East European Quarterly, XL, No. 4 December 2006 THE VANISHING TRUTH? POLITICS AND M E M O R Y IN POST-COMMUNIST EUROPE Lavinia Stan Montreal, Canada In Eastern Europe, the post-communist transformation has been as much an effort to come to terms with the horrors of the communist past as to build a future stable democratic order and address present socioeconomic problems. As part of transitional justice, the political process which allowed 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 postcommunist 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.' In one form or another, these policy tools were meant to sif^ the historical truth from the official lie about the comniunist 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 383 384 EAST EUROPEAN QUARTERLY 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.^ 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 iO 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 worid, 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).'' 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 THE VANISHING TRUTH? POLITICS AND MEMORY IN POST-COMMUNIST EUROPE 385 shared have informed public policy, affecting millions of lives and determining our chances to obtain a clear picture of the virtues and shortcomings ofthe 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.^ 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 Eastem Europe.•? 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.^ The secret police structures which operated in communist Eastem 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 3 86 EAST EUROPEAN QUARTERLY 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 betit on destroying it. Regardless of whether their name was Sigurimi (Albania), Securitate (Romania), Stasi (East Germany), Sliizba Bezpieczenstwa (Poland), Komitet za Durzavna Sigurnost (Bulgaria), AUamvedelmi 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 comtnunist party that controlled the hiring, firing and promotion ofthe agents.^ 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 peiTnitting victims some belated but well-deserved closure for the injustices they suffered at the hands of communist hacks. As other authors THE VANISHING TRUTH? POLITICS AND MEMORY IN POST-COMMUNIST EUROPE 387 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 ofthe communist political game. Myth 1: PoliticalJustice 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 past, and charged that the process as a whole ultimately aimed not so much to help Eastern Europeans come to terms with their dictatorial experience, as to help post-communist elite groups settle scores with their electoral rivals. For some, the penchant of political elites to make use of lustration, court proceedings, secret file access and property restitution to weaken the popular appeal of their political competitors has irremediably compromised the de-communization project and our chances to reconstruct history objectively and dispassionately.'o Suspicions regarding the social use of de-communization as a tool to gain and maintain political power more than a process to atone for past wrongdoings were further fuelled by memories of the great purges undertaken by the communists after 1945, which post-communist governments have been apprehensive to reenact. At that time, collaboration with the Nazis led to the expulsion from the administration and the bureaucracy, and larger social categories opposed to indigenous communist parties or Soviet hegemony also lost their jobs and/or lives with no right to appeal. Many Eastern Europeans pointed out that lustration was a similar screening process, because it banned individuals due to their belonging to selected groups (judges and prosecutors, communist state dignitaries, secret officers), not because of their personal record of past wrongdoing, which in some cases might have been inexistent. The charge of political manipulation rings ever more true, given the way post-communist transition unfolded. During the last 15 years, successors to the communist parties have tended to oppose transitional justice on grounds that the rights of former communist officials and secret 388 EAST EUROPEAN QUARTERLY agents to fully participate in the political process should be carefully protected if democracy is to be consolidated. For them, the real test the pro-democratic opposition faced was to recognize not only the rights of their sympathizers, the communist-era political prisoners, but also the rights of their political enemies, the communist-era officials and spies. By contrast, pro-democratic opposition forces have tended to support political justice on grounds that it helped the society morally cleanse and prepare itself for democratization by allowing for elite replacement instead of elite reproduction. Political justice has figured prominently in the electoral platforms of pro-democratic and anticommunist parties, while in general being conspicuously absent from Social Democrat programs. Both camps have translated their preferences into policy making, by voting either for or against legislative proposals aimed to move political justice forward. Moreover, political elites have found retribution a useful way to signal their intention to break with the past, with the need to mark such a break being stronger wherever they were the same old elites." Note, however, that the Eastern Europeans' need to know the true extent of communist repression, the activity of the political police, and the identity of the secret agents goes beyond the post-communist political cut-throat battles between the successors to the communist parties and the anticommunist opposition. If transitional justice would strictly relate only to post-communist politics, then a decade and a half of political manipulation should have diminished interest for the topic and turned Eastern European citizens into hard-core skeptics. But popular interest for disclosing the communist repression mechanisms, the identity of the tortured and the torturers (to borrow Huntington's terms), and the geography of prison and labor camps remains high, even though Eastern Europeans doubt the efficacy of specific transitional justice policies. The number of memoirs, diaries and testimonials published by both victims and victimizers is on the rise, making such personal accounts arguably one ofthe most popular literatures in that part ofthe world.'2 in addition, political manipulation should have quelled the political parties' appetite to enact transitional justice legislation, but in fact the opposite is true. Countries which in the early 1990s proved reluctant to face their communist past adopted relevant legislation toward the end of the decade (lustration and file access in Poland, and file access in Romania) or even later (file access in Slovakia and a more vigorous lustration process in THE VANISHING TRUTH? POLITICS AND MEMORY IN POST-COMMUNIST EUROPE 3 89 Poland). Confronting the past, however reluctantly and clumsy, is apparently a test each and every post-communist country must face sooner or later. Myth 2: Justice is Unnecessary Another argument has claimed that transitional justice remains largely unnecessary, for a number of different reasons. Some commentators pointed out that the communist abuses were relatively few, and repression, even at the height of the Stalinist era, lacked the purposeful master plan of Hitler's Final Solution of completely exterminating selected groups. By extension, the contention has been that communism was not as morally reprehensible as Nazism, and, when the argument was pushed to the extreme, that in Europe the socio-economic accomplishments of communist rule excused its demand for human sacrifice.'