Balast po komunizmie. Instytucjonalne rozliczenie komunizmu w krajach Europy Środkowej – opis struktur oraz okoliczności ich powstania
Pamięć i Sprawiedliwość, Vol. 22 No 2 (2013), pages: 153-182
Publication date: 2013-12-30
Résumé
After knocking down communism in 1989, Poland and other countries of
Eastern Europe were burdened with a task of settling accounts with their totalitarian
past both in institutional dimension – through legal compensation for the victims
of crimes and persecutions, trying their perpetrators and developing institutional
standards preventing functionaries of the former communist secret services and
their co-workers from having an impact on public life (lustration) and also
enabling the victims to have an insight into the documents collected in the past on
them. Since, in the centre of the lustration debate an issue of exploring, developing
and settling accounts with one of fundamental pillars of the totalitarian system
i.e. former security forces was placed, one of the elements of settling accounts with
the communist past was the creation of institutions responsible for taking over the
archives of the communist special forces and revealing the network of agents of the
political secret service, as well, as conducting research and educational activities
in that area. The text analyses the conditions in which that process occurred in
Poland and her bordering countries: Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and
Russia.
The concluding paragraphs of the article contain the assessment that the
process of creating the institutions responsible for taking over the materials of the
state security organs, their development and making them available was a part
of a political ritual of transformation from totalitarianism to democracy. That
transformation was experienced by all post-communist countries of Central
Europe which chose a democratic variant of social development. The institutions
established in order to accomplish that goal have similar competences apart from
investigative functions possessed only by the Polish Institute of National
Remembrance. Lesser successes were achieved as far as the attempts to legal persecution
of the perpetrators of communist crimes were concerned and it relates to the entire
geographical area. The state of law proved to be an inefficient tool in bringing the
guilty ones to justice within the course of passing years.
Settling accounts with communism was never done in Russia. One may think
that Russian leaders came to the conclusion that society is not ready yet for
such a move since it would entail huge social and political costs and that its full
realisation would be possible only after the natural generation exchange has been accomplished.
The author puts forward a thesis that a future researcher of the
history of the post-communist era in Europe will be able to clearly distinguish the
borderlines of the countries which have settled their accounts with a totalitarian
past and of those where this has not been done with all the system, social and
moral consequences of that fact.
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