10.1177/0888325405278020Coping with the PastEast European Politics and Societies
Anti-Communist Justice and
Founding the Post-Communist Order:
Lustration and Restitution
in Central Europe
Hilary Appel*
This article explores how ideas and beliefs shaped the development of programs
of retrospective justice. By focusing on lustration, property restitution,
and the declassification of secret service files in four central European
countries, this article investigates the role of formalized anti-communist
programs in the founding of the new political and economic order. After
reviewing the development of anti-communist programs in East Germany,
the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary, the article examines the motivation
behind these programs and the variation in approaches across countries.
It then analyzes the implications of anti-communist programs for the
creation of a post-communist national identity, and concludes with a discussion
of the weak anti-communist programs in post-Soviet Russia.
Keywords: Eastern Europe; retrospective justice; restitution; postcommunism;
ideology
I.
Many new governments in Central and Eastern Europe
employed anti-communism to distance themselves from their
predecessors, to bring legitimacy to their new leadership, and to
advance their political and economic agendas. The importance
of anti-communism, however, extends well beyond the realm of
political rhetoric and post hoc justification of political preferences.
It informed policy choices, shaped perceptions of legitimacy,
and constrained political alliances. In some instances, anticommunist
sentiment and the need to break decisively with the
379
East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 19, No. 3, pages 379–405. ISSN 0888-3254
© 2005 by the American Council of Learned Societies. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1177/0888325405278020
* An earlier version of this article was prepared for the Havighurst Center Workshop on Ideas
and Transition, Luxembourg, 7-10 July 2004. Special thanks to Matt Murphy for his comments
and the participants of the Havighurst Center conference in Luxembourg , especially
Venelin Ganev and Karen Dawisha.
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past directly translated into anti-communist legislation. These
laws seemed to serve as necessary steps to cope with past acts of
collaboration and to redress injustices under the former regime.
Focusing on East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech
Republic, this article addresses three programs in particular—
lustration, property restitution, and to a lesser extent the declassification
of secret service files—to understand the role of formalized
anti-communist programs in the founding of the new
political and economic order. These programs help to elucidate
how anti-communist ideas and beliefs were fundamental to the
process of regime change.
This article studies anti-communism as a set of ideas and values
that tangibly structure policy making. The anti-communist
dimension to programs such as lustration and restitution is twofold.
First, they are anti-communist because they carry negative
repercussions for many who were privileged in the past communist
system. Second and more important, these programs are
anti-communist because they were the products of strong anticommunist
beliefs that permeated many levels of society. Recognizing
some variation across countries, anti-communism generally
refers to a set of ethical beliefs about the legitimacy of the
past political and economic system. On a normative or ethical
basis, it rejects the moral authority of the past regime, which violated
the basic political and economic rights of individuals. Moreover,
it implies a duty for anti-communist leaders not only to condemn
but also to redress the injustices perpetrated under the past
system. Focusing on the ideational underpinnings of anti-communist
programming provides insight into the role anti-communism
played in the founding of the new polity and national identity.
An investigation of anti-communist programs in terms of
material interests or power, rather than in terms of normative values
and conceptions of justice, misses the greatest motivation
behind the adoption of these programs.
Yet, despite the pervasiveness of anti-communism in Eastern
Europe, both anti-communism and the ideational dimension of
regime change more generally are understudied in the literature
on post-communist transition due to the methodological challenges
of measuring and comparing nonmaterial variables. Not
380 Coping with the Past
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only are they seldom quantifiable, but ideological beliefs—even
when part of a larger organized system of values that are shared
by many people—seldom exist in an identical form across countries.
Indeed, unlike material variables, scholars cannot always
compare the same ideology, or the same independent variable,
across countries in a simple fashion. A further challenging aspect
of this theoretical area is that the contributors to the political science
literature on ideas have yet to agree on how to define and
differentiate ideas from other phenomena. While recognizing the
breadth of ideational phenomena that the literature examines,
this article examines anti-communist ideas in terms of “principled
beliefs.”
1
Despite the methodological challenges, anti-communism is
too influential in post-communist politics to ignore. Indeed, the
number of anti-communist programs and the range of countries
in Central and Eastern Europe that adopted them serve to highlight
the ideational dimension of regime change.
2
Some of the
anti-communist programs that were important for coming to
terms with the past and for limiting certain legacies of the old
regime include
1. the banning (often followed by the lifting of bans) of communist
parties. For example, the Czechoslovak Federal Assembly passed
Law 260 that punished the supporters of communism or fascism
with one to five years in prison. The Constitutional Court overturned
the law, noting that the successor communist party was
behaving within the legal confines of a democracy (Rosenberg
110).
3
The overturning of bans on communist parties stands in
contrast to the continued barring of fascist or Nazi parties after
World War II.
2. the erasing of public images and tributes to the communist regime.
This included the renaming of streets, parks, and other places with
East European Politics and Societies 381
1. Judith Goldstein and Robert Keohane, early contributors to the literature on ideas, differentiated
three ideational phenomena: causal beliefs, principled beliefs, and worldviews. This
typology is useful in clarifying how anti-communist justice is understood relative to other
ideational phenomena. See Judith Goldstein and Robert Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign
Policy: Beliefs, Institutions and Political Change (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1993), 8-9.
2. For an extensive discussion of how anti-communism manifested itself in economic reforms,
see Hilary Appel, A New Capitalist Order: Privatization and Ideology in Russia and Eastern
Europe (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004).
3. Tina Rosenberg, The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts after Communism (New York:
Vintage Books, 1996).
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distinctly communist associations and the removal of public statues
and monuments marking communist achievements or
leaders.
3. the prosecution of former party leaders, secret police agents, and
border guards for violations of human rights and other abuses
during the communist period. Some notable trials include those of
Poland’s General Wojciech Jaruzelski, East Germany’s party leader
Erich Honecker and Stasi head Erich Mielke, and the German
Democratic Republic’s (GDR’s) Berlin Wall border guards. In Germany,
as a result of provisions in the Unification Treaty of 1990,
tens of thousands of East Germans were subject to prosecution for
crimes committed in the GDR. In particular, the Unification Treaty
amended the statute of limitations for a range of crimes, including
violence at the border, torture, kidnapping, and economic crimes.