^ Paradoxically, the vei7 lack of transitional justice methods like secret file access has impeded researchers and the general public alike from knowing the true scale of arrests, killings and torture perpetrated by and in the name of the communist regime. However, recent revelations suggest that repression was far more widespread than previously acknowledged, the total number of victims of European communism might had matched those of victims of the Nazi regime, and some atrocities attributed to the Nazis were in fact perpetrated by the communist comrades (for example, the killings of Polish officers at Katyn).'"* Other observers have insisted that the worst period of violence in Eastem Europe took place decades ago during the consolidation of communist rule, mostly in the late 1940s and the 1950s. As such, transitional justice has lost its edge and urgency. Outbursts of repression and violence took place in 1953 in Germany and Czechoslovakia, 1956 in Hungary, 1968 in Czechoslovakia, 1970 in Poland and (arguably) 1987 in Romania, but they caused relatively few deaths, because Eastem European resistance took the form of mostly passive resistance. Even in Poland, the only country where the govemment faced an active popular opposition organized around the Solidarity, repression occurred on a minor scale and political arrests virtually ceased with the 1986 amnesty. Arguably, "for most Poles, martial law was a period not of intense repression, but of intense boredom."'^ When asked about the horrors and abuses of late communism, people in those countries were hard pressed to come up with an answer that would justify the prosecution and pun- 390 EAST EUROPEAN QUARTERLY ishment of communist officials. As writer Nicolae Matiolescu pointed out, even the Stalinist rule of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu resulted in only a handful of casualties, because by the mid-1960s communist repression had turned psychological, not physical: "my generation lived through difficult times, but not through the most difficult. Of course we were threatened, of course we were followed, but nobody told me 'ifyou fail to do this, we'll take your kid and you'll never see her again'."'6 Adam Michnik echoed this position when he credited the communists with making Poland "the most comfortable barrack in the block."''' However, one could also argue that, because the peak of repression happened four decades ago, the prosecution of past crimes is becoming ever more imperative. As victims and victimizers grow old or die, the window of opportunity to hear their stories and sort out good from evil deeds is progressively narrowing down.i^ Still other commentators believe that the public disclosure of individual involvement in past abuses is unnecessary because perpetrators were punished enough by having to live with a guilty conscience for which they have atoned daily. The view ignores the fact that the most common reaction to being utimasked or brought to justice was denial, not apology. The overwhelming majority of those named as informers denied their tainted past and sued for calumny, even when hard evidence tipped the balance against them. When asked to account for their actions, Ceausescu, Todor Zhivkov and General Wojciech Jaruzelski were defiant, refusing to deliver long-waited apologies for brutally quashing dissent, depriving citizens of basic food and medicine, or instituting the martial law." After being convicted for killing, beating and torturing anticommunist activists in Poland, former head ofthe Ministry of Public Security Investigations Department Adam Humer shouted at his former victim "shut up, you old bitch!" Instead of asking forgiveness from his victims, Securitate General Nicolae Plesita mocked dissident writer Paul Goma, insisting that Goma acted as a secret police collaborator after emigrating to Paris in 1978, a contention unsubstantiated by evidence. 'Put the past behind you, do not resurrect it' has also been the advice of those who rejected lustration on grounds that the post-communist transition already marginalized the communist officials and secret agents, or that the region's problems were too urgent and daunting to allow for time and resources to be devoted to de-communization. THE VANISHING TRUTH? POLITICS AND MEMORY IN POST-COMMUNIST EUROPE 391 Eastern Europeans have become increasingly worried by the ability of communist officials and secret agents to pursue viable political careers, and transform their old political clout into new economic capital. Citizens are worried that, from the positions they occupy today, former communists can harm the region's budding democracies or destroy valuable archival material attesting to their tainted past. In this context, "the balance between forgiveness and justice is difficult to establish, especially when those who are to be forgiven behave as if they deserve to be thanked rather than chastised, when they suddenly speak of tolerance or virtue, when they abruptly wrap themselves in the cloak of democratic values and an honest work ethic that they claim always to have upheld."20 A defiant Jaruzelski voiced surprise that, instead of being thanked for his (unproven) pro-Gorbachev stance and successflil prevention of what he saw as an imminent Soviet invasion of Poland, he stood accused of imposing the martial law. From Sofia to Prague, secret agents have brushed aside charges of involvement in human rights abuses, preferring instead to remind the public of their key role in defending their country's sovereignty, independence and national interest at a time when ironically those countries were seeing their sovereignty, independence and interests trampled by Moscow. For the agents, domestic repression was merely collateral damage in the grander and nobler war against domestic and foreign enemies, real or imagined. Similarly, communists could be exonerated for their contribution to past repression and economic mismanagement because they were wellintended, honest and hard-working individuals who did their best within the existing order. The experience of other post-authoritarian countries suggests that democratization cannot be successfully effected without some reevaluation ofthe past. For O'Donnell and Schmitter, "it is difficult to imagine how a society can return to some degree of functioning which would provide social and ideological support for political democracy without somehow coming to terms with the most painful elements of its own past."2' Tismaneanu reinforces the same point when writing that "to ask for a serious coming to grips with the past is not simply a moral imperative: none of these societies can become truly liberal if the old mythologies of self-pity and self-idealization continue to monopolize the public discourse."22 Transitional justice provides a solid foundation for budding democracies because it constitutes the middle-ground solution between 392 EAST EUROPEAN QUARTERLY forgetting the past and engaging in violent retribution, two unacceptable options that prevent new regimes from gaining much-needed political legitimacy.23 For other authors, the stakes are even grander. For example, Bomeman believes that "the relevance of retributive justice in contemporary context goes far beyond the fate of individual crimes and victims; its increasing importance is part of a global ritual purification of the center of political regimes that seek democratic legitimacy."