Politicising the Communist Past: The Politics of Truth Revelation in Post-Communist Poland by Szczerbiak Aleks (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 589 Kovalev leading a team of experienced negotiators who proved themselves to be invested in improved East-West relations. The major negotiators from the Western side often sent junior diplomats, mainly to signal that they ‘would be prepared to walk away if the Soviets refused to compromise’ (p. 113). By focusing on all the different actors involved, Cotey debunks the myth of the Helsinki Process being solely a bilateral, superpower project. Even if the process and the outcome of the Helsinki agreement greatly influenced the way the Cold War developed, giving the West an upper hand on pretty much ‘every significant point’ (p. 5), no actor was too small to have a voice in the process; no political culture was by default out of the loop. Of course there were dominant actors, but the detailed descriptions of the actual negotiations make it clear that this was a diplomatic project. Cotey also takes into account the parallel structure of established Cold War organizations, such as NATO and the Warsaw Pact. It was not obvious to especially the Western leaders to leave disarmament off the agenda for Helsinki, but in the end, Nixon and Brezhnev reached a compromise which the other leaders accepted even if some felt like it had been a secretive process governed by the superpowers. Cotey has succeeded in creating an effortless narrative of a complicated international diplomatic process while highlighting its far-reaching importance. The Final Act is based on archival research in eight countries, a long list of published diplomatic documents, interviews and periodicals, and an excellent command of the existing historiography. It is hard to imagine a more balanced account. This book is sure to become the standard work of reference for research focusing on topics as varied as human rights, trade relations, activist groups and international diplomacy in the 1970s and 1980s. Department of History and Classical Studies Rósa Magnúsdóttir Aarhus University Szczerbiak, Aleks. Politicising the Communist Past: The Politics of Truth Revelation in Post-Communist Poland. BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies, 121. Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2018. vii + 198 pp. Tables. Notes. Bibliographies. Appendix. Index.£115.00. As as one would expect from this author, Politicising the Communist Past provides an authoritative and balanced analysis of the post-Communist political scene. Aleks Szczerbiak’s study of the convoluted politics of transitional justice and truth revelation in Poland will particularly interest students of Central and Eastern Europe, but also provides food for thought to readers interested in the dilemmas of enacting transitional justice in other SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 590 countries across the globe. The book investigates why — despite initial talk of drawing a line under the past — dilemmas around transitional justice refused to go away in Poland after 1989. They have frequently dominated the political agenda, and remain acutely painful and polarizing today. Poland is an interesting case study of a country which, having failed to deal energetically with matters of transitional justice in the early days of the post-Communist regime,foundthepoliticsofthepastintrudingagainandagainintothepolitics of the present. Moreover, Szczerbiak argues that the Polish case illustrates the impossibility, in post-Communist Europe, of disentangling the two strands of political debate concerning historical truth revelation procedures. The first strand concerns the extent and nature of access to Communist-era secret police files. The second concerns lustration policies, aimed at vetting and screening public office-holders to reveal who had been associated with the communist regime, particularly its security services. Szczerbiak considers in detail why such matters could not be swept under the carpet. He shows how a sequence of sensational revelations — some occurring almost by chance — helped keep the issues alive across the decades. However, the main focus of the book is on the role played by politicians: Szczerbiak weighs the evidence in support of competing interpretations as to why the arguments proved so difficult to resolve. On the one hand, ‘instrumentalstrategic ’ explanations focus on how politicians manipulate and even manufacture the debate for political purposes. On the other, ‘programmaticideological ’ explanations place more emphasis on political actors’ beliefs that genuine democracy can only be constructed on the basis of openness about the past, and their concerns that...