Contending Temporalities: Stretching the Temporal Reach of Lustration in Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

As part of decommunization, states in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union used lustration measures to remove communist officials and secret police collaborators from positions of power and to bring to light communist era abuses. As a form of transitional justice, lustration is unusually temporally tethered to the communist past. However, in practice some states stretched lustration’s temporal parameters, reaching back up to eighty years to pre-Soviet and Nazi World War II (WWII) abuses, and extending forward decades into the post-communist present. This temporal stretching expanded lustration’s goals beyond vetting mechanism, to corruption fighter, historical memory marker, and nation-state (re)builder. Lustration’s temporal stretching conflicts with Venice Commission, Council of Europe, and European Court of Human Rights’ guidelines and legal rulings on lustration. This article presents three temporal approaches to the window of time covered by lustration in eleven post-communist states between 1990 and 2018: lustration focused on a single, elongated communist past, lustration covering multiple pasts, and lustration spanning both communist and post-communist abuses. Comparative cases in these three temporal categories illustrate significant variation within states surrounding the temporal purview of lustration. This regional variation is juxtaposed with Council of Europe guidelines, related court rulings, and Venice Commission amicus briefs to illustrate contending temporalities surrounding the use of lustration as an “extraordinary” justice measure in consolidated democracies. This study highlights the importance of time as a variable and invites more empirical work on the conditional effects of time on transitional justice.