^4 Myth 3: Justice Is about Assigning Blame Often debates surrounding the legitimacy of political justice have been couched in negative terms. Transitional justice was seen as a process of assigning blame, even when it allowed individuals accused of wrongdoing to clear their names and make public their side of controversial, divisive stories. In Eastern Europe, instances of victims taking revenge on their former torturers were almost non-existent, proving that revenge was not the driving force for the reevaluation of the recent past. While it often boiled down to naming names and publicly exposing perpetrators, political justice has been a larger effort to set the record straight and gain additional, more accurate, insight on historical moments which until very recently remained shrouded in secrecy. Such methods mostly aimed to prosecute instances of political repression, but some of the crimes for which justice was sougiit were crimes of economic corruption or other activities with deep social repercussions. Compared to the Latin American, South African or post-Nazi German experiences, in Eastern Europe the definition of crime was extended beyond its political dimension to include economic and social dimensions in order to better refiect the communist reality. For example, the so-called Ruli Report held Albanian communist leaders accountable not for their politicai actions, but for the economic crime of living well in a poor country. A fascinating reading, the report detailed the luxurious spending of top communist leaders, noting that their unlawful extra privileges were at odds with Albanian reality. As Austin argued, since most of what the communists did politically was within the bounds of communist law, the best route was "to catch them on preaching austerity while practicing gluttony." The report unveiled that between 1989 and 1990 the family of dictator Enver Hoxha stocked "two tons of meat, seven tons of salami, 523 liters of oil, 3.1 tons of butter, 321 liters of raki, alcoholic beverages and wine, 250 liters of THE VANISHING TRUTH? POLITICS AND MEMORY IN POST-COMMUNIST EUROPE 393 beer, 5.3 tons of fruit and citrus products, 114 kilograms of olives...and 1.8 kg of coffee." Greater abuse took place in the realm of competent medical treatment and holidays abroad, available only to the nomenklatura members and their relatives. Clearly, post-communist leaders felt that in a nation so stricken by shortages, the public would be more inclined to support actions that focused on financial abuses.25 Albania was not the only country where the post-communist poHtical elite promoted de-communization as symbolic compensation for widespread feelings of economic injustice. In the aftermath ofthe December 1989 Revolution, Romanians rejected the helping hand extended by members of the diaspora on grounds that those who did not tasted the 'soy salami' (a delicatessen under Ceausescu's rule) could not take the high moral ground and passjudgment on the citizens' collaboration with the regime. Note that in Eastern Europe, as in other parts of the world, political justice did not always mean punishment. Often it consisted of an attempt to provide some form of symbolic or financial compensation to the victims. Former political prisoners have insisted to be rehabilitated, and asked for their criminal record to be erased and their good name restored. Many former victims were content with obtaining formal apologies from post-communist governments for past communist crimes (delivered by president Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland or Emil Constantinescu of Romania), or permission to erect monuments marking dismantled labor camps (Belene in Bulgaria), disaffected prisons (Sighet and Pitesti in Romania) or forgotten forced domicile camps (Latesti in Romania, where huts inhabited by political prisoners fontied a huge hammer and sickle visible from high above^^). Many associations of victims have regarded symbolic compensation as important as the prosecution ofthe old communist guard, but not all associations have obtained recognition for their demands. The Russian Memorial society could not find the financial means to build one single memorial dedicated to the victims of the Stalinist terror, whereas the Romanian Association of Fonner Political Prisoners erected commemoration statues in every locality where major political prisons had once operated.2^ Myth 4: The Past Belongs to the Historians Many governmental agencies have justified their reluctance to make secret files accessible to the larger public, the journalists and the independent researchers on grounds that only historians are qualified to 394 EAST EUROPEAN QUARTERLY correctly assess the data gathered in secret documents. Historians alone are able to examine that infonnation in the context of the period when it was produced, distinguish between authentic and doctored documents, evaluate the reasons behind the production of secret materials, and accurately assess the background of the agents and informers who filed the infonnation reports. Following some independent agency leaders, themselves historians, wide access to the secret archive lays the process of reconsidering the past open to current political manipulations, an eventuality whicli should therefore be avoided at all costs. Only by denying journalists and independent (read un-controlled) researchers access to the secret archives, or restricting their access to a minimum, can political considerations be eliminated from the interpretation and analysis of the secret files. This position implies that the historians' deontology imposes higher ethical standards than those by which journalists and researchers working in other traditions abide, and obscures the fact that a number of Eastem European historians assumed a position in favor or against transitional justice even before undertaking any significant research on the topic. Not only that historical analysis was heavily controlled by the communist regime, which had little tolerance for critical examinations that could challenge the official ideology and policy, but in a number of countries appointment to the leadership of the independent agencies in charge of transitional justice process was negotiated politically. An extreme example is represented by the Romanian Council for the Study of Securitate Archives, whose 11-member leadership college was entirely decided upon by the political parties represented in the upper Senate. While, by law, college members must be individuals who are not members of any political party, their options and activity have been colored by the realization that their positions depended on support from the political party that nominated them.28 The first leadership team (which ended its mandate in the early 2006) included only three individuals with formal training as historians, and the new team includes as many. It is worth stressing that historical analysis cannot answer many of the questions deemed relevant by political science, sociology, criminology or textual critical analysis, whereas restricted file access does not respond to the public's need to be informed. The charges against journalists seem exaggerated in light of instances when historians working for the independent agencies were THE VANISHING TRUTH? POLITICS AND MEMORY IN POST-COMMUNIST EUROPE 395 involved in disclosing confusing, unreliable and plainly incendiary information. In Febmary 2005, for example, Poland was rocked when journalist Bronislaw Wildstein published on the internet a working list of over 240,000 names of fonner communist secret political police and military intelligence agents, secret covert informers, prospective candidates to informer positions, as well as victims. The list did not distinguished between perpetrators and victims, thus exposing all those named to the suspicion that they had collaborated with tiie communist political police services, and arousing concern that the incomplete data may be used for political purposes or personal vendetta. Wildstein defended his actions as legitimate on grounds that "this is not our past, this is our present. Those people are present and play important roles in our