4
In the Czech Republic, the parliament passed the Act Concerning
the Lawlessness of the Communist Regime in 1993, which was
upheld by the Constitutional Court. It permitted the prosecution of
individuals for crimes committed during the communist period.
Like the Unification Treaty, this act also overturned any existing
statute of limitation that would have prevented prosecutions for
the duration of the communist period.
5
The Czech government
also created the Bureau for Investigation and Documentation of
the Crimes of Communism to study and record human rights
abuses under the past regime.
6
4. the rehabilitation of victims of the communist regime who were
unjustly punished (through public vindication and financial
compensation). For example, in the summer of 1990, the Czechoslovak
Federal Assembly passed the Act on Judicial Rehabilitation
to clear the names of two hundred thousand political prisoners
and adjusted the pensions of former prisoners who had been
unfairly prosecuted.
7
The Hungarian government in 1996 allocated
3 billion Huf (about $12 million) to compensate the victims
of political, religious, or racist persecution between 1939 and
1989—either those subject to forced labor in Soviet camps during
World War II, victims of the 1956 revolution, or those unjustly persecuted
during the communist period.
8
382 Coping with the Past
4. Helga Welsh, “Dealing with the Communist Past: Central and East European Experiences
after 1990,” Europe-Asia Studies 48:3(1996): 417.
5. Vojtech Cepl and Mark Gillis, “Making Amends after Communism,” Journal of Democracy
7:4(1996): 121.
6. CTK# (Czech News Wire), 6 December 1994.
7. Rosenberg, Haunted Land.
8. Andrzej Kozminski, “Restitution of Private Property: Reprivatization in Central and Eastern
Europe,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 30:1(1997): 100.
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5. the opening of the archives of the secret police to the public or to
victims.
6. the purging (or lustration) of former communists from public
organs.
7. the return of property confiscated during the communist period.
These legal manifestations represent how the new governments
translated anti-communist sentiment into distinct programs to
facilitate the transformation of the regime. This article focuses on
the latter three anti-communist programs to interpret and assess
the normative and ideational pillars on which they are based.
II. Lustration and the use of secret police files
Lustration refers to the process of screening groups of people
for previous acts of collaboration under the communist regime
(especially acts of collaboration with the secret police) and in
turn disqualifying members of these groups from holding highlevel
positions in the public sector. Several countries carried out
some form of lustration including Poland, East Germany, the
Czech Republic, Hungary, Albania, and Bulgaria. All of these
countries adopted legislation denying former secret police collaborators
from holding high-level government positions,
whereas individual countries barred collaborators from other
posts, such as academia in Bulgaria, the postal service in
Germany, and the state media in the Czech Republic.
East Germany
For Germans, coming to terms with their role in the past political
system was an all too familiar process since this was the second
time in the twentieth century that political collaborators had
to “work off the past,” as Habermas calls it.
9
At the end of the Cold
War, dealing with political collaborators in unified Germany was
especially sensitive since many felt that de-Nazification was not
East European Politics and Societies 383
9. Habermas borrows the expression from Theodor Adorno in his essay “A Double Past.”
Jürgen Habermas, A Berlin Republic: Writings on Germany, trans. Steven Rendall (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1997).
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handled correctly and that efforts to cleanse German political life
after World War II were inadequate, especially in the east.
10
With the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of
the GDR regime, Germans had to agree on an approach to pursuing
retrospective justice. Along with other decommunization
measures, the Unification Treaty included provisions for the
lustration of collaborators with the East German secret police
(Stasi). Both high-level officials of the GDR Communist Party
(SED) and Stasi agents and informants were disqualified from
holding numerous kinds of jobs in the public sector.
The Unification Treaty provided for an extensive lustration
program. It disqualified tens of thousands of government officials
(parliamentarians, ministers, local councilors, judges, lawyers,
and anyone in a job requiring security clearance) for fifteen
years.
11
In contrast to other programs, German lustration also
applied to low-level workers in public employment, such as janitors
in public buildings, government secretaries, and postal
workers for fifteen years. Although disqualification was not automatic,
employers would receive portions of a collaborator’s file
and determine whether to continue employing him. In addition,
professors and school teachers were subject to lustration. In Saxony
alone, 13,500 primary school teachers were fired, about 25
percent of the teachers in the region. The mass firings antagonized
East-West relations since lustration ultimately provided a
boon for unemployed West Germans, both in academia and in
the public sector generally. Furthermore, in industry, employers
could check whether senior managerial employees had a history
of collaboration and could fire them if their history would
impede them from performing their job.
12
384 Coping with the Past
10. Under de-Nazification in western Germany, every citizen was assumed to be a “major
offender” unless he could prove his innocence before a tribunal. Given the administrative
burden of holding millions of tribunals, the German government soon resorted to several
general amnesties. For the most part, only the highest level of war criminals faced tribunals.
Rosenberg, Haunted Land.
11. Erhard Blankenburg, “The Purge of Lawyers after the Breakdown of the East German Communist
Regime,” Law and Social Inquiry 20:1(1995): 223-44.
12. John Miller, “Settling Accounts with a Secret Police: The German Law on the Stasi Records,”
Europe-Asia Studies 50:2(1998): 315.
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It is not surprising that lustration affected so many East Germans,
in particular because the Stasi had reached deeply into
society. In fact, the Stasi had files on six million people, about
half the adult population of the GDR. After unification, the secret
police files were partially opened to the public in that East Germans
gained the right to read their own files. As in Poland and the
Czech Republic, citizens did not gain (automatic) access to other
people’s files or to the true names of their informants appearing
in their own files,
13
except in special circumstances. To prevent
misuse of the files, no government institution could search a person’s
file, including members of the police or the judiciary, for
speculative purposes. When a search did fall within the confines
of the law, the person under scrutiny had to be informed and had
to provide his consent to the investigation. Lustration checks are
ongoing and are permissible by law through 2006.
