote ⁹ The obvious difference is that the crimes of the Holocaust were not committed on Israeli soil and its perpetrators were not compatriots of the Israeli investigators, let alone holders of powerful positions in Israeli society. The creation of these institutions, often with lavish budgets in post-Communist standards and hundreds of employees, significantly reduced the scarcity of justice and information. There was greater supply of historians and social scientists than lawyers and they cost less. Historians are better qualified to manage and conduct research in historical archives than policemen and lawyers. The large number of employees has allowed these institutions to embark on the almost Sisyphean task of digitalizing the files of the secret police, systematizing them in data banks with indexes and then drawing conclusions from them. The cross-comparison of vast databases overcame some of the destruction the secret police inflicted before losing control over the files (Tucker Reference Tucker2009). Historians in these institutes have also expanded the scope of justice by considering cases of harmful collaboration with totalitarian intelligence agencies other than the secret police (David Reference David2011, 81).

Post-totalitarian nations needed to overcome and counter the culture of historical forgetting and disinformation that totalitarianism instituted with evidence-based historiography, free of totalitarian lies, suppression of ideologically inconvenient historical episodes, and obscurantist language. Still, a state-sponsored project of writing a single historiographic narrative that would then be promulgated through all the channels that the state controls, primary and secondary public education, memorials, monuments, museums, subsidized publications, and so on, is inconsistent with democratic pluralism, where historiography is left to civil society. “[A] state run institution whose main aim is to cultivate a national memory … is a clear step towards a state-run cultural policy that potentially threatens to undermine the social positions and cultural background of groups or social or political strata who have no direct influence on the government” (Kopeček Reference Kopeček and Kopeček2008, 90; cf. Tamm Reference Tamm2013, 668). Historiography “becomes an uninterrupted dispute between various interest groups, each trying to promote its own vision of the past or impose it on society” (Stobiecki Reference Stobiecki and Kopeček2008, 180). Still, given the weakness of civil society and the low level of productivity, not to mention competence of some post-totalitarian academic history departments, without such state intervention not much new historiography would have been produced, if for no other reason than because there would have been no alternative major source to finance it. The previous, default, historiography that the Communist regime produced, or translations of old research from Western European languages, would have then generated historical consciousness. Alternatively, there would be no historical consciousness at all; the whole national past would have been consigned to oblivion, the preferred option for former Communists and some State of Florida politicians and university trustees (Stobiecki Reference Stobiecki and Kopeček2008, 182). Collective amnesia, outdated foreign perspectives, and Communist propaganda are hardly better options than competing state-sponsored interpretations of the past.

Kopeček (Reference Kopeček and Kopeček2008) argued that states or at least ruling right-wing parties tended to back narratives of heroic victimhood on the basis of nineteenth-century nationalism and pre-totalitarian national historiographies. In Slovakia, the political appointment of an ultranationalist to head their national memory institute drew even more criticism (Kopeček Reference Kopeček and Kopeček2008, 90). Interestingly, the same victimhood and heroism narrative has been told in Israel, where the day on which the Warsaw Ghetto uprising began is a state holiday for commemorating the Holocaust, called the Day of Holocaust and Heroism. The victimhood emphasizes the just cause of the nation, the heroism, a model for the young to imitate and to be proud of. In the Baltic states, a similar narrative of local victimhood and heroism competed with the Holocaust narrative over who should be considered a greater victim and hero and which national groups partially participated in victimizing the others and thus were not fully heroic, since some of the KGB officers in the Baltic states had some Jewish cultural background and the Nazis recruited some locals to assist them in the implementation of the Holocaust (cf. Kattago Reference Kattago2012). This kind of narrative ignores vast evidence about the everyday complicity of subjects with the totalitarian system in the Baltics. It would prevent historians from understanding how the totalitarian system operated and lasted for so long, how ordinary people adjusted to it, and how these adaptations persisted as the legacies of totalitarianism.