reality." This opinion was shared by one of those whose name appeared on the list, the Roman Catholic priest Jozef Maj, who saw the leak as a "blessed offense" that finally launched the process of reaching the truth in public life.29 Apparently, the journalist was dissatisfied with the failure of the Institute of National Memory, the Polish independent agency in charge of transitional justice, to publicly name secret agents and informers. The Institute claimed that Wildstein 'stole' the list from its computers with the help of a memory stick, but it was clear that the journalist received help from an unidentified Institute historian. To date, Wildstein has refused to name his accomplice(s), and none of the Institute's employees came forward to confess. Myth 5: Guilt is Collective According to this view, with the exception of the rare committed dissidents and opponents, all Eastem Europeans have supported the communist regime more or less zealously, more or less conspicuously, and more or less convincingly, and by extension have tacitly endorsed its appalling human rights record. Thus, all citizens in the region are to blame for allowing the communist systems to go unchecked, and control their lives for decades. Few Eastem Europeans, if any, are morally entitled to throw the first stone, because few of them have an untainted past that would protect them from blackmail and allow them to assume a high moral ground. Conversely, all citizens deserve to be celebrated as heroes, because entire nations shouldered with dignity and diligence the erratic policies of dictatorial regimes under whose command everyday survival became an ever daunting task. This moral relativism has been 396 EAST EUROPEAN QUARTERLY coupled with what Gonzalez-Enriquez termed a problem of 'national conscience'. Widespread rejection of the communist model has coexisted in most countries with the recollection that society failed to act against it. Soviet regional domination allowed Eastem Europeans to blame a foreign power for their dictatorial experiences, exonerating their own societies and political elites to some extent. In sum, the region was captive to the Soviet Union, while the nations were captive to the communist leaders. Transitional justice efforts were further de-legitimized by the mass character of the Eastem European communist parties, whose membership rolls included an average of 10 percent ofthe total adult population, or 15 percent of the working population.30 If the immediate relatives of communist party members are considered, between one-third and half of all Eastem Europeans were closely related to the party-state, and shared a vested interest in seeing it survive and deliver the significant benefits of party membership. As Enriquez-Gonzalez noted, "this made for a diffuse sense of social complicity with the authorities. Complicity did not mean consent, but did imply effective collaboration fuelling moral relativism."^' Konrad also distinguished a universal complicity with the old regime: "in a satellite state all citizens, humble or proud, are servants. Find me an honest man in a totalitarian or even relatively liberal yet patemalistic society. You'll look long and hard. Find me a truthsayer in a society where the state is the father - state socialism, for instance - and where the man at the top has the power of a king. In a satellite state is fitting to lie or, rather, it is impossible to known what is a lie and what is the truth."^^ Guilt cannot be assigned to individuals in a Nuremberg-style trial because in the formerly communist systems entire nations indulged in quiet complicity and citizens were known for not taking any action more than for actively supporting the regime. However, the important distinction between regime supporters and regime critics cannot be easily glossed over. It is insulting and improper to bunch together Jaruzelski and Jacek Kuron, Gustav Husak and Vaclav Havel, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and Comeliu Coposu, Zhivkov and Georgi Markov, and deny the many shades of guilt and innocence separating them. THE VANISHING TRUTH? POLITICS AND MEMORY IN POST-COMMUNIST EUROPE 397 Myth 6: Individual Rights Override Society's Rights Some researchers and citizens believe that transitional justice is greatly impeded, when not rendered inapplicable, by the individuals' right to protect their good name and reputation, a right that overrides the right of the larger community to leam the truth about the communist repression mechanisms. Three intertwined arguments were raised in defense of this view. First, it was pointed out that information in the secret files was collected without the victims' knowledge. True, the political police sought to corroborate information by relying on a variety of sources and by employing several informers to pursue each victim. Proponents of this view stress that the information reports were ultimately written from the viewpoint of the spies, with little, if any, input from the victims. This one-sidedness would make interpretation of the secret infomiation extremely difficult. Remember, however, that nobody seriously expected that the analysis of secret files would pose no problems. A possible solution would be to complement and contrast the secret archival documents with testimonials obtained from the victims or witnesses, whenever possible. Second, it was argued that file access should be limited to the materials detailing an individual's political activity, carefully avoiding personal details. Otherwise, by maicing the private information public, reputations would be shattered unnecessarily and possibly irremediably.33 The classical example illustrating this conundmm referred to revelations about the head of the Romanian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Teoctist, whom historians unmasked not only as a participant in a 1940 student anti-Semitic outburst that led to the destruction of a Bucharest synagogue and the death of some 150 people, but also as a monk whom Securitate informers suspected of being a homosexual.34 Many a critic deplored the sensationalist manner in which the revelations were made, arguing that Teoctist's sexual preferences were nobody's business. (Paradoxically the Orthodox Church staunchly opposed the decriminalization of homosexual behavior, which it condemned as 'an aberration' to which even incest was preferable.35) In an effort to avoid such delicate situations, the Gauck Institute has blocked the names of third parties mentioned in the secret files, thus allowing only the victims to hold the key to the real identity of those persons. The Council for the Study of Securitate Archive went even further and in 2005 suddenly decided to block entire pages of secret documents on grounds that they did not 398 EAST EUROPEAN QUARTERLY directly refer to the informers' involvement with the political police. Since civil society representatives and independent researchers have had no access to the secret archive, there is no real guarantee that the blocked information was indeed controversial. Third, in order to protect the identity of agents still active and ensure the successful continuation of ongoing operations, Eastem European intelligence services have refused access to the files touching on issues of 'national security', a term which no country in the region has fully defined. While intelligence services have claimed that a significant number of secret documents should be kept out ofthe public's sight, the civil society has countered that in fact very few files really touch on 'national security', the more so since post-communist services pretend to be completely new organizations, not the inheritors of the communist political police. Since the post-communist and communist agencies reportedly share no methods, goals and personnel with the communist secret police, it was argued that the new intelligence services have no true reason to protect the reputation of their predecessors and cover up their crimes. But the reality is more nuanced. Despite their promise to abide by democratic rules, post-communist intelligence services have been widely viewed, and occasionally behaved, as heirs of the communist political police structures. Myth 7: Spies Were Guiltier than Party Officials Eastem European societies have tended to regard the secret political police agents as more guilty and despicable than the communist officials, despite evidence suggesting that the nomenklatura acted as the brain that orchestrated the torture, repression and intimidation conducted by its secret police muscle. 