14
Czech Republic
As in Germany, Czechoslovakia passed a lustration law relatively
early (October 1991), shortly following the failed coup
attempt in the Soviet Union. Czechoslovakia’s first lustration law
was passed by the Federal Assembly and signed into law by President
Václav Havel. This program disqualified particular groups
from public positions for five years. The program is still in force
in the Czech Republic since the parliament extended the law
(overriding two presidential vetoes) in 1995 for five years and in
2000 indefinitely. In this program, any Czech seeking a high public
office must apply for a certificate verifying that he never collaborated
with the secret police (StB) and never attained a certain
level in the communist party. If a person’s name appears in the
StB files as an agent or an informant, he becomes ineligible for
senior positions in government ministries, the military, the
police, the new secret service (FBIS), and the state-owned media.
Likewise, he cannot serve as a judge at any level, a state notary, a
public prosecutor, or the director of a majority state-owned enterEast
European Politics and Societies 385
13. Miller, “Settling Accounts”; and Welsh, “Dealing with the Communist Past.”
14. Miller, “Settling Accounts,” 315.
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prise.
15
Czechoslovak lustration disqualified former collaborators
from holding leadership positions in academia; although regular
professors did not need to submit lustration certificates. That
said, most of the social science faculty in higher education was
replaced after the Velvet Revolution due to anti-communist sentiment.
Social science professors and researchers were typically
considered unqualified and pressured to leave. Demographic
factors aided this process since many researchers and professors
appointed shortly after the purge in academia in 1968-69 were
approaching retirement age anyway. In the Slovak lands, the
lustration law was not widely enforced before the division of
Czechoslovakia, and Slovak Premier Vladimír Mec#iar abandoned
the lustration program after independence.
16
Lustration in the Czech Republic affected thousands of people,
with more than forty thousand posts requiring lustration certificates.
During the first decade of the program, the Ministry of the
Interior provided more than 345,000 lustration certificates (and
340,000 within the first two years). While the StB files listed
700,000 Czech names, only about 3 percent of the 345,000 certificates
issued by the Interior Ministry were positive, thereby certifying
collaboration.
17
While Czech citizens had the right to view
their own files, the lustration certificates presented to employers
showed almost no detail from the file.
18
The certificate assigned
only a letter that designated the general kind of collaboration
associated with the name.
Hungary
Hungary’s lustration program targeted the agents and collaborators
of the communist domestic secret police as well as the
counterinsurgency squads that operated during the 1956 revolu-
386 Coping with the Past
15. More details on the positions included in lustration appear in Roman Boed, “An Evaluation
of the Legality and Efficacy of Lustration as a Tool of Transitional Justice,” Columbia Journal
of Transnational Law 37:2(1998): 357-402.
16. On Mec#iar and the repeal of the lustration law, see C TK,# 21 December 1993.
17. Roman David, “Lustration Laws in Action: The Motives and Evaluation of Lustration Policy
in the Czech Republic and Poland (1989-2001),” Law and Social Inquiry 28:2(2003): 414.
18. For example, the Act on the Access to Files Created by Activity of Former Stat Security (no.
140/1996 Sb.) allows every adult Czech to see his or her file.
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tion and the fascist Arrow Cross. Hungary’s program is distinguished
by its vacillation between an extensive program that pertained
to more than ten thousand posts to a more modest
program covering several hundred. After several failed attempts
in the early 1990s, Hungarian parliamentarians passed a broadly
inclusive lustration program in March 1994 that required the
vetting of ministers, deputy ministers, members of parliament,
judges, prosecutors, mayors and other local government officials,
ambassadors, senior military officials, high-level employees in
the state media, academic administrators, and the directors of
state-owned companies.
19
However, when the Socialists regained
power in 1996, the lustration program was curtailed and affected
only the most senior posts in the government and the stateowned
media. The number of jobs subject to lustration according
to the new legislation, by some estimates, may have been lowered
to as few as five hundred posts.
20
In 2000, however, the right
regained the parliament and voted to expand the scope of
lustration once again to include more members of the media and
judiciary, and it extended the lustration program until 2004.
Regardless of the scope of the program, the privacy of individuals
was respected—in part due to the efforts of the Constitutional
Court, which made this a priority. If the panel of lustration
judges found an individual to have collaborated with the secret
police, that individual had the option of resigning to prevent a
public revelation of past acts of collaboration.
21
Poland
A formalized lustration program came late to Poland, despite
frequent attempts to pass a lustration law during the early and
middle 1990s. While the Sejm adopted Poland’s lustration law in
April 1997, the program did not take effect for another two years,
East European Politics and Societies 387
19. Kieran Williams, “Explaining Lustration in Eastern Europe: A Post-Communist Politics
Approach” (Mimeo, 2003), 7, http://www.sussex.ac.uk/sei/documents/wp62.pdf.
20. Williams, “Explaining Lustration,” 7.
21. EECR, “Constitutional Watch—Hungary,” Eastern European Constitutional Review
11:3(2002): 22-26, http://www.law.nyu.edu/eecr/vol11num3/constitutionwatch/
hungary_print.html (accessed 10 August 2004).
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leading then to the dismissals of three ministers and several parliamentarians
that year.
22
Like the narrower Hungarian program,
Polish lustration was strikingly limited, especially compared to
the Czech or German programs, since it only applied to a narrow
set of public-sector positions, including the president, legislative
deputies and senators, presidential appointees to government
bodies, judges, prosecutors, and leading posts in the state-owned
media.
23
If a Pole wanted to apply for a relevant position, she had
to file an affidavit specifying whether she had collaborated with
the secret police during the communist period. She would be disqualified
from holding a position in government for ten years
only if she lied about her collaboration. In other words, if an
applicant acknowledged past acts of collaboration, she would
not be disqualified from holding the position. Hence, access to
top government positions turned on the current truthfulness of
the candidate and not her past acts of collaboration.
24
Although
about twenty-five thousand public positions required the submission
of the affidavit, only eighty-five individuals have faced a
lustration trial before the Polish vetting court. Of these, the court
found eighteen people to have submitted false affidavits,
including four parliamentarians.
25
Prior to the initiation of Poland’s lustration program, informal
versions of lustration occurred on many occasions. Accusations
of secret police collaboration tainted Polish political life for years
and led to the resignations of two Polish prime ministers: Jan
Olszewski in 1992 and Jozef Oleksy in 1996. Two post-communist
presidents, Lech WaÂeñnsa and Aleksander Kwas!niewski, were
also publicly accused of collaboration, but they were cleared by
the courts and thus neither resigned.
