ABSTRACT
Post-communist countries have responded differently to their recent past by adopting screening and lustration programs, by prosecuting communist officials and secret agents, and by making secret archives available to the public at different times and to different degrees. This chapter seeks to answer important comparative questions. The first section assesses how countries have dealt with their communist dictatorial past by summarizing the experience with transitional justice in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union during the first stages of post-communist transformation, starting with the collapse of the Eastern European communist regimes in 1989 and ending in 2007, the year when Romania and Bulgaria were accepted into the European Union. Moreover, this section places each post-communist country on the continuum stretching from “forgiving and forgetting” to “prosecuting and punishing,” depending on their progress in dealing with the past. The second section reports on the theories proposed to date to explain country differences, while the third section outlines a model that better explains why some countries have been leaders and other countries have been laggards with respect to the politics of memory. We argue that the theoretical frameworks proposed to date fail to fully explain why different post-communist countries have adopted different transitional justice processes at different times, and that the three factors we propose, taken together, can serve as more accurate predictors of post-communist efforts to seek truth and obtain justice.