'Hunt the muscle, not the brain' has held true throughout the region. There was considerable interest in gaining access to the documents amassed by the secret political police, but not as much interest in the archives of the communist party, which have been opened to the public only selectively. Some local analysts have focused their attention on the similarities between the intelligence activity conducted by the party and the secret police, and contended that the party was gathering infonnation on members and candidates by resorting to secret informers in operations evoking the activity of the secret police. According to these researchers, the secret police archive should be complemented with the party archive for a clearer picture of spying activi- THE VANISHING TRUTH? POLITICS AND MEMORY IN POST-COMMUNIST EUROPE 399 ties, and their accompanying denunciation, collaboration and resistance patterns. It is difficult to pinpoint the precise reasons why secret agents have been condemned more than the communist party officials, but the underground, hidden character of their work could provide a plausible explanation. Eastem Europeans further admit that even among spies there were shades of guilt, with the part-time collaborators drawn from all walks of life being more condemnable than the full-time officers with military ranks. In the chain of command, party officials decided the general framework within which secret services operated, flill-time secret officers implemented the party program and selected specific methods to translate it into reality, whereas part-time informers collected the information needed to estimate the extent of public dissatisfaction with party policies and data suitable to blackmail, intimidate and control individual dissidents. The higher levels of this hierarchy of repression retained the decision-making power, but the smallest cogs, the part-time informers, have occupied the public's mind. They were the closest to the victims, performing their secret deed in their unassuming capacity as relatives, friends, workmates and neighbors. While fiiU-time officers were occasionally excused on grounds that they were just doing their (albeit condemnable) jobs, part-time informers have been unanimously denounced for their duplicity and readiness to betray those who trusted them. The more the victims tmsted the informers who secretly spied on them, the more surprised and disappointed were they when finding out the identity of the spies. Curiosity has been sustained by the difficulty involved in finding out the true identity of long-time informers, who provided information under code names.^^ As in the case of post-communist politicians unmasked as former secret collaborators, these informers were generally unapologetic. I was told that, after reading his secret file, writer Stelian Tanase reportedly "suddenly tumed white," and left the Council for the Study of Securitate Archives. Hours later he publicly unmasked his best friend, sociologist Dan Oprescu, as one of the spies who pursued him most zealously. Oprescu went so far as to single-handedly design plans to help the Securitate find out the channels Tanase wanted to use to send manuscripts for publication abroad (a major offense under the Ceausescu regime). When asked on the national television why he did it, Oprescu, a vocal pro-democratic intellectual affiliated with the elitist Bucharest- 400 EAST EUROPEAN QUARTERLY based Group of Social Dialogue, responded that he believed he actually helped Tanase, because by offering his services he prevented the secret police from recruiting somebody less sympathetic to the dissident writer. Oprescu's assumption that he was the only secret informer spying on Tanase was utterly inaccurate.^'' Myth 8: Everyone Had a Secret File Leaders of post-communist intelligence services and independent agencies have often lamented that every citizen seems to believe that he or she was pursued by the secret political police. When told no such file was found (that is, no file portraying them as victims), citizens blamed the agencies for not being transparent enough and for hiding the truth. While independent agencies are still unable to uphold standards of accountability and transparency comparable to those of the German Gauck Institute, it is no less true that the secret police selected targets carefully. Eastem European communist political police structures spied on unprecedented numbers of citizens, but they did not cover the entire population, both because it was unnecessary to follow the citizens who did obey the regime and because it was too costly to dissipate resources.38 The extant secret archives total tens of linear kilometers of documents and thousands of nominal files, but the files were archived over several decades, and thus do not represent a percentage of the total population in 1989. As other organizations working in the command planned economy, the secret police received plan quotas and targets it strived to meet by allocating resources judiciously among operations in an effort to optimize return. Compared to other economic units, the secret police units had access to generous resources, but were under pressure to utilize those resources efficiently. Even when an individual came to the attention of the secret police, the officers first assessed the case, collected information, evaluated the leads, and opened a nominal file only when the information reports confirmed that the targeted individual showed an attitude hostile to the regime. There are no estimates on the percentage of investigated cases which ended in the opening of a secret file, but the secret archives do include a significant number of cases which were ultimately abandoned for lack of evidence. It certainly seemed as though the political police monitored everything and everyone. It seemed that the police knew the most intimate details about the personal lives of ordinary citizens. It THE VANISHING TRUTH? POLITICS AND MEMORY IN POST-COMMUNIST EUROPE 401 seemed that spies were everywhere, and this is why citizens were careful to whom they divulged their most inner thoughts. In reality the perception of omnipotence and ubiquitousness was carefully constructed by specialized disinformation departments exaggerating the spies' penetration, the public's obedience to the official line, and the nation's support for the regime. By spreading rumors to shape public opinion, the departments were capable to complement the work ofthe informers. Myth 9: Informers Were Themselves Victims Some Eastem Europeans exonerate the informers on grounds that they themselves were victims of a totalitarian regime that forced them to betray their relatives and friends. The assumption that spying was executed under duress is only partly true. Undated internal Securitate documents revealed that 1.5 percent of informers had been recruited as a result of blackmail and another 1.5 percent as a result of monetary rewards, with the rest willingly and