Historians differ from lawyers in having the broadest scope of interest in the past, not just in events that have legal implications. When historians discover significant new documents in the archives, they rush to publish them and their analysis before another historian “scoops” them. Consequently, historians looked for and found evidence for collaboration with the secret police of public figures who were not politicians or civil servants and hence beyond the pale of lustration but not beyond the pale of shaming, for example, Olympic sportspersons, Hungarian film director István Szabó, and Czech writer Milan Kundera (Tucker Reference Tucker2009). The purpose of such exposures was not to ensure the future of democracy but to set the historical record straight (a founding value of the historians’ profession), reinterpret the past activities of public figures in light of their collaboration, and advertently or inadvertently diminish their reputation, influence, and status as role models in cultures that still hold artists and intellectuals rather than TV celebrities such as the Kardashians in high esteem, and where Communist regimes promoted the heroic perception of sports stars almost as highly as do some U.S. state colleges.

Another difference between lawyers and historians is that they typically operate with different contextual standards of truth (Tucker Reference Tucker and Hosle2014). Common law works with multiple standards of proof: “Beyond reasonable doubt” in criminal justice where the stakes are high; “the preponderance of evidence,” where the stakes are lower, in civil cases; and with a presumption of guilt when the stakes are very low, for example in cases of licensing. Historians usually write about the lives and times of dead people. Their standards of probable truth are close to those in civil cases. However, when what historians assert publicly has direct effects on living people, a higher standard, a higher probability, is required. The culture and training of historians do not prepare them to demand criminal law, beyond reasonable doubt, standards of truth. At their intellectual core, the debates about the revelations of historians in the archives may not be about politics but about the appropriate standards, high enough probabilities, for historians to claim that people who are still alive and are affected by their speech acts collaborated in some form or another with totalitarianism.

The Results

Letki (Reference Letki2002) noted the high correlation between lustration and successful transition to democracy. Borneman (Reference Borneman1997) argued there was a positive correlation between retributive justice and the rule of law. But correlations do not imply causation. In this case, I think they may be the result of a common cause, the balance of power between the elites. The absence of any lustration in Russia, apart of few measures designed to fight Yeltsin’s political rivals to the left (Waller Reference Waller, Berman and Waller2006, 20), eventually allowed the Putin counterrevolution, the restoration of the KGB elite, and the rollback of democratic reforms, rights, and liberties won after the end of the Soviet Union. “If democratic consolidation is heavily dependent on elite attitudes, the fact that Russia has largely been untouched by revolutionary systematic purging of Communist elites from positions of power … or even the ritualistic expiatory ‘lustration’ that characterizes most other East European transitions to a greater or lesser degree … makes it even more likely that the imprint of the Communist legacy has survived the regime transition” (Hughes and John Reference Hughes, John, Anton and Gel’man2003, 127). But the absence of lustration in Russia reflected the power of the KGB in the first place. Czech lustration reflected, as well as reinforced, the replacement of political elites. The enactment of retributive justice under conditions of severe scarcity of justice functioned then as a catalyst to existing processes of replacement of elites and democratization.

