ABSTRACT
Accountability for the crimes of totalitarian communist regimes became an issue for the Council of Europe after the velvet revolutions in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union. As numerous archives were released, it became clear that there were no essential differences between Communism and Nazism, as both used similar, criminally inhumane means to maintain power. Twenty million deaths resulted from political repression in the Soviet Union, and 1 million in the Communist states of Eastern Europe (Courtois 4). After new states with totalitarian communist pasts joined the Council of Europe, Resolution 1096 was adopted in 1996, containing measures to dismantle the heritage of former communist totalitarian systems. Ten years later, in 2006, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) passed Resolution 1481, on the need for international condemnation of the crimes of totalitarian communist regimes, which for the first time strongly condemned the crimes that they themselves had committed. Although most Central and East European states have distanced themselves from their former communist regimes and have condemned the grave human rights violations committed by them, in Ukraine the Communist Party continues to be legal and active; that party has not clearly dissociated itself from the crimes committed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the subsidiary Communist Party of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and it has failed to condemn them without ambiguity. The aim of this chapter is to examine the Council of Europe’s resolutions and the former communist European states' practices in regard to accountability for communist rights abuses, as well as to analyze how Ukraine is coping with its totalitarian communist past.