conscientiously collaborating, but the numbers seemed to reflect plan targets more than real results.39 From the limited information we have acquired from archival documents and the public confessions of informers, we know that some of them collaborated voluntarily and others only reluctantly, but it is impossible to indicate with precision at this moment whether one group was larger than the other. We would like to think that most citizens had good reasons to give in pressure, if pressure was applied in all cases. Some individuals agreed to become the eyes and ears of the political police under the threat that compromising information on them or their dear ones will be revealed publicly in case of a refusal. This group included former Nazi sympathizers, homosexuals and possibly other social categories. Before their release from jail, political prisoners were promised a speedier integration into the society if agreeing to collaborate. However, recruitment was not always the result of such extreme situations. Significant numbers of informers spied because of misguided patriotism (reporting on foreign tourists or members of ethnic minorities), out of revenge (to get to their personal enemies or competitors) or in the hope of obtaining material and immaterial advantages (permission to transfer from village to town or to travel abroad, the prospect of a better job, easy acceptance into the university for their children, speedier promotion or simply to supplement their meager wages with generous 402 EAST EUROPEAN QUARTERLY honoraries). Certainly, in these latter cases the informers used the system as much as the system used them. Myth JO: The Truth Is in the Archives Eastem Europeans believe that the truth about the communist regime, the identity of the victims and their victimizers, as well as the activity of each secret officer and informer, can be uncovered simply by opening the secret archives. Consequently, access to the secret archives has heen viewed as quintessential to any examination of the recent past. There seem to be two sides of this argument. One view is that the archive should not be tmsted, either because it was significantly altered after 1989 or because, by relying on the secret materials, postcommunist societies would allow the communist spies to write history. Several reports have claimed that the secret archives were modified by adding, destroying or altering documents in an effort to cover the collaboration of high ranking politicians or to manufacture evidence against specific individuals. The tasks of sorting out the pre-1989 from the post1989 documents and piecing together precious shredded material might prove daunting, but there is no reason to believe that the communist secret police knowingly falsified the archive it took so much pain to compile, catalogue and protect. Up to 1989, the integrity ofthe archive in terms of quantity and quality - was regarded as an important task of the secret police. True, the reality as reflected in the files was often colored by the agents' personal or ideological lens. The agents occasionally saw dissidence and opposition in deeds which victims associated with mere survival. In their quest to prove useful, obtain promotion, cover up inefficiency in their intelligence work or complement dwindling networks of active infonners, some agents fabricated materials, mistook apolitical citizens for active dissidents, or invented reports filed by unknown informers. Only a careful analysis of the archives, complemented with information obtained from other sources, could lead us to the tmth. A recent case showed the discrepancy between communist reality and its reflection in the secret archives. In 2005 Malgorzata Niezabitowska, a Solidarity Weekly reporter and later spokeswoman for the first Polish post-communist govemment, was publicly accused of collaboration with the communist secret police. According to her, accusations were all traceable to her only encounter with secret agents on 15 THE VANISHING TRUTH? POLITICS AND MEMORY IN POST-COMMUNIST EUROPE 403 December 1981. Although interrogated for seven hours without food or water, she refused to become their tool or tell them anything other than information they already knew. According to her secret file, Niezabitowska ultimately gave in the pressure, acted as an informer under the code name Nowak, and met her contact officer ten more times to provide valuable information that was duly recorded in her file. The journalist defending herself by maintaining that her activity as an anticommunist opposition member belied the accusation of collaboration, and insisting that political police agents should not be allowed to write the history of communism with malicious lies discrediting members of the anticommunist opposition.''" Other observers believe that the secret archives can generally be trusted. Following this view, the more unmediated access we have to as many secret documents as possible, the greater our chances to piece together a more accurate and comprehensive picture of communist repression. The argument hinges on the quantity of the secret archival documents released to the public. In a number of countries, much of the negotiation revolving around which specific files should be tumed public dealt with the number of files, ignoring both the content of the files and the quality of their information. As long as large segments of the secret archive (military intelligence records, extemal information records or personnel records detailing the activity of the flill-time officers) are still out of reach, there are compelling reasons to push for their declassification, but this should not prevent us from recognizing the major problems associated with the content of the secret archives. The secret archives contain almost nothing on the communist party officials who orchestrated the massive surveillance campaign Eastem European countries were known for. Which party members helped or were helped by the political police? When, why and how? This kind of information can be obtained only through access to the party archives and cross-verification of multiple sources of information, the more so since in the late 1960s the Eastem European communist parties ordered the destruction of all secret files containing material on informers drawn from among party members, and expressly forbade secret officers to approach party members without the approval of the party leadership. Subsequently, the party leadership, not the secret police, kept records ofthe party members approached by or spying for the political police. 404 EAST EUROPEAN QUARTERLY In Lieu of Conclusion Transitional justice has sought to uncover the tmth and isolate the lie about the communist regime, sort the victims from the victimizers, and determine how much responsibility communist leaders and ordinary citizens share for the abuses perpetrated during the 1944/1945 - 1989 period. How much tmth was uncovered seems to be, at least for now, in the eye of the beholder. This is because this concerted effort has tended to emphasize quantity (of secret files made available publicly, of informers unmasked, of communist officials lustrated, of court trials initiated, of former secret agents retired) to the detriment of the quality of the process (unveiling those who masterminded repression more than those the part-time spies, identifying and lustrating the "big sharks" more than the "small fries," or distinguishing between degrees of involvement and degrees of guilt). Granted, there were compelling reasons to vigorously demand access to as many secret documents as possible, as long as most Eastem European countries have made only a fraction of these records available to the general public. Preoccupied with getting file access, Eastem Europeans