26
388 Coping with the Past
22. “Solidarity Officials Dismissed for Ties to Communist Secret Police,” Washington Post, 9
September 1999.
23. David, “Lustration Laws.”
24. PAP (Polish News Wire), 4 July 1997.
25. David, “Lustration Laws.”
26. In August 2000, the vetting court ruled that Kwas!niewski had been truthful in his statement
that he had not collaborated with the secret police. On the findings of the court, see PAP, 11
August 2000.
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III. Restitution
Like lustration, most Central and East European countries
undertook restitution programs after the collapse of communism
as a way to cope with their recent past. These programs sought to
return real property that had been legally or illegally confiscated
during the communist period, although several countries defined
the period of illegal confiscations somewhat more broadly than
just the communist period. Restitution programs often returned
property in kind. However, when property had been transformed
or was serving a social purpose (such as education,
health care, or local governance), financial compensation took
the place of restitution in kind. Some programs, like in Hungary,
kept the maximum level of financial compensation low for budgetary
reasons. Other programs, such as the Czech and German
programs, sought to link the level of compensation to the value
of the property expropriated.
In all instances, restitution constituted part of the larger process
of redressing material injustices of the communist period. In
most cases, the injustice addressed was the violation of personal
property rights. At times, however, restitution served as a measure
to correct for broader historical injustices, such as the distorted
distribution of privileges in society across political and ethnic
groups or, more broadly, to respond to the shift in the ethnic
makeup, such as in the Baltic region during the Soviet period. In
fact, in all of the Baltic countries, restitution aimed to favor ethnic
Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians—including émigrés who
had forfeited citizenship rights—at the expense of the Russian
minority that had immigrated to the Baltics after 1945. It also
deliberately encouraged the diaspora to return and the Russian
minority to leave.
27
In most East and Central European countries, however, restitution
served to redistribute property rights among political
groups rather than ethnic groups. The restitution of housing to
pre-communist owners serves as a powerful example of redistriEast
European Politics and Societies 389
27. Mark Blacksell and Karl Born, “Private Property Restitution: The Geographical Consequences
of Official Government Policies in Central and Eastern Europe,” Geographical
Journal 168:2(2002): 188; and Lynn Fisher and Austin J. Jaffe, “Restitution in Transition
Countries,” Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 15:3(2000): 233-48.
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bution that was sensitive to past political position. One alternative
to restituting residential property (within the context of creating
a private property system) was simply to transfer the title of
state apartments to the current tenants, as occurred in Russia.
This approach, however, extended the privileges of the
communist era (and the material rewards associated with past
collaboration or political position) into the post-communist era.
In the Czech Republic, such a privatization approach was not
compatible with anti-communist sentiment and popular conceptions
of justice and was thus strongly rejected.
28
Many post-communist governments returned seized property,
including the Czech Republic, former East Germany, Bulgaria,
Romania, and the Baltic states. Each country adopted its own version
of restitution, depending on the normative concerns of the
people, constrained importantly, however, by the local political
and social context.
East Germany
Property restitution posed serious challenges in reunified Germany,
even though claimants could rely on well-maintained
property records and a stable, well-endowed legal system. Like
the lustration process, eastern Germany’s extensive restitution
program appears in the 1990 Unification Treaty as its own appen-
dix.
29
The program is the largest in the region, with 20 percent of
the population (about five million people) participating in the
program.
30
It is estimated that 90 percent of urban buildings fell
within the restitution program.
31
Former property owners or their
heirs could claim title to property confiscated by the communist
government or the Nazi government, albeit according to different
procedures. While the adjudication of restitution claims led to
delays in planning, development, and public and private invest-
390 Coping with the Past
28. Hilary Appel, “Justice and the Reformulation of Property Rights in the Czech Republic,” East
European Politics and Societies 9:1(1995): 22-40.
29. Mark Blacksell, Karl Born, and M. Bohlander, “Settlement of Property Claims in the Former
East Germany,” Geographical Review 86 (April 1996): 200.
30. Ibid., 202.
31. Blacksell and Born, “Private Property Restitution,” 185.
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ment, the overwhelming majority of East German restitution
claims have been settled at this point.
In contrast with other programs in the region, the restitution of
East Germany property was not limited by nationality. Any former
owner or heir—whether a foreign citizen or a nonresident—
could submit a claim to property confiscated during the
communist period or the Third Reich.
32
On one hand, this reflects
Germany’s particular history during the Second World War,
namely, its role as an aggressor as well as the holocaust. On the
other, its inclusive approach served its larger cause of trying to
convince others, especially the Czech and Polish governments,
to return expropriated property to former German owners in
their restitution programs.
Czech Republic
In the Czech program, only Czech citizens in residence could
reclaim land or buildings confiscated by the communist government
after February 1948. Although the Czech program focuses
primarily on property seized by the communists, it also includes
Jewish property confiscated by the Nazis after 1938. The parliament
added Jewish property to the restitution program only
after a long and contentious debate. The government resisted
anticipating restitution’s starting date to 1938 to include Jewish
property—despite the negligible amount of property concerned
given the scarcity of Jewish-Czech heirs—due to the fear that
expanding the scope of restitution would pave the way for
Sudeten Germans to reclaim property seized immediately after
World War II by the Czechoslovak government. As in Poland,
there has been strong resistance to making Germans eligible for
restitution, even at the expense of aggravating Czech-German
relations.
Hungary
Hungary’s restitution process began in 1991 with the enactment
of two restitution laws. They initiated the restitution of reliEast
European Politics and Societies 391
32. Special thanks to Matt Murphy for this point.
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gious property seized during the communist period and allowed
private individuals to apply for partial financial compensation for
expropriated property. Instead of cash payments or property in
kind, former owners would receive a voucher
33
that was tradable
for shares in enterprises or land undergoing privatization. The
rationale for initially choosing a form of financial compensation
over restitution in kind is specific to Hungary’s structure of ownership
in 1991. In contrast to East Germany or Czechoslovakia, a
substantial amount of property was already privately owned,
including many apartments, houses, small businesses, and other
types of property. Therefore, in Hungary’s case, restitution in
1991 would not have meant transferring state property to former
private owners but reallocating property among private individu-
als.
