University Press, 2002); Marc Morje Howard, The Weakness of Civil Society in Postcommunist Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
57. See Vaclav Havel, “Post-Communist Nightmare,” New York Review of Books, May 27, 1993, p. 8.
58. See John Rawls’ discussion of criteria for assessing civic freedom and the idea of a well-ordered society in Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 30-40.
59. Quoted in Michal Cichy, “Requiem for the Moderate Revolutionist,” East European Politics and Societies 10, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 145.
60. Timothy Garton Ash, “Trials, Purges and History Lessons: Treating a Difficult Past in Post-Communist Europe,” in Memory and Power in Post-War Europe, ed. Muller, p. 277. The activity of a Truth Commission represents “nonjudicial truth-seeking as a transitional justice tool” (Priscilla Hayner). It can therefore set the stage for future prospects for justice. See Priscilla B. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Facing the Challenge of Truth Commissions (New York: Routledge, 2002).
61. For seminal contributions to this discussion, see Jerzy Szacki, Liberalism after Communism (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1995); Ronald Dworkin et al., From Liberal Values to Democratic Transition: Essays in Honor of Janos Kis (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004); Janos Kis, Politics as a Moral Problem (New York and Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008).
62. See the commentary by Vladimir Tismaneanu and Paul-Drago? Aligica, “Romania’s Parliamentary Putsch,” Wall Street Journal (Europe), April 20, 2007. On May 19, 2007, Basescu overwhelmingly won in a national referendum (74.5 percent voted against his impeachment).
63. This “synchronization” was the thrust of interwar Romanian liberal theorist Eugen Lovinescu’s approach to the country’s modernization.
64. Karen Dawisha, “Communism as a Lived System of Ideas in Contemporary Russia,” East European Politics and Societies 19, no. 3 (2005): 46393. Directly related to Dawisha’s insight is the problem of nostalgia for the Communist past. For example, Alexei Yurchak details the mechanisms of socialization in the late years of the Soviet Union, emphasizing the depth of integration in the socialist milieu despite the latter’s outwardly seemingly incremental nature. See Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006).
65. See Michael McFaul, Nikolai Petrov, and Andrei Ryabov, Between Dictatorship and Democracy: Russian Post-Communist Reform (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2004); Peter Reddaway, “Russia on the Brink,” New York Review of Books, January 28, 1993, pp. 30-35. Reddaway notices a multilayered feeling of moral and spiritual injury related to loss of empire and damaged identity: “Emotional wounds as deep as these tend to breed anger, hatred, self-disgust and aggressiveness. Such emotions can only improve the political prospects for the nationalists and neo-communists, at any rate for a time.” Recently Reddaway has become even more pessimistic: Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 2001).
66. Grigore Pop-Eleches, “Transition to What? Legacies and Reform Trajectories after Communism,” in World Order after Leninism, ed. Tismaneanu, Howard, and Sil.
67. Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial, p. 41. A few years ago I discussed the role of eclectism in the ideological milieu of Central and Eastern Europe: Vladimir Tismaneanu, “In Praise of Eclectism,” The Good Society 11, no. 1 (2002).
68. Stephen E. Hanson and Jeffrey S. Kopstein, “The Weimar/Russia Comparison,” Post-Soviet Affairs 13, no. 3 (July-September 1997): 252-81. On the failed democratization process in Russia, see M. Steven Fish, Democracy Derailed in Russia: The Failure of Open Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
69. See Martin Krygier, “Conservative-Liberal-Socialism Revisited” The Good Society, 11, no. 1 (2002): 6-15.
70. Judt, Postwar, p. 692.
71. Martin Palous, “Post-Totalitarian Politics and European Philosophy,” Public Affairs Quarterly 7, no. 2 (April 1993): 162-63.
72. Ralf Dahrendorf, After 1989: Morals, Revolution, and Civil Society (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). For an update on Dahrendorfs predictions and evaluation about Europe after the revolution, see his new introduction and postscript in the second edition of his Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (New York: Transaction Books, 2005).
73. Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society (Oxford: Polity Press, 1986), p. 84.
74. Joachim Gauck, “Dealing with the STASI Past,” in “Germany in Transition,” special issue, Daedalus (Winter 1994): 277-284.
75. Charles Villa-Vicencio and Erik Doxtader, eds., Pieces of the Puzzle: Keywords on Reconciliation and Transitional Justice (Cape Town: Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, 2005), pp. 34-38.
76. Jan-Werner Muller, Constitutional Patrotism (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 97-119.
77. Gesine Schwan, Politics and Guilt: The Destructive Power of Silence, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), pp. 54-134.
78. Herman Lubbe argued in 1983 that this communicative silence has allowed federal Germany to make a successful transition to democracy after 1945. See Hermann Lubbe, “Der Nationalsozialismus im politischen Bewusstsein der Gegenwart,” in Deutschlands Weg in die Diktatur: Internationale Konferenz zur nationalsozialistischen Machtubernahme im Reichstagsgebaude zu Berlin: Referate und Diskussionen. Ein Protokoll, ed. Martin Broszat et al. (Berlin: Siedler, 1983), p. 329-49.
79. Judt, Postwar, p. 830.
80. Jurgen Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), p. 234.
81. The full English version of the speech by Romania’s president Traian Basescu before the joint session of the Romanian parliament on December 18, 2006, can be found on www.presidency.ro (section “Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania”—CPADCR). The most vocal critics of this condemnation have been Vadim Tudor’s Greater Romania Party (and its viciously anti-Semitic and anti-Western weekly) and the Social Democratic Party chaired by Mircea Geoana, former ambassador to Washington and foreign minister (2001-2004). Iliescu is the honorary chairman of this party.
82. Leon Aron analyzed the manner in which the Putin administration is sponsoring and imposing the creation of a “new Russian history” that relativizes or altogether ignores the exterminist experience of Sovietism. See Leon Aron, “The Problematic Pages: To Understand Putin, We Must Understand His View of Russian History,” New Republic, September 24, 2008. Also see Orlando Figes, “Putin vs. the Truth,” New York Review of Books 56, no. 7 (April, 30, 2009); and Masha Lipman, “Russia, Again Evading History,” Washington Post, June 20, 2009. Also see David Brandenberger, “A New Short Course? A. V. Filippov and the Russian State’s Search for a ‘Usable Past,’” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, no. 4 (2009): 825-33. See also the responses to this essay in the same journal: Vladimir Solonari, “Normalizing Russia, Legitimizing Putin,” pp. 83546; Boris N. Mironov, “The Fruits of a Bourgeois Education,” pp. 847-60; and Elena Zubkova, “The Filippov Syndrome,” pp. 861-68.
83. Frederick C. Corney, “What Is to Be Done with Soviet Russia? The Politics of Proscription and Possibility,” Journal of Policy History 21, no. 3 (2009): 276.
84. Dominick LaCapra called this phenomenon “fetishized anti-Semitism, that is, anti-Semitism in the absence of minimal presence of Jews.” See Dominick LaCapra, “Revisiting the Historians’ Debate—Mourning and Genocide,” History and Memory 9, nos. 1-2 (Spring-Winter 1997): 80-112.
85. Charles Simic, “The Spider’s Web,” New Republic, October 25, 1993, p. 19.