have postponed envisaging what to do with the files once they are in their hands, dismissing reports that the secret archive was occasionally distorting reality. Preoccupied with unmasking at least some spies, they have denied the accused the due right to appeal, and dismissed concems that numerous informers were drawn not so much from the ranks of the communist party but from the ranks ofthe anticommunist opposition, the secret police's primary target. Preoccupied with prosecuting the top communists and spies, they have neglected the fact that the regime relied on the daily cooperation of thousands of ordinary citizens. Victims and victimizers were regarded as two distinct categories, when in fact on more than one occasion these groups overlapped, allowing individuals to cross boundaries. In Eastem Europe, an honest search for the tmth was also greatly impeded by the lack of political will to keep transitional justice separate from the politics ofthe present. In other words, the region has fought the demons of the present in the name of eradicating the demons of the past. Indeed, the post-communist competition between political parties has generally determined which transitional justice methods were adopted and when exactly. This led to not only widespread feelings of popular distmst toward the final aim of political justice, but also to an uneven THE VANISHING TRUTH? POLITICS AND MEMORY IN POST-COMMUNIST EUROPE 405 pace of makeshift solutions that tried to reconcile too many objectives at the same time. Rather than assuming that these compounded problems will make the tmth vanish, there are grounds to believe there is light at the end of the tunnel, if one assumes that de-communization will unfold similarly to de-Nazification. Perhaps 50 years from now, Eastem European societies will be better prepared to take a fresh look at their communist interlude. By then more and more testimonials and secret archives will be available, and the old generation of political leaders who started their careers during communism will be replaced by a new generation not personally involved in communist-era abuses, and therefore more disposed to revisit the past. Research for this article was conducted with the generous financial support of a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada standard grant. Sabina Stan, Lucian Turcescu, and the participants in the European Consortium of Political Research "Truth and Representation " workshop gathered in April 2006 in Nicosia, Cyprus, have contributed valuable material and suggestions. All errors of fact and interpretation are mine. Notes 1. During the last 15 years, the literature on transitional justice in Eastem Europe has grown exponentially, touching on almost every aspect and every country. For comparative assessments of different elements of transitional justice, see Neil J. Kritz, ed.. Transitional Justice. How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes (Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace Press, 1995), 3 volumes, Tina Rosenberg, The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts after Communism (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), Ruti Teitel, Transitional Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), Alexandra Barahona de Brito, Carmen Gonzalez-Enriquez and Paloma Aguilar, The Politics of Memory. Transitional Justice in Democratising Societies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), Priscilla B. Hayer, Unspeakable Truths. Facing the Challenge of Truth Commissions (New York: Routledge, 2002), and Noel Calhoun, Dilemmas of Justice in Eastern Europe's Democratic Transitions (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004). This article itself is part of a major comparative study of lustration, file access and court proceedings as post-communist transitional justice tools, which will be available soon. 2. Gilbert Durand, Les structures anthropologiques de I'imaginaire: Introduction a t'archetypologie generate (Paris: Bordas, 1969). I have used the same framework in "Democratic Delusions: Ten Myths Accepted by the Romanian Democratic opposition," Problems of Post-Communism, vol. 50, no. 6 (November/December 2003), pp. 51-60. 3. These myths informed the presentations delivered by representatives of the independent agencies charged with effecting transitional justice in post-communist Europe at the Communist Security Apparatus in East Central Europe 1944-5/1989 conference, organized by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, the Czech Office for the Documentation and the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism, and the Federal Commissioner for the 406 EAST EUROPEAN QUARTERLY Records ofthe National Security Services of East Germany, Warsaw, 16-18 June 2005. This was the first time representatives of a number of Eastem European independent agencies met with researchers working on the topic. 4. An exception is Vladimir Tismaneanu, Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy. Nationalism and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). He identifies the myth of de-communization, but none ofthe myths presented here. 5. Emst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), p. 48. 6. Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave. Democratization in the Late Twentieth Cenmry (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). 7. The Intemational Criminal Tribunal of the Former Yugoslavia was established in The Hague in 1993 by a Security Council resolution. Its purview was represented by the serious violations of intemational humanitarian law, that is, crimes committed after the collapse ofthe communist regime. As such, this tribunal is not considered an instrument of decommunization. 8. These agencies include the State Commission on Infonnation Security (in Bulgaria), the National Council for the Study of Securitate Archives (in Romania), the Historical Office and the Institute for Transitional Democracy and Intemational Security (in Hungary), the Institute of National Memory (in Poland), the Slovak Nation's Memory Institute (in Slovakia), the Office for the Documentation and Investigation ofthe Crimes of Communism (in the Czech Republic), and the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the National Security Ser\'ices of East Germany (in Germany). No such agency was set up in Albania, but the Albanian Cold War Studies Center has been at tbe forefront of efforts to promote access to secret records ofthe communist regime. 9. See Krzysztof Persak and Lukasz Kaminski, A Handbook of the Communist Security Apparatus in East Central Europe, 1944-1989 (Warsaw: Institute of National Remembrance, 2005). 10. See, among others, Andrzej Walicki, "Transitional Justice and the Political Struggles of Post-communist Poland," in Transitional Justice and the Rule of Law in New Democracies, ed. by James A. McAdams (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), pp. 187 and 194-205. 11. Romania and Bulgaria, which after 1989 experienced elite reproduction, undertook spectacular gestures to break with their dictatorial past. In Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu was subjected to a speedy show-trial and quickly executed commando-style, along with his wife Elena. The trial and the execution were selectively broadcast on the national television. In Bulgaria, Todor Zhivkov was also tried, found guilty and sentenced to prison term for mostly economic crimes. While other countries in the region undertook court procedures against top communist officials, no where else did they receive the death penalty or extended prison temis. 12. An example is a new mini-series based on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's once banned 1968 anti-Soviet novel. First Circle. The series reportedly attracted 15 million viewers a night. See Time (20 February 2006), p. 55. 