In the Czech Republic, which went further in retributive justice than all the post-totalitarian countries, 400,000 persons (4% of the population) were subjected to lustration vetting, of whom 3 percent (12,000 people) were found to had been residents or collaborators (Williams et al. Reference Williams, Szczerbiak and Fowler2003). Former dissident and Minister of Justice, Jiří Ruml, held that the courts’ actions rendered the law ineffective, by overturning positive verdicts of lustration on appeal. Constitutional court judge Prochazka said that lustration was effective in declaring strongly the social disapproval of collaboration. He excused the counterlustration actions of the courts by explaining that the destruction of incriminating materials by the secret police did not leave sufficient evidence in many cases. The former chair of the Supreme Court, Otakar Motejl, said that lustration was “useful but unsuccessful.” It was useful in creating public discussion of collaboration and in encouraging officials to leave public administration who might have remained there otherwise. Lustration was unsuccessful because many of those who left public administration received much better rewarding jobs in the “private” sector. The court system tended to favor the lustrated. As the vice-chairman of the Czech Supreme Court put it, “the lustrated were thrown out of the door, but some came back through the window” (Ivh and Dub 1998). By comparison, in the eastern part of united Germany, without scarcities of justice, half a million state employees were dismissed and were replaced following unification. About 10 percent of them, 42,000–55,000, were fired due to their association with the East German Secret Police (McAdams Reference McAdams2001, 73). In Germany there were able, willing, and indeed eager West German alternative elite to replace the East Germans and the definition of people to be dismissed was vague and open to conflicting interpretations in different regional jurisdictions: “people whose behavior or attitude were not compatible with commitment to basic democratic free order.” “Attitude” can mean anything. In some Lands allegedly even cooks and janitors for the secret police were excluded from state employment, as in Germany unlike in other post-Communist countries lustration excluded from any type of public employment, even on the lowest echelons (McAdams Reference McAdams2001, 75).

The grave damage that has been inflicted on East-Central European societies by the former secret police and the nomenklatura after 1989 was economic and moral. Again, the Czech Republic is representative in this respect, though the details of financial corruption varied somewhat from country to country: The lustration laws were not designed to control the private sector. Since most Czech industry became de jure though not de facto privatized (the Czech government continued to control most of the privatized companies through the state owned banks that owned investment funds, until they were privatized only a decade after the first wave of privatization), there were no legal limitations on the involvement of the former secret police in the economy. Consequently, the moral, social, and political devastation that these people had inflicted on their fellow countrymen was compounded by stealing their economy. The theft, asset-stripping, and embezzlement of what was left of the national economies after 1989, the corruption of the new political elite, had much to do with the economic and consequently political power of the late-totalitarian elite (Tucker Reference Tucker2000, 209–241).

President Havel summed the Czech situation in his December 9, 1997, address to parliament:

Similar transformation of secret policemen into businessmen through privatization happened in Poland, where, as in Russia, former secret policemen were involved in protection rackets and private security companies that sold their criminal skills and state connections to the highest bidder (Łoś and Zybertowicz Reference Łoś and Zybertowicz2000, 154–179).

Secret police officers, especially those who were involved in economic espionage, external relations including trade, and those with agents and networks on the managerial level, infiltrated the economic system and ruthlessly used their networks and ability to obtain inside information both from the state and the firms to gain control over privatized properties and then received protection and subsidies from the state (Basta Reference Bašta, Berman and Waller2006, 36).

Jasiewicz presented an alternative interpretation. He acknowledged that “networks comprising ex-communists and some of their former adversaries, now joined in a web of greed, bribery, nepotism, and cronyism. Sure enough, the old nomenklatura had the means, legal and illegal, formal and informal, to enrich itself in the process of privatization and liberalization of the economy. Sure enough, some former dissidents could not resist the temptation to ‘get rich quick,’ and used connections both old and new to this end” (Jasiewicz Reference Jasiewicz2007, 32). In his opinion, in Poland, “political patronage in general is an all-around growth industry, with numerous players playing and the list of those who have a finger in the pie shifting and swelling after each alternation of those in office” (Ibid). In Jasiewicz’s opinion, the patterns of corruption associated with the late-totalitarian elite are those of any national elite. Corruption is rooted deep in a culture of patronage and nepotism, disregard of the rule of law and meritocratic considerations. The association of these practices with the late-totalitarian elite is merely the result of its continuity. The replacement of the elite through lustration or by other means would not have changed this reality, but merely replaced one corrupt elite with another. Jasiewicz illustrated this claim by the practices of the Law and Order Party in Poland. That party had no former secret policemen or nomenklatura members, yet it appointed cronies to state and semistate economic managerial positions on the basis of political patronage and loyalty. The same could be argued about the practices of the ruling Fidesz in Hungary since 2010. The corrupt legacies would not be then of totalitarianism, but of much older national traditions going back perhaps hundreds of years.