34
This carried substantial economic and political costs. To
minimize the burden on the political leadership and the budget,
the compensation to former owners often remained financial and
typically fell far below the value of the property. As elsewhere,
only citizens in residence (in 1990) could participate in restitution,
which also helped to limit the fiscal burden of property resti-
tution.
35
In 1997, the parliament revised the restitution program to facilitate
the return of property to religious orders and schools. Religious
groups became eligible to apply for government annuities
to compensate for real property that could not be returned in
kind. The annuities were proportional to the value of the property
but again fell short of the value of property lost in most
cases.
36
Poland
In Poland, one might have expected property restitution to
proceed quickly because the return of confiscated property
392 Coping with the Past
33. The maximum value of the voucher was $70,000. Kozminski, “Restitution of Private
Property.”
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, “Briefing: Property Restitution and
Compensation in Post-Communist Europe: A Status Update,” 10 September 2003, http://
www.csce.gov/briefings.cfm?briefing_id=262 (accessed 12 August 2004).
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appeared in the 1990 constitution amended after Solidarity
gained power and because the restitution of Church property
began even prior to Solidarity’s 1989 electoral victory, during the
Rakowski government.
37
Nevertheless, more than sixteen legislative
attempts to establish a program of restitution have failed.
38
Instead, claimants have tried to gain access to property expropriated
during the communist period using the courts rather than a
formal program. As would be expected, the absence of legislation
has limited the amount of property restituted. The legal system
has been slow, with fewer than 3,000 property claims processed
(in contrast to 2.7 million in East Germany).
Restitution’s adoption has been delayed despite a general
agreement among the main political parties that property should
be returned in kind when possible and that reprivatization bonds
should be used for compensation when not. In addition, the
main parties agreed that the claimants must be Polish citizens and
that a bifurcated tax system should apply, differentiating
between former owners and heirs. Even with these areas of
agreement, finalizing a restitution program in Poland has stalled.
One complication is Poland’s historical shifts in borders. For
example, while political groups want to compensate the former
owners of property located in the territory ceded to the Soviet
Union after World War II, the state struggles with finding the
resources to compensate these Poles.
39
On a related point, there
are similar hurdles in returning property to claimants of Ukrainian
descent whose property was nationalized when Poland’s
borders shifted after World War II.
40
Of greater concern are the
German claims to nationalized property in Western Poland, a
problem familiar from the Czech Republic. This political hurdle
is expected. After all, Poles do not even want Germans to buy
Polish real estate, let alone receive it for free.
41
An additional
East European Politics and Societies 393
37. Kozminski, “Restitution of Private Property,” 101.
38. Blacksell and Born, “Private Property Restitution,” 187.
39. Kozminski, “Restitution of Private Property,” 102.
40. Blacksell and Born, “Private Property Restitution,” 186.
41. One survey shows that 72 percent of Poles wanted an eighteen-year transitional period on
foreign sales of land, even at the expense of delaying European Union (EU) membership.
Indeed, foreign landownership was fiercely resisted and became one of the greatest sticking
points in EU membership negotiations. “Survey: Poles Strongly Favor 18-Year Ban on
Land Sales to Foreigners,” Associated Press Worldstream, 2 July 2001.
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point of concern is the restitution of Jewish property, since
Poland has been lobbied by American Jewish groups and American
politicians to include former Jewish property in its restitution
program.42
In addition to ethnic and border-related problems, Poland’s
delays stem from divisions in society and in the political arena
over conceptions of distributional justice.
43
One bill on restitution
did pass through both houses of parliament in March 2001 but
failed to become a law due to a presidential veto, which President
Kwásniewski justified on the grounds of social justice and
economic development.
44
In Poland, some of the resistance to
various restitution proposals stems from concerns over the rights
of the current owners or users of previously confiscated property.
Officials are uncertain about how to cope with the tenants of
restituted residential buildings. Approaches to this problem have
varied across countries. In Bulgaria, tenants of restituted property
could not be expelled for three years, whereas in the Czech
Republic, tenants could not be expelled unless they agreed to an
equivalent housing trade. In Poland, existing tenants were fearful
of their fate after restitution, in particular given the material insecurity
many faced during the initial years of shock therapy.
45
The
current economic downturn only further exacerbates tenants’
fears.
IV. The power of ideas
The determinants of anti-communist legislation
In national debates, proponents and opponents discuss anticommunist
programs explicitly in ideational and even moral
terms. For example, advocates of anti-communist legislation
commonly evoked justice to explain their support, such as former
Polish prime minister Jerzy Buzek who promoted restitution,
394 Coping with the Past
42. PAP, 26 January 2004.
43. Ann Louise Strong, Thomas Reiner, and Janusz Szyrmer, Transformations in Land and
Housing: Bulgaria, The Czech Republic and Poland (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996); and
Kozminski, “Restitution of Private Property,” 104-5.
44. PAP, 22 March 2001.
45. Kozminski, “Restitution of Private Property.”
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stating, “Justice means that we should return to people the property
of which they had been robbed.”
46
As another illustration,
Vojtech Cepl, a justice on the Czech Constitutional Court, and his
coauthor explained anti-communist programs by contending,
“After communism fell in Czechoslovakia, the new regime recognized
that while it would not be possible to make full amends for
all past injustices, there were measures available that would help
make good on the promise of principled and responsible government.”
This was necessary for the “metamorphosis of the norms
of human conduct.” He adds, “Without rehabilitation, lustration
and restitution, there [would] be no transformation.”
47
While
political actors talk about these programs in terms of anti-communist
justice, a skeptic might find politicians’ ideational or
ethical motivations suspect.
For example, some might question whether restitution represents
more than just another mode of ushering in a private property
system. After all, restitution was part of the larger privatization
process. Returning property in kind (rather than financially
compensating former owners) imposed virtually no burden on
government budgets. Restitution had other advantages as well. It
was relatively transparent. It avoided most controversies over the
value of assets. Moreover, restitution could create a constituency
supportive of capitalist reforms, spark entrepreneurship and capital
formation, and improve economic growth.
48
According to this
formulation, one might say that a capitalist ideology drove restitution
as much as, if not more than, anti-communist historical
justice.