13. For such a claim, see Rosenberg, The Haunted Land, pp. 395-407, and Jurgen Habennas, "Constientizarea trecutului," Lettre Internationale, editia romana, no. 13 (Spring 1995), pp. 33-36. While the comparison between totalitarian regimes was undertaken by a number of authors, arguments failed to convince. Those who regard Stalinist communism and Nazism as two sides of the same totalitarian coin do not see eye to eye with those who claim that the Nazi record of human rights infringements was by far the worst. Members of THE VANISHING TRUTH? POLITICS AND MEMORY IN POST-COMMUNIST EUROPE 407 these two camps do not change sides. The totalitarian model is far more accepted in Europe than in North America. See, among others, Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, eds., Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorship in Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Francois Furet and Emst Nolte, Fascisme et Communisme (Paris: Plon, 1998), Anne Applebaum. Gulag. A History (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), and Henry Russo, ed., Stalinism and Nazism. History and Memory Compared (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). 14. Stephane Courtois et al.. The Black Book of Communism. Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge: Har\'ard University Press, 1999). 15. Rosenberg, The Haunted Land, p. 227. 16. Nicolae Manolescu interviewed by Iosif Sava. "Seratele lui Iosif Sava," TVR Intemational (23 March 2006). 17. Gazeta Wyborcza (25-26 September 1993). 18. Almost every country provides examples of old and sick victimizers whom local courts could not hold accountable for past abuses. In 1995, Stalinist-era Polish judge Maria Gurowska stood accused that in 1952 she sentenced to death General August Emil Fieldorf (alias Nil), the Home Army's chief of diversionary activities, following a show-trial. Gurowska rejected the charge, insisting that she had acted in accordance with her conscience: Fieldorf had to be "eliminated from society." Gurowska died before her case come to court. In 1993, former head of communist secret services Czeslaw Kiszczak was accused of causing the deaths of nine miners and wounding 25 others in a clash with special anti-riot police at Wujek in 1981. While traveling to the court, Kiszczak had a heart attack and could not cooperate with the investigating magistrates. In Romania, Stalinist-era Ministry of Interior Alexandru Draghici died in the early 1990s before being held accountable. 19. See the summary of the Ceausescus' trial, available at www.timisoara.com/ timisoara/rev/trialscript.html. For Jaruzelski's trial, see Rosenberg, The Haunted Land, pp. 125-258. For the Polish examples, see Lavinia Stan, "The Politics of Memory in Poland: Lustration, File Access and Court Proceedings," Studies in Post-Communism Occasional Paper no. 10 (March 2006), p. 10. 20. Andrew Nagorski, The Birth of Freedom: Shaping Lives and Societies in the New Eastern Europe (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), p. 59. 21. Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 30. 22. Tismaneanu, Fantasies of Salvation, p. 116. 23. Calhoun, Dilemmas of Justice, especially the Introduction. 24. John Bomeman, Settling Accounts. Violence, Justice and Accountability in Postsocialist Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. viii. 25. Robert Austin and Jonathan Ellison, "Albania," in Transitional Justice in Eastern Europe, ed, by Lavinia Stan (forthcoming 2007). 26. The author's personal interview with Paul Goma, Paris, August 2004. 27. Constantin Ticu Dumitrescu, Album Memorial (Bucharest: Asociatia Fostilor Detinuti Politici, 2004). I thank Dr, Juliet Johnson for the information on the Memorial society, 28. Lavinia Stan, "Access to Securitate Files: The Trials and Tribulations of a Romanian Law," East European Politics and Societies, vol. 16, no. 1 (December 2002), pp. 55-90, and "Spies, Files and Lies: Explaining the Failure of Access to Securitate Files," Communist and Post-Communist Studies, vol. 37, no, 3 (September 2004), pp. 341-359. 408 EAST EUROPEAN QUARTERLY 29. Associated Press (13 February 2005). The list was available at http://lista,atspace. org. Also Stan, "The Politics of Memory in Poland," pp. 30-31, 30, Joni Lovendusky, Politics and Society in Eastern Europe (London: MacMillan Education, 1987), 31, Barahona de Brito et el,. The Politics of Memory, p. 222, 32, George Konrad, The Melancholy of Rebirth: Essays from Post-Communist Central Europe. 1989-1994 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1995), pp, 2-3. 33. For the Vasile Vetisanu case, see Gabriel Andreescu, "Cazul Vasile Vetisanu si aplicarea Legii 187/1999," Revista Romana de Dreptwile Omului, no. 25 (2003), pp. 63-81. For the Ludovic Rakoczi case, see Lavinia Stan, "Moral Cleansing Romanian Style," Problems of Post-Communism, vol, 49, no, 4 (July/August 2002), pp. 52-62. 34, Lavinia Stan and Lucian Turcescu, "The Devil's Confessors: Priests, Communists, Spies and Informers," East European Politics and Societies, vol. 19, no. 4 (December 2005), pp, 655-685, Historians Gabriel Catalan and Dorin Dobrincu were the first to make the revelations, 35, Lavinia Stan and Lucian Turcescu, "The Romanian Orthodox Church and PostCommunist Democratization," Europe-Asia Studies, vol, 52, no, 8 (December 2000), pp, 1467-1488, republished in East European Perspectives, vol, 3, no. 4 (22 February 2001), and vol. 3, no. 5 (7 March 2001), and "Religion, Politics and Sexuality in Romania," EuropeAsia Studies, vol. 57, no. 2 (March 2005), pp, 291-310, 36. One of the rituals of joining the ranks of informers involved choosing the code name together with the officer to whom the informer was to work for. Whereas the informers had the luxury of selecting their code names, the victims were assigned code names by the officer. Before the secret archives were tumed public, the victims had no knowledge of their code name. See Lavinia Stan, "Inside the Securitate Archive" (Cold War Intemational History Project, February 2005), available at www,wilsoncenter,org. Also Dennis Deletant, Communist terror in Romania. Gheorghiu-Dej and the Police State 1948-1965 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), and Ceausescu and the Securitate. Coercion and Dissent in Romania, 1965-1989 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Shatpe, 1995). 37. Tanase's secret file was selectively published in a book cleverly contrasting the entries in the writer's own diary with the reports and information notes included in his Securitate file. The diary did not divulge the names of those Tanase was in contact with while pursued by the political police. The secret file mentions the spies only by their code names. After being unmasked, Oprescu was expelled from the Group of Social Dialogue. Oprescu never publicly apologized, Stelian Tanase, Acasa se vorbeste in soapta (Bucharest: Compania, 2002), 38. The extant Securitate archive includes around 1.9 million files on victims and informers (for a population of 23 million), while the Stasi archive includes some six million files (for a population of 17 million). See John Koehier, Stasi. The Untold Story ofthe East German Secret Police (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999). 39, Marius Oprea, Banalitatea raului. 0 istorie a Securitatii in documente. 1949-1989 (Bucharest: Polirom, 2002), 40. The Institute of National Remembrance determined that the spy with the code name Nowak was in fact Niezabitowska, See Andrew Purvis, "The Reckoning. How Accusations of Communist-Era Collaboration Are Shaking up Central Europe," Time Europe (4 April 2005), and The New York Times (14 January 2005).