However, a comparison of Poland (No. 38 on Transparency International’s 2013 Corruption Index) and the Czech Republic (No. 57 on Transparency International’s 2013 Corruption Index) with Russia (No. 127 on Transparency International’s 2013 Corruption Index) demonstrates a gap in the scope and types of corruption. The totalitarian secret police was better trained and experienced in a wide array of criminal and corrupt practices than any other section of late-totalitarian society; after all, even in the West spies are considered criminals with a license. The Communist secret police was also ruthless, amoral, and lacked loyalty and sympathy to fellow citizens. Graduates of the secret police did not share the kind of inhibitions and compunctions that ordinary corrupt politicians may have had about the use of violence or other unsavory means. There is a qualitative difference between a political system and state that suffer from high levels of systemic corruption by politicians and civil servants and a state that is nothing but a front for organized crime.

The moral and financial corruption that followed the adjustment of the rights of the late-totalitarian elite to its interests led to disillusionment with democracy and a rise in populism and conspiracy theories about a deal between the old and new elites (Rupnik Reference Rupnik, Diamond and Plattner2007, 21):

Totalitarianism entailed a paranoid worldview. Totalitarianism had to construct dangers, enemies, and conspiracies out of thin air, not just because it had to be on guard against losing total control, but also because external enemies were necessary for keeping internal cohesion within the elite. Paranoia, unlike fear, is unfocused, a priori, and abstract, leading to compulsive behavior. The secret police was a reflection of compulsive paranoid behavior. But this behavior was projected on society and constructed it in that image. The people who were spied on became paranoid themselves, seeing conspiracies, informers, and dangers everywhere in their environment. But the paranoia of ordinary denizens of the totalitarian universe did not prevent them from actually being persecuted. Most supporters of lustration in the post-Communist universe have not articulated well their anxieties. But their paranoia aside, persecuted they were, and though they could not articulate their fears of the secret police and the late-totalitarian elite, they had every reason to fear them. Gaining access to the files helped the victims because it concretized their fears. The exposure of the identities of agents and collaborators “demystified” them (McAdams Reference McAdams2001, 63). Instead of living in an insecure world where anybody could have been an informer, they learned who was against them and much more significantly who was not against them. The Czech writer Pavel Kohout, a former Charter 77 dissident, a former Stalinist poet, and, as he admitted, a former informer during his Stalinist phase, read his file. He described his experience in an article in the weekend edition of the daily Lidové noviny. Kohout’s greatest surprises were not from discovering who informed on him, but from learning who refused to inform on him. Some ordinary people he was sure had informed on him had withstood interrogations, threats, and enticements, and told the secret police that they were his friends and would not inform on him.

Teitel (Reference Teitel2000) suggested that “transitional justice” prosecutions were designed to clarify the distinction between right and wrong without necessarily attributing blame or inflicting penalties. Post-totalitarian retributive justice was prospective and declarative; it accepted the absence of individual responsibility for institutional wrongs, while attempting to affect a normative shift for the future. Post-totalitarian retributive justice certainly did some of that, made a contribution to the moral regeneration of devastated and disillusioned peoples, as the existence and example of the dissidents helped in the slow regeneration of civil society (Tismaneanu Reference Tismaneanu2012). In the long run, such moral regeneration should make some forms of justice, which are now deep, shallow, and consequently allow an increase in the scope and accuracy of justice in the future.