Irrespective of the economic benefits of shifting property from
the public to the private sector, restitution was not just another
privatization program. It does not represent straightforward economic
policy making or politics as usual. First, restitution beneEast
European Politics and Societies 395
46. PAP, 22 March 2001.
47. Cepl and Gillis, “Making Amends,” 119-20. The debates on lustration could be represented
by a collection of statements by Czech, East German, and Polish politicians, such as that of
Bogdan Peñk, a deputy with the Polish Peasants’ Party, who asserted, “In this fledgling
democracy, no one with a sane mind trusts ‘deliberate collaborators.’” The Warsaw Voice, 8
September 2002.
48. John Earle and Scott Gehlbach, “A Spoonful of Sugar: Privatization and Popular Support for
Reform in the Czech Republic,” Economics and Politics 15:1(2000): 7; and Kozminski, “Restitution
of Private Property,” 97.
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fited a small percentage of the electorate. Second, as a means of
privatization, restitution carried significant political and economic
costs and risks. Blacksell and Born discuss the problem
that occurred in Germany (and elsewhere) in which the claimants
of restituted property found themselves burdened with new
liabilities given the poor condition of many buildings in
depressed areas. Given the new owners’ lack of resources and
the location of the property, there was little possibility of renovating
the property for resale or renting it out for a profit. In these
cases, claims for restituted property were actually withdrawn
since the liabilities exceeded the value of the asset.
49
Even when
the restitution of property included attractive residential buildings,
the policy carried real political risks. When residential
buildings had the potential to turn a profit, new owners often
treated their tenants poorly in the hopes they would move since
the new owners could sell their buildings only if they found some
way to evict their tenants.
50
In the early 1990s, private service
companies sprung up to help new owners “negotiate” with tenants
to get them to leave. Thus, not only did restitution benefit a
small group of people, it created conditions that could potentially
lead to a large backlash by tenants.
The economic benefits of restitution were also mixed. The
uncertain climate caused by restitution (due to the protracted
adjudication of property disputes) delayed infrastructural
development and distorted investment. Some especially complex
restitution claims concerned large tracts of land, including
major national parks, cemeteries, multiple homes, and buildings.
For large areas, urban planning was put on hold for years
as claims made their way through the sometimes intricate restitution
process.
51
East European governments did not adopt restitution programs
based on simple political and economic incentives. Nor-
396 Coping with the Past
49. Blacksell and Born, “Private Property Restitution.”
50. New owners often resorted to underhanded methods to push out tenants, including noise
pollution, shutting off utilities for (non)repairs, and even rat infestation. Employed in a real
estate development company in Prague in 1994, the author interviewed representatives
from such companies, and such services were offered. Several companies advertised eviction
services in the classified sections of local newspapers.
51. Blacksell, Born, and Bohlander, “Settlement of Property Claims.”
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mative considerations weighed heavily in these choices. Much of
the momentum behind restitution programs came from the revolutionary
energy of the time. They were fueled by the widely felt
sentiment that the nationalization of property and the violation of
personal property rights by the previous communist regimes
were unjust. Returning property to past owners served to boost
the legitimacy of the new regime and bolster the integrity and
credibility of the new private-property rights regime. In doing so,
the government demonstrated both a commitment to private
ownership and a repudiation of past ownership structures. Restitution
legally overturned the past programs of nationalization
and served to denounce the coercive methods of expropriating
property by the past communist regimes. These benefits were
compatible with the larger systemic goal of creating a capitalist
economy and a law-based polity.
52
Justice and the politicization of lustration
Perhaps more than restitution, skeptics might call into question
the moral imperative motivating lustration, given the problems
with lustration’s implementation. First, lustration programs
suffered from many flaws, including their reliance on the very
organs and methods that anti-communists disdain. In a twisted
way, the lustration programs validated the former secret police
institutions in that the lustration commissions relied on the former
agencies’ records to lustrate people. On an ethical level, this
endorsement is certainly problematic. Under communism, people
might have informed against their will, under coercion and
even under torture. The agents also acquired and (at times
falsely) attributed information gained through illegal wiretaps
and video surveillance.
53
Even on a practical level, identifying
informants based on the old secret police files leads to false accusations.
The files were not accurate since the incentive structure
of the secret services encouraged agents to pad files, to attribute
information to uncooperative candidates, and to fabricate names
East European Politics and Societies 397
52. Noel Calhoun, Dilemmas of Justice in Eastern Europe’s Democratic Transitions (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
53. Ibid.
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from scratch to meet departmental quotas.
54
Also, in Romania,
Slovakia, East Germany, and the Czech Republic, agents were
known to have purged and altered secret police archives in the
days and weeks following the sudden collapse of the old
regimes. In East Germany, for example, despite the formation of
citizens committees to protect the integrity of the files, high-level
Stasi officials had multiple opportunities to smuggle or destroy
files.
55
Second, skeptics might point to the political misuse of
lustration as well to cast doubt on any ethical or ideational motivation
behind the program. Many observers have accused politicians
of manipulating the lustration process to discredit their
opposition. As expected, an accusation of secret police collaboration
was a quick and dirty way to discredit opponents, even
those with long histories battling communism. Perhaps the best
known example of a dissident who faced lustration charges is
that of former Czech parliamentarian turned foreign minister, Jan
Kavan. He claims that the accusations of collaboration and his
positive identification in the StB files stemmed from his virulent
opposition to the economic program of then Prime Minister
Václav Klaus.
56
When people in the Klaus camp labeled Kavan a
leftist and an StB collaborator, Kavan had to make the choice of
whether to resign or face a lustration trial. He chose to fight the
lustration case brought against him and won in January 1996,
nearly five years after first standing accused. Another notable
example is former Czechoslovak deputy premier Václav Valeš,
who also confronted accusations of past communist collaboration
by members of parliament. When submitting his resignation,
he formally cited health reasons. However, according to public
statements by President Havel, Valeš’s resignation was prompted
by “unscrupulous” and “unsubstantiated” attacks on him in the
Federal Assembly and in the press that insinuated Vales# had collaborated
with the StB.
