...countries to deal with their recent past, Eastern Europeans have adopted different methods at different paces and at different times. After some initial hesitation, post-communist governments have opted for a combination of lustration, a screening process allowing the ban of communist officials and secret political police agents from post-communist politics, court proceedings and trials prosecuting communist leaders and secret informers, public access to the secret files compiled by the political police, restitution of property abusively confiscated by the communist authorities, rehabilitation of former political prisoners, and formal public condemnation of the abuses perpetrated by the communist regime and its willing executants. (1) In one form or another, these policy tools were meant to sift the historical truth from the official lie about the communist past, to identify the mechanisms of repression employed to quash dissent and opposition, to establish the link between the communist party and the political police, to catalogue the manifold crimes of the outgoing regime, and to sort the villains (the communist torturers) from the angels (the victims of the communist regime). In short, they were meant to help rewrite recent history by renouncing the communist ideological canon in order to provide a truer picture of life in the people's democracies that would more adequately reflect the positions of both the rulers and the ruled.

Regardless of their chosen method of effecting transitional justice, and the pace at which the process was allowed to unfold, Eastern European countries have seemingly shared a number of myths regarding their politics of memory. Rather than being coherent systems of thought explaining reality, these myths are beliefs whose foundations transcended logic, and thus it is unlikely that any amount of evidence can shatter their pseudo-cognitive immunity. These myths revolve around several fundamental assumptions, presumptions and simplifying arguments which have informed public policy in the area of transitional justice, underpinned public debate regarding the utility, desirability, legitimacy and feasibility of the process, and framed the scholarly literature examining national efforts of dealing with the authoritarian past. Many an observer of post-communist transitional justice has fallen prey to these 'mythological constellations', as French anthropologist Gilbert Durand termed mythical constructs belonging to a common theme and structured around a central vision. (2) The myths presented here were identified in conversations with Eastern European researchers studying the topic, as well as with politicians developing relevant legislation and civil servants implementing it. (3) It remains to be seen whether recognition of these empirically un-tested myths will lead to a paradigm shift in how country cases are analyzed or policy proposals are formulated. There is increased dissatisfaction with some of these fundamental assumptions in response to growing theoretical and empirical evidence of their resilience.

While myths have been a fundamental datum in the political world, especially in such societies beset by discord, enmities and problematic democratic traditions as Eastern European societies have been, political scientists have generally paid little attention to them, preferring instead to emphasize the importance of rational mental constructs determining political behavior and public policy choices (including rational choice and game theories). (4) I prefer to call these untested assumptions myths because they have been diligently used to analyze the communist past without being themselves subject to any systematic analysis. They were widely shared well before any empirical evidence could be presented to prove, disprove or amend them. Moreover, individuals have supported them with an ardor mimicking religious faith more than academic dispassionate analysis. The passion with which these mental constructs have been defended or combated has elevated them above the level of simple assumptions one might be willing to discard in the face of reliable evidence to the contrary. These privileged assumptions can be termed myths also because they "are filled with the most violent emotions and the most frightful visions," as philosopher Ernst Cassirer wrote. (5) While stubbornly neglected or quickly dismissed as unserious, the myths transitional justice theorists and practitioners unconsciously shared have informed public policy, affecting millions of lives and determining our chances to obtain a clear picture of the virtues and shortcomings of the communist political system.

Rather than wild justice or no justice at all, post-communist transitional justice policies have offered partial justice, and therefore constituted a politically feasible and morally defensible solution that was, nevertheless, far from being perfect. Terms with slightly different connotations have been used to refer to policies adopted as part of the third wave of democratization in the late 20th century, when so many countries faced the dilemmas of justice at a time when they also had to embark on political and economic double transition. (6) These terms, which include 'transitional justice', 'political justice', 'the politics of memory', 'coming to terms with the past', 'de-communization', and 'truth and justice', will be used interchangeably here, not because they have the exact same connotations, but because the myths identified below seemingly apply to these interrelated processes. By now all countries in the region, except parts of the war-torn former Yugoslavia, have adopted at least one transitional justice method, proving that, despite some initial hesitation, those nations were not ready to embrace the Spanish way of "forgetting and forgiving" past wrongdoings and providing blanket amnesty for all perpetrators of the ancien regime. Note also that Truth and Reconciliations Committees and International Tribunals, which in African and Latin American countries constituted effective tools of getting closure for past injustices, were unpopular in Eastern Europe. (7) Instead, post-communist countries preferred to set up independent governmental agencies as primary transitional justice vehicles acting as custodians of the secret archives generated by the communist political police, granting file access to citizens upon request, identifying the secret agents involved in human rights violations (and, in some countries, also making these individuals known to the public). The responsibilities and competencies of the agencies differ widely, with the German so-called Gauck Institute being hailed as a model of efficacy, and the Slovak and Polish Memory Institutes being criticized for failing to fulfill their mandate. (8)

The secret police structures which operated in communist Eastern Europe were all styled after the Soviet NKVD and KGB, and included departments of domestic intelligence gathering, foreign espionage and counter-intelligence. Whereas intelligence services in democracies are primarily concerned with maintaining the information shield needed to protect the country from domestic terrorist attacks and penetration by foreign spies, communist services were mainly interested to protect the ruling nomenklatura from the powerless population. The 1989 regime change proved that the secret services failed in their mission to keep the regime insulated from domestic and external factors bent on destroying it. Regardless of whether their name was Sigurimi (Albania), Securitate (Romania), Stasi (East Germany), Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa (Poland), Komitet za Durzavna Sigurnost (Bulgaria), Allamvedelmi Osztaly (Hungary), Statni Bezpecnosti (Czechoslovakia) or Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del and Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (the Soviet Union), the secret services were the obedient tool of the communist party that controlled the hiring, firing and promotion of the agents. (9) Full time agents with military rank conducted their work of intimidation and harassment of ordinary citizens with the help of part time informers drawn from all walks of life. After 1989, communist secret services were formally dismantled, and replaced with new Western-style information agencies placed under more or less effective parliamentary supervision. Communist-era agents and informers were progressively retired, and most active cases were closed and classified. In line with information services in democracies, Eastern European secret agencies reevaluated their goals, renouncing political repression for the benefit of the government in favor of monitoring terrorist organizations, preventing organized crime and big larceny, and securing the national borders. Throughout the region, the secret archive remained a bone of contention between the political class, afraid that its ties to the communist regime might be disclosed, and the intelligence community, eager to retain its privileges.

Aware of the pitfalls of moving into un-chartered territory, I will present ten myths which have informed the debate on post-communist transitional justice, bringing examples from different Eastern European countries and examining different components of the politics of the past to illustrate the way in which each and every myth reflects and distorts reality. My aim here is to spell out these mental constructs and challenge the commonly held assumption that transitional justice leads to knowledge of the 'truth' about the communist regime more than it gives the society a chance to engage in a cathartic experience of moral cleansing permitting victims some belated but well-deserved closure for the injustices they suffered at the hands of communist hacks. As other authors argued previously, post-communist transitional justice has dealt with the future and the present at least as much as with the past. It could be that the search for the truth about communist repression is determined by the quality of archival documents and oral history testimonials that we are able to amass as much as by our own biases in defining and analyzing the fundamentals of the communist political game.

Myth 1: Political Justice Is Political Vendetta

Debates on political justice were often dismissed on grounds that they merely reflected the configuration of current political divisions between and within government and opposition, rather than searched for the truth about the communist past. Some pundits objected to transitional justice because it apparently revolved around the present more than the...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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