Myths of Lustration

Post-totalitarian retributive justice and lustration generated a good deal of urban myths outside of Central and Eastern Europe. Two historical episodes in particular seem to have been projected on and reflected back from the post-totalitarian reality: The McCarthyist period in the United States and the dirty wars against leftists in Latin America. Somehow, the Communist secret police came to be identified with left-wing American intellectuals and Latin American rebels. Even more ridiculously, the weak post-totalitarian democratic elites came to be identified with McCarthy and military juntas. “Communism” was interpreted as an ideology and “Communists” were a group of people united by convictions who shared a “political allegiance” (Teitel Reference Teitel2000, 167) and joined a political party. However, in late-totalitarian Europe the first meant a power hierarchy and the second amoral opportunists. People whom Rupnik (Reference Rupnik2002a) called somewhat stereotypically “New York human rights and media circles” promulgated myths about widespread “McCarthyist” witch hunts (Weschler Reference Weschler1992a,Reference Weschlerb), a “wide-spread administrative purging from political office” in the Czech Republic and Hungary (Teitel Reference Teitel2000, 95), use of the files by new democratic regimes to destroy individual lives (96), and the exclusion of Communists as well as collaborators from participation in political life (98). Displaying lively imagination, Teitel (171) claimed that the list of “excludables,” dubbed “enemies of democracy,” was supposedly read on Czechoslovak television. Actually, only the names of the ten members of parliament who lost their seats were read on television as part of the news. There was no purge of former or current Communists even de jure. Yet, Teitel concluded (172) by equating lustration with the Stalinist purges that cost tens of millions their lives.

The “preposterous” (Rupnik Reference Rupnik2002a) myth about purges reappeared in the most unexpected places: In the context of opposing the purging of Baathist officials from the Iraqi government by the U.S. occupation forces, Ian Buruma (Reference Buruma2003) stated in the New York Times:

In reality, opinion polls actually put the popularity of lustration in the Czech Republic at 80 percent, lustration was extended indefinitely by parliament in 2000, only a handful of Czech former dissidents were actually lustrated, judicial review was available in all cases and usually it annulled lustrations, and the initiative for lustration originated in the parliament rather than in the government.

The myths of lustration have probably been sustained in the United States more than by any other book, by Tina Rosenberg’s Pulitzer Prize winning in the category of nonfiction (sic!) bestseller, the Haunted Lands (Reference Rosenberg1995). Almost two decades after its publication, a cursory search on the internet shows that it is still being taught in U.S. colleges and universities. As Rosenberg acknowledged, the stories she told were not representative, but were interesting because they appeared to be morally ambiguous. Like many other critics of lustration, Rosenberg’s main criticism was that it was based exclusively on the secret police’s own files, rather than on due process, the examination of the documentary evidence in the files and the interrogation of witnesses. But Rosenberg herself also relied on single sources uncritically. She took at their word people whose profession was deception and manipulation. She did not attempt to compare their testimonies with those of independent witnesses who were not recommended by the lustrated themselves to corroborate their stories, or even with standard history books. Consequently, the book is replete with factual errors, exaggerations, and, above all, attempts to blur the differences between victims and perpetrators.

Particularly troubling is the following assertion about the 1,864 signatories of Charter 77: “half of those signed in 1989, when it was safe, fashionable, and good for the resume” (Rosenberg Reference Rosenberg1995, 24). In fact, only 141 people signed Charter 77 from October to December of 1989, when it was safe (Prečan Reference Prečan1990, 463): 8 percent, not 50 percent. This deception attempts to generate the impression that everybody, including the dissidents, were opportunists, and as such they were indistinguishable from the collaborators with the former regime. Still on the subject of dissent, Rosenberg asserts confidently that most Czech dissidents were Communist Party members before 1968 (112). Some dissidents indeed were 1968 vintage reformed Communists, but there is no proof that they were the majority. Many of the signatories of Charter 77 were motivated by their strong religious convictions and they have never been Communist, nor were artists and philosophers such as Havel and Jan Patočka, two of the first three spokespersons of the movement. Traditionally, only one of the three spokespersons of Charter 77 was a reformed Communist, indicating a rough ratio of 1:3 (Prečan Reference Prečan1990; Tucker Reference Tucker2000).

Rosenberg claimed (6) that the supporters of lustration argued that to preserve democracy it was necessary to curtail the political rights of Communists. However, lustration has not been directed at the Communist Party or its past and present members anywhere, not even contingently, because the files of the secret police and their directory did not contain the names of members of the Communist Party, who were listed in a separate directory that was usually destroyed. Rosenberg wrote that almost everyone was a Communist in the sixties: “The world spun at a leftward tilt in that decade, and many believed in the social goals that communism professed to hold dear …. The Party had room for dissidents and offered them the heady possibility of redesigning communism”(119). Revolutionary totalitarianism did not have a space for dissent; dissidents were killed and jailed in the revolutionary era, so there were hardly any dissidents who could have joined the Party in 1968. The new left was popular among young people in Western Europe and on U.S. campuses, but those trends were not present in East Europe because of the experience of the previous two decades. By the sixties, after two decades of Communism, believers, unlike pragmatists, were far between and few. Rosenberg (8) echoed Communist propaganda in claiming that Czech Communists led the popular uprising at the end of the Second World War and that the Red Army liberated Prague on May 9, 1945. In fact, the uprising was popular and led by a coalition of all Czech parties, and the liberation of Prague was finally achieved by “Vlasov’s army” of ex-Soviet, mostly Ukrainian, POWs who were recruited to fight on the side of the Axis powers. They agreed to liberate Prague in return for receiving asylum, but after the Red Army arrived, they were carted off to Siberia. As elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the Soviets waited and arrived only once the local resistance was weakened by fighting the Nazis alone. Altogether, only ten Red Army soldiers died in the course of taking over Prague, a negligible figure in comparison with the tens of thousands who died taking Berlin, indicating that they met practically no resistance (Lukes Reference Lukes2012). Rosenberg claimed (8) that the Red Army kicked the Germans from the Sudetenland. In fact, western Bohemia was liberated by Paton’s American forces; they remained there as military authorities until Truman ordered their withdrawal two years later.

Rosenberg attempted to blur the difference between agents and dissidents by claiming without a shred of evidence that many Czech dissidents agreed to become informers (92). Rosenberg considered involvement with Communism commensurable with participation in the war in Vietnam on the American side (sic!). What “if a new American government declared the Vietnam War immoral and decided to prosecute all soldiers who had taken part?” (114). This strange simile was then cashed out in claiming that lustrace “punishes people for activities that were legal – not just legal but considered a patriotic duty – at the time of their commission” (98). Rosenberg somehow associated collaboration with the puppet regime of the Soviet occupier and what Czechs could have considered a patriotic duty. A survey of popular opinions of professions taken in the late 1960s in Czechoslovakia revealed Czechs and Slovaks to hold secret policemen in the lowest esteem with the single exception of sewer cleaners (Williams Reference Williams, William and Deletant2001). Since the post-1968 normalization regime was clearly the result of a foreign invading army and occupation, nobody could have confused serving it with patriotism. Even more disturbing, the use of conformity (albeit imaginary in Rosenberg’s case) as acceptable justification of anything is probably the most morally dangerous part of Rosenberg’s book. One of the lessons of the Second World War has been that conformity does not justify anything, but is dangerous. Much of the literature and philosophy of the forties and fifties, from Camus to Moravia, Ionesco, and the existentialists, has been about the dangers of conformism of the kind that bred the bestial herd-like anonymous murderous mass movements in the thirties.

It is my impression that conformism and opportunism rather than any political ideology link the totalitarian elite and secret policemen with some of their American defenders in and out of academia. People who jumped through many inauthentic hoops to achieve career goals and a high income identified with people who, unlike the dissidents, jumped through other hoops, immoral ones, to achieve successful careers and material wealth in different social contexts. It is possible to construct informing on people or joining the secret police as career moves, together with getting admitted to an elite university, receiving a fellowship to study in Moscow, being admitted to the exclusive fraternity of the KGB, becoming a consultant to that agency, receiving several promotions through an old boys and comrades network, excelling in marketing and sales of weapons to terrorist states, and becoming a manager of a larger state corporation that eventually is spontaneously privatized. Some people may feel closer to this kind of curriculum vitae than to that of an underground artist who was denied any formal education, could not travel, and lived in poverty holding manual jobs. They have to honestly tell themselves that had they lived in that kind of society, they would have gone for the Moscow fellowship rather than for the underground art scene.

