Paradoxes of Postcommunist Lustration

Abstract

Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe. By Nalepa Monika. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 300 pp. $25.99 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-73550-6). Postcommunist Eastern Europe has provided the best set of cases for quasi-experimental designs that explain why countries engage differently in the process of coming to terms with a repressive past. Countries in this region not only suffered under the same type of communist regime until 1989, but they experienced regime change in a relatively short time period (1989–1991) and engaged in similar reconsiderations of the past during the 1990s. The possibility of controlling for so many variables has proven attractive to scholars seeking to identify the determinants of transitional justice. Most of them have identified the nature of the communist past (Moran 1994), the type of transition (Huntington 1991), or the “politics of the present” (Welsh 1996) as explanations for why countries have pursued lustration (the banning of former communist officials and secret agents from public office) and court trials. My own work (2009) has pointed to the legitimacy of the communist and postcommunist regimes as a main predictor, based on examinations of lustration, file access, and court trials conducted in all postcommunist countries until 2007. In the first study that applies game theory to transitional justice, Nalepa investigates three puzzles: Why did communists renounce power peacefully if …