57
In the Czechoslovak Federal Assembly
398 Coping with the Past
54. Rosenberg, Haunted Land.
55. Ibid.; Calhoun, Dilemmas of Justice.
56. Author’s interview with Jan Kavan, Prague, 7 February 1996.
57. Valeš is an interesting example of a politician who had suffered under the communist
period of normalization (fired as a government minister and incarcerated for three years)
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in 1991, ten deputies in total denied collaboration and fought
positive lustration identifications, despite the powerful pressure
of their peers to submit their resignations.
58
Indeed, the strong
criticism of lustration by prominent dissidents with clear anticommunist
credentials, such as Adam Michnik and Havel, further
calls into question both the ethical and the anti-communist
underpinnings of these programs.
The use of lustration for political ends occurred throughout the
region. In Slovakia, former Premier Vladimír Mec#iar was known
for denouncing opponents for past collaboration,
59
and many
Polish leaders, as discussed above, stood accused of secret police
collaboration without the benefit of due process, given the delay
in formalizing a program. Although some politicians survived the
attacks, many succumbed to the pressure. Moreover, due to the
repeated leaking of names from the secret police files, some individuals
were “lustrated” without ever applying for high-level
positions or without verification from the Interior Ministry. When
this occurred, people’s reputations and professional prospects
suffered. Returning to the Czech case, in June 1992, students
working in the StB archives smuggled out computer disks with
the registry lists of 160,000 names and published them in installments.
The list did not accurately match up against the list in the
Ministry of Interior, with some names missing and others added.
60
Indeed, there is much evidence to suggest that lustration was
nothing but a political weapon, given its frequent abuse and
exploitation. And it is easy to focus on its flaws in implementation
and assert that lustration was supported not for reasons of historical
justice or anti-communism but for its political utility. In social
science analysis, moreover, it is always easier to reduce human
motivation to self-serving materialist behavior. Perhaps it even
seems naïve to attribute lofty goals to politicians or policies.
Despite its misuse, lustration nevertheless did arise out of ethical
and normative concerns. First, as Noel Calhoun argues, it
East European Politics and Societies 399
but still faced accusations of communist collaboration. For Havel’s comments, see C TK,# 17
September 1991.
58. C TK,# 18 April 1991, 24 May 1991.
59. David, “Lustration Laws.”
60. Rosenberg, Haunted Land.
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arose out of an ideological commitment to a new liberal order.
Lustration was a way to prevent past political iniquities from polluting
or contaminating the new society and polity. Certainly
lustration at times was used as a weapon, but it was much more
than a weapon since it was also a way of protecting the inchoate
liberal democratic order.
61
As Czech Justice Cepl explains,
lustration “excludes from governmental power those whose
actions have manifested hostility to democratic principles. It also
gives democracy a breathing space, a kind of grace period during
which it can put down roots without the fear that enemies in high
places will try to undermine it. Fundamental change in a society
requires replacement of its elite. Members of the old communist
elite . . . have questionable values and loyalties.”
62
Lustration’s effects were both substantive and symbolic. On a
substantive level, it prevented former power holders during communism
from achieving (or maintaining) positions from which
they could stall or block the transformation of the regime. From
the vantage point of 1990-91, this threat loomed large. For example,
even former Czech president Havel, who later opposed the
extension of lustration, initially did support it as a “purely revolutionary,
extraordinary provisional act” limited by a “certain transitional
period” since he agreed with the idea that “supporters of
the old regime should not be tolerated in influential posts.” And
although he would have designed the program differently and
restricted it to a shorter period, he did support and sign into law
the 1991 lustration bill.
63
Demonstrating a decisive break with the
past, the purging of high-level communist party and secret police
agents and informants helped inspire confidence in the integrity
of the new leadership and helped secure the new system of government.
In Romania, for example, the continued presence of
former secret police officials undermined the public’s confidence
in the legitimacy of the National Salvation Front government
following the fall of the Ceausescu regime.
While lustration served the political interests of some leaders,
this is not an indictment of lustration, nor is it a refutation of the
400 Coping with the Past
61. Calhoun, Dilemmas of Justice.
62. Cepl and Gillis, “Making Amends,” 122.
63. C TK,# 7 October 1995.
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ideational or ethical dimension of anti-communist programs. As
Max Weber argued, ideas are more likely to survive and be influential
when they do not conflict with, and even serve, existing
interests. While past political science convention recommended
that “ideas-based” arguments demonstrate that leaders’ interests
were harmed for norms or beliefs to matter theoretically,
64
more
recent theorizing on the role of ideas recognizes the futility of discussing
interests and ideas as discrete and distinct from each
other.
65
The presence of one variable does not repudiate the
impact or the relevance of the other. Political behavior, especially
in revolutionary moments, is the product of both ideas and interests,
two phenomena that often overlap.
66
On an ethical level, lustration was intended to help create a
just society. It fulfilled the cathartic need to punish the perpetrators
of past injustices without violating an individual’s right to life
or liberty without sufficient evidence of past crimes. As Calhoun
explains, it not only was a way to keep former collaborators from
thwarting systemic change, simple disqualification from public
service was also ideationally compatible with a new law-based
polity, in which criminal prosecution based on retroactive applications
of the law would be forbidden.
67
Moreover, lustration
sought to avoid the spontaneous denunciations of political and
industrial elites that occurred in the early days after the collapse
of the past communist regimes. Many in East Central Europe
wanted to avoid reliving their postwar experience with street justice
in which collaborators with the Nazi regime faced the spontaneous
punishment of the crowd.
68
Cepl and Gillis provide a compelling moral explanation for
lustration as a program motivated by anti-communist historical
justice, rejecting baser motivations such as retaliation and
revenge. They contend that lustration has been part of a moral
East European Politics and Societies 401
64. Goldstein and Keohane, Ideas and Foreign Policy.
65. Mark Blyth, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth
Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
66. Bruce Ackerman, Private Property and the Constitution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press. 1977).
67. Calhoun, Dilemmas of Justice, 34-40.
68. Luc Huyse, “Justice after Transition: On the Choices Successor Elites Make in Dealing with
the Past,” Law and Social Inquiry 20:1(1995): 51-70.
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cleansing that society had to go through to transform itself. If simple
retaliation or revenge had been the goals of lustration, they
could have been reached more efficiently and directly.
69
After all,
according to the design of the program, most collaborators could
avoid being exposed by remaining outside government or
beneath the relevant levels of public office, or they could resign
quietly as in Hungary. In addition, the details of collaboration
have generally been kept private, and there are strict limitations
on who can initiate a lustration investigation.
