ABSTRACT
On the continuum of East European transitional justice strategies, Czechoslovakia sits with East Germany nearer the “prosecute and punish” than the “forgive and forget” pole. Most notably, the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic pioneered post-communist lustration, passing a tough and wide-ranging law in 1991. This vigor conforms nicely to patterns that scholars have identified regarding three factors that appear to shape how states in the region have approached transitional justice: the nature of their communist regime, transition type, and the balance of power between former communists and their opposition in the subsequent regime. Beginning with the first factor, Gustáv Husák’s Soviet-backed “normalization” regime (1969-1989), which sought to retrench Communist power after the liberalizing period of the 1968 Prague Spring, was an excellent example of repressive and ideologically inflexible “bureaucratic-authoritarianism.” Allowing people neither the possibility of “voice” through dissent nor “exit” through emigration, its repressiveness produced a pressure-cooker situation, stoking the kind of societal resentment which, in the aftermath of regime collapse, is typically supportive of rigorous transitional justice policies. And collapse the regime did: having “resisted reforms on the Hungarian or Polish model to the bitter end, the communist leadership in Prague was in an exceptionally weak position to stem the tide of protest that swept all the East European capitals.”1 The ten critical days of 1989’s Velvet Revolution, which began with a student demonstration on 17 November and built up to a millions-strong general strike on 27 November, so undermined the deeply unpopular regime that “the outcome of negotiations reflected almost wholly the preferences of the opposition.”2 Thus, Czechoslovak Communist leaders were in no position to demand the kinds of concessions that, for example, their Polish counterparts were able to gain from Solidarity through the Roundtable Agreements earlier that year. As a number of theorists argue, such a transition is unfavorable for elites hoping to encourage forgiving and forgetting. And finally, unlike in Romania, for example, the first elections brought a real change in leadership, with members of dissident-led umbrella parties (Civic Forum in the Czech Republic and the Public Against Violence in Slovakia) replacing Communist elites at the highest levels of the state.
