Phoenix Edmundovich. How the rejection of lustration led to the resurgence of the dictatorship in Russia

In Czechoslovakia, democratic reformers and the protest movement demanded the disbandment of the secret political police and the removal from the leadership of people involved in human rights violations under communism.

The situation was similar in the Baltic countries. Here, at an early stage, parliamentary commissions were created, whose tasks included the development of transitional justice measures, the investigation of the activities of the republican KGB and their elimination, as well as the development of legal mechanisms for the use of state security materials. So, after the failure of the GKChP putsch and the acquisition of independence by the Baltic republics, on August 24, 1991, the Supreme Council of the Republic of Lithuania established a “Temporary Commission to Investigate the Activities of the KGB of the USSR in Lithuania.” Similar commissions were created in Latvia in March 1992, and in Estonia in May 1993.

The commissions worked and were headed by deputies from the ranks of the independence movements. The chairman of the Lithuanian interim commission, which consisted mainly of members of the Sajudis social and political movement, was deputy Balis Gayauskas, a former dissident and political prisoner who spent 35 years in Soviet camps, two years in exile and was released only in 1988. And the Estonian commission was headed by former political prisoner Ann Tarto: he spent 14 years in Soviet prisons and camps and was also released from prison in October 1988.

Poland, like some other countries, including Hungary and Romania, embarked on the path of reforms later, after the threat of nomenklatura revenge began to be taken seriously by society. So, during the year – from December 1996 to December 1997 – the number of those who believed that lustration should be carried out in Poland increased by almost 20 percentage points (from 57% to 76%), and in the same 1997 year the law was passed.

Although lustration (or measures regulating access to public institutions and civil service, the judiciary, educational institutions, the media and other public institutions of officials, employees and agents of repressive bodies) was an extremely controversial process and caused a lot of controversy in all countries of the region , it was they who found themselves at the center of the political agenda of most post-communist democracies. Lustration measures were taken both at a very early stage and years and even decades after the collapse of communism. Approximately from the beginning of the “zero” years, the phenomenon of the so-called. late lustration, when previously adopted laws were first adopted or expanded (Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Georgia, Ukraine), and countries that adopted lustration laws at an early stage (Germany, Czech Republic) extended their effect. In one form or another, legal acts regulating lustration have been adopted in most countries of the region.

Since it was possible to identify people associated with repressive structures primarily with the help of archival data, the lustration process, as a rule, was accompanied by the opening of the archives of the ruling Communist Party and the secret political police.

Special institutes were created to manage and study archival materials. Quite often they also became “operators” of lustrations (as was the case in Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania) or conducted pre-trial investigations, participating in the collection of evidence for court proceedings (as, for example, in the Czech Republic, Lithuania or Latvia). Such institutions were created at one stage or another in almost every country in the region. So the opening of the archives became a kind of “side” effect that inevitably accompanied the discussion of lustration bills.

Russia: democratization failed

In Russia, after the collapse of the Soviet regime, in full accordance with Herling-Grudzinsky’s warning, there was a gradual restoration of the structures of the political police, but democratization did not take place. It seems that these two facts are interrelated. Democratic transformation in Russia did not take place largely because the state security structures, the backbone of Soviet communism and the most repressive institution were not dismantled, and the employees of these structures, involved in massive repression and human rights violations, were not held accountable for their actions and retained their positions influence. With the exception of rather limited rehabilitation, no other transitional justice measures have been implemented in Russia.

The conditions for the nomenklatura revenge and the revenge of the special services were formed back in the years of perestroika. The State Security Committee survived perestroika in a better way than any other Soviet institution, including the Communist Party. Until the last days of the USSR, the KGB remained the mainstay of the regime, retaining its powers and apparatus “weight”, without changing the structure and personnel.