ABSTRACT
Decommunization is a complex issue involving questions of justice, punishment, financial and political redress, as well as the emotional and symbolic needs of post-communist society. It has become the benchmark of difference between liberal, middle-class and secular orientated parties and those espousing more populist, nationalist and traditional politics. For the liberals, legitimate decommunization has been contaminated by those who they perceive as using it as a diversion to hide political redundancy in the face of the huge task of the political and structural transformation of Poland. The populist and more traditional parties, on the other hand, charge their opponents with, at best being tainted by contact with the communists at the Round Table, and at worst, with having been communist agents in the past.
