ministers? Why not? After all, many of them had cooperated actively in the dismantling of their own regime. But if not, if there were to be restrictions placed on the civic or political rights of such people, then how long should such restrictions apply and how far down the old
This was one thorny problem. The second was in some ways more complicated still, and only emerged over the course of time. The Communist regimes did not merely force their rule upon a reluctant citizenry; they encouraged people to collude in their own repression, by collaborating with the security agencies and reporting the activities and opinions of their colleagues, neighbours, acquaintances, friends and relations. The scale of this subterranean network of spies and informers varied from country to country but it was present everywhere.
The consequence was that while the whole society thus fell under suspicion—who might not have worked for the police or the regime at some moment, even if only inadvertently?—by the same token it became hard to distinguish venal and even mercenary collaboration from simple cowardice or even the desire to protect one’s family. The price of a refusal to report to the Stasi might be your children’s future. The grey veil of moral ambiguity thus fell across many of the private choices of helpless individuals. [355] Looking back, who—save a handful of heroic and unwavering dissidents—could pass judgment? And it is striking that many of those same former dissidents—Adam Michnik prominent among them—were the most vigorously opposed to any retribution for their fellow citizens.
For all that these difficulties were common to every post-Communist state, each country dealt with them in its own way. In places where there never really was a transition—where Communists or their friends remained in power under a new nomenclature and with freshly laundered ‘Western’ agendas—the past remained untouched. In Russia, as in Ukraine or Moldova or what remained of Yugoslavia, the issue of retribution never really arose and high-ranking officials from the old regime were quietly recycled back into power: under Vladimir Putin, Communist-era
In Germany, on the other hand, revelations concerning the size and reach of the state security bureaucracy had astonished the nation. It turned out that in addition to its 85,000 full-time employees the Stasi had approximately 60,000 ‘unofficial collaborators’, 110,000 regular informers and upwards of half a million ‘part-time’ informers, many of whom had no means of knowing that they even fell into such a category.[356] Husbands spied on wives, professors reported on students, priests informed on their parishioners. There were files on 6 million residents of former East Germany, one in three of the population. The whole society had in effect been infiltrated, atomized and polluted by its self-appointed guardians.
To lance the boil of mutual fear and suspicion, the Federal Government in December 1991 appointed a Commission under the former Lutheran minister Joachim Gauck to oversee the Stasi files and prevent their abuse. Individuals would be able to ascertain whether they had a ‘file’ and then, if they wished, come and read it. People would thus learn—sometimes with devastating domestic consequences—who had been informing on them; but the material would not be open to the public at large. This was an awkward compromise but, as it turned out, quite successful: by 1996, 1,145,000 people had applied to see their files. There was no way to undo the human damage, but because the Gauck Commission was trusted not to abuse its powers the information it controlled was hardly ever exploited for political advantage.
It was fear of just such exploitation that inhibited similar procedures elsewhere in Eastern Europe. In Poland, accusations of past collaboration became a familiar way of discrediting political opponents—in 2000, even Lech Walesa was accused of collaborating with the former special services, though the charge never stuck. One post-Communist Interior Minister even threatened to publish the names of all his political opponents who were tarnished by the brush of collaboration; it was in anxious anticipation of just such behaviour that Michnik and others had favoured simply drawing a final line under the Communist past and moving on. Consistent with this view, Michnik even opposed efforts in 2001 to try the former Communist President Jaruselski (then aged 78) for giving orders back in 1970 to shoot striking workers. In 1989 the recent memory of martial law and its aftermath had made it seem unwise to open up the past and assess guilt; by the time it was safe to do so the opportunity had passed, popular attention was elsewhere and the quest for belated retroactive justice looked more like political opportunism.
In Latvia it was decreed that anyone with a record of KGB involvement would be barred from public office for ten years. From 1994 Latvian citizens were at liberty, following the German model, to see their own Communist-era police files; but the contents were made public only if a person ran for office or sought employment in law enforcement. In Bulgaria the new government, drawing on the practice of post-Vichy France, established tribunals with the authority to impose ‘civic degradation’ upon those guilty of certain offenses associated with the previous regime.
In Hungary, the benign role of the Communist Party in its transition out of power made it hard to justify purging or punishing it for earlier sins—particularly since in post-Kadar Hungary the main point of contention was of course 1956, a date which would soon be ancient history for a majority of the population. In neighbouring Romania, where there were indeed ample recent grounds for retribution, efforts to mount a local version of the Gauck Commission foundered for some years on the firm opposition of the post-Communist political elite, many of whose luminaries (beginning with President Iliescu himself) would certainly be implicated in any serious interrogation of the Ceausescu regime’s activities. Eventually a ‘National College for the Study of the “Securitate” Archives’ was inaugurated, but it could never aspire to the authority of the German original.
In none of these countries was the problem of coming to terms with the Communist past resolved to everyone’s satisfaction or with complete fairness. But in Czechoslovakia the solution that was adopted aroused controversy reaching well beyond the country’s borders. Stalinism here had come later and lasted longer than elsewhere, and the ugly memory of ‘normalization’ was still very much alive. At the same time Communism had a firmer political basis in the Czech region than anywhere else in Eastern Europe. Finally, there was a certain national discomfort at the memory of Czechoslovakia’s apparent serial failure to resist tyranny—in 1938, in 1948 and after 1968. For one reason or another, the whole country—as it seemed to its more uncompromising domestic critics—suffered from a bad conscience. Vaclav Klaus knew whereof he spoke.
The first post-Communist Czechoslovak legislation—a 1990 law rehabilitating everyone illegally sentenced between 1948 and 1989 and eventually paying out 100 million euros in compensation—provoked little debate. But it was followed by a ‘lustration’[357] law (renewed for five years in 1996 and renewed again when it expired early in the twenty-first century) whose purpose was to vet all public officials or would-be public officials for links to the old security services. This legitimate-sounding objective led, however, to widespread opportunities for abuse. Many of the names found on the old secret police informer lists were, it transpired, merely ‘candidates’: men and women whom the regime was hoping to force into compliance. They included a number of the best-known Czech writers, some of them not even resident in the country.
The secret police lists soon found their way into the press, published and publicized by politicians and parliamentary candidates hoping to discredit their opponents. In the course of the mud-slinging even Havel was mentioned as a one-time candidate for recruitment into the police network of spies. And, as some critics had warned, while the secret police files furnished copious data about those they sought to recruit they were all but silent on the identities of the policemen doing the recruiting. A cartoon in the daily
Lustration was not a penal procedure, but it did cause acute embarrassment to many of its victims, unjustly ‘named and shamed’. More seriously, perhaps, it was from the outset an overtly political device. It was one of the issues on which the old Civic Forum alliance broke up—longstanding dissidents (Havel included) opposed the new law while Klaus enthusiastically supported it as a way ‘to clarify who stands where’ (and embarrass his ex- dissident critics, some of them erstwhile reform Communists). It is noteworthy that Vladimir Meciar in Slovakia also opposed the lustration law, not least because of his own widely rumored links to the former secret police— though once he had taken his country into independence he made copious use of the information in police files for his own political ends.
In the first twelve years of its application, the lustration law did relatively little direct damage. It was applied