In Poland, it is especially evident that retaliation did not drive
the program, given that a person’s open acknowledgement of
past collaboration formally allowed him to maintain his government
position.
70
The desire for truth helped society come to
terms with the communist past. As David and others argue,
71
the
more citizens learned about their history of human rights
abuses, arrests, killings, and torture under communism, the
more they wanted to know about the perpetrators of these
abuses. The search for truth as part of the healing and cleansing
process underlies the Truth and Reconciliation Tribunals in
post-apartheid South Africa and in Chile after the Pinochet
regime.
Thinking comparatively about anti-communist programs
Despite the legitimate criticisms of these programs, both
lustration and restitution represent a need to correct for
injustices perpetrated under communism. While the presence of
anti-communist programs across Central Europe reflects the
common desire to break with the past, the intensity of these programs
varies substantially by country. For example, among the
four countries discussed, anti-communist programs were pursued
more vehemently in East Germany and the Czech Republic
than they were in Poland and Hungary. It is unclear why the anticommunist
legislation was more encompassing and more exten-
402 Coping with the Past
69. Cepl and Gillis, “Making Amends”; David, “Lustration Laws.”
70. That said, sometimes the revelation of past collaboration created informal pressures for
politicians to resign.
71. David, “Lustration Laws.”
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sive in the first two cases. Two plausible explanations are the
greater rigidity of the orthodox communist regimes in the GDR
and Czechoslovakia and the suddenness of these regimes’ collapse.
In both countries, the former communists steadfastly
resisted political and economic liberalization up until their fall
from power. Thus, when the communists fell, they fell harder.
Likewise, they vigorously punished dissident activity until the
end of their tenure. Not only should this have added directly to
the populace’s disdain for them, it should have also weakened
the ability of former communists to block lustration and restitution
attempts during the most relevant period—that is, following
the collapse of the old regimes—the point at which the former
leaders were most discredited. After the first democratic elections
in Czechoslovakia and the reunification of Germany, former
communists lacked legitimacy and power and thus were in no
position to shape legislative outcomes. In Hungary and Poland,
this is less true. Political and economic change emerged gradually
in the 1980s with the aid or acquiescence of former communist
elites. Moreover, relative to their counterparts in Czechoslovakia
and the GDR, Hungarian and Polish leaders from the
communist era gained legitimacy as center-left politicians quite
early, as long as they embraced democratic and capitalist change.
The relationship between the strength of the successor
communist party and the strength of lustration programs is direct:
as one rose, the other waned.
In short, both the political power of former communists and
the speed with which communism was dismantled help to
explain the relative intensity of anti-communist legislation. That
said, anti-communism was potent enough in all four countries for
several anti-communist programs to be adopted. Moreover, the
relative strength of anti-communist programming does not mean
that the East Germans or the Czechs are inherently more anticommunist
than the Hungarians and the Poles. Such a case could
not be made in any rigorous or definitive way. More important,
the exercise would represent a misunderstanding of both the
nature and the power of ideology. Asserting that anti-communism
shaped the founding of the new regimes in East European
East European Politics and Societies 403
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countries does not require rank ordering them. Furthermore, to
argue that ideational motivations drove certain anti-communist
programs, it is not necessary to show that these populations subscribed
to an ideology with equal fervor or with identical inter-
pretations.72
On a final note, it should be mentioned that the desire to
return confiscated property and purge secret police informers
from the public sector was not universal in the post-communist
region. In fact, post-Soviet Russia did not experience the same
demand for restitution or lustration. After nearly three-quarters of
a century of Soviet communism, it is not that surprising that the
demand for returning confiscated property was weak. That said,
it was not altogether absent either. In response to demands for
restitution, the Yeltsin government decreed in 1994 that the heirs
of individuals who lost property during the Soviet period should
be financially compensated, with compensation not exceeding
one hundred times the average salary, about one thousand U.S.
dollars.
73
In terms of lustration, however, the long tenure of Soviet communism
would not explain at all the failure to bring to justice
KGB informants. In Yeltsin’s Russia, one might have expected to
see a rehabilitation program or a lustration program of some kind
emerge. While some political rehabilitation did occur, lustration
did not. Although the KGB acquired a new name, little restructuring
or purging occurred. In Russia, the secret police was not
equivalently discredited as in Central and Eastern Europe. After
all, who could imagine a similarly popular, openly proud, former
KGB officer serving as president in a Central European country,
such as in the case of Russian president Vladimir Putin. Not only
is Putin popular, but he has encountered virtually no backlash or
public outrage over his promotion of an entourage of former
404 Coping with the Past
72. On the “unwarranted assumptions about the uniformity of convictions” among members of
an ideological group, see Joseph Schull, “What Is Ideology? Theoretical Problems and Lessons
from Soviet-Type Societies,” Political Studies 40:4(1992): 728-41. Thomas Hansen also
notes the tensions created by the “multiplicity of meanings inscribed in most ideological
constructions.” Thomas Hansen, The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in
Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 25.
73. Kozminski, “Restitution of Private Property,” 97.
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KGB agents to the highest echelons of government.
74
Certainly, it
would be an interesting sociological study to investigate evolving
attitudes of Russians toward the KGB from the glasnost years to
the present. Such a study could produce fascinating insights into
the transformation of national identity and political legitimacy in
the post-Soviet era.
Perhaps the rejection of communism—through formalized
anti-communist programs—is too closely linked to the process of
developing a new national identity for these programs to be consistently
popular throughout the region. For most people living
in Central Europe, the rejection of communism can occur quite
easily without perceiving it as a rejection of oneself. Moreover,
those in Central Europe who might feel proud of the communist
past do not share the same legitimacy or political clout as their
counterparts in Russia. In Central Europe, anti-communist programs
are part of redefining national identity in the post–Cold
War era. Restitution in particular reveals the link between anticommunism
and nationhood. Just consider the anti-Russian
dimension to restitution in the Baltics and the anti-German
dimension to restitution in Poland and the Czech Republic. The
formal programs that help East Europeans come to terms with the
communist past also help them to redefine themselves within the
construction of the new democratic political system and the new
geopolitical and social order.