Anybody who conducted research in post-Communist Europe knows the tendency of many to repaint their past in heroic colors; everybody was a heroic dissident, at least by stealing something from the state. Such proclamations of dissidence need to be taken with a grain of salt. Rosenberg did not quite taste the salt. She described (111) the then-head of the Social-Democratic opposition party (who would become Prime Minister in 1998 and president in 2013), Miloš Zeman, as a “former dissident” who circulated petitions in 1989 for the release of Havel from prison that his main political rival to the right, Václav Klaus, refused to sign. Gilding the lily, she added, “Most former dissidents oppose lustrace. Miloš Zeman, now head of the Social Democratic Party (which Opposes lustrace), did an informal tally and placed 80 percent of his former comrades in the anti-lustrace side” (112). The only problem is that Zeman had never been a dissident, but just like Klaus, he worked in his profession as an economist. He had no connection to any dissident circles, and like Klaus, never circulated petitions for anything, or he would have lost his exclusive job. He became a national figure in 1989 when he published in an official magazine a brutally honest article about the sorry state of the Czechoslovak economy at the time and was then interviewed about it in the official Communist mass media.

Rosenberg told a risibly pathetic Oprah Winfrey-style story about a medical doctor who allegedly joined the Communist paramilitary militia to gain support for purchasing cancer treatment equipment for his clinic (90). Allegedly, as a militia member he only gave lectures on first aid. Consequently, he lost his job after the fall of Communism. Unfortunately for this story, no medical position was on the list of high government offices covered by the law of lustration. It could well be that in some provincial setting an aspiring doctor joined the militia to advance his career (with or without the medical equipment), and then when the regime changed, the colleagues whom he terrorized demoted him and advanced themselves, using his political background as an excuse. But this would have had nothing to do with lustration.Footnote ¹⁰

Rosenberg (67) summed up soberly that “Lustrace was a witch-hunt, but the witches were real.” The Czech StB had the closest links to the KGB, and it continued to attempt to influence public opinion after the coup in the Soviet Union. Lustration prevented people from being blackmailed. “Most of the government’s bureaucrats were holdovers from the last regime – who else had the qualifications for the job? – and they continued to act like Mafiosi, awarding their friends and one another cheap loans, good jobs, and government contracts. And it was the old Communists who had the money and access to buy the newly privatized business” (69). Still, she concluded that a “new enlightened minority” undertook a new revolution and the supporters of lustration were therefore Leninist. She ignored the democratic popularity of lustration, the lack of enlightenment rhetoric in a bureaucratic process named after a religious ritual, and the difference between the totalitarian destruction of civil society, the annihilation of a major part of the population, and a few hundred people losing jobs in the highest echelons of government bureaucracy.

This is almost, but not quite, the end of the story. Ten years later, Tina Rosenberg (Reference Rosenberg2005) wrote in the New York Times that in the Czech Republic the Interior Ministry screeners fired people holding important government jobs according to an index of officers, collaborators, and candidates of the secret police without examining their guilt or the content of the files. As noted earlier, Interior Ministry functionaries had no authority to fire anybody and the scope of lustration excluded the category of candidates since the Constitutional Court ruling of 1992. Rosenberg concluded that through leaks of the list of lustrated to the press, “[t]his process slandered thousands of innocent people and perpetuated the Communist mentality of the enemies list. The policy has been softened, but its essence remains.” Then she went on writing about the unreliability of informers’ files, and the assumption of guilt for collaborators, ignoring in 2005 that the 1991 law changed in 1992; the categories of candidate and informer were excluded and judicial review was introduced. It seems that by 2005, the myth of lustration had taken a life of its own and had become immune of any reality check; it became a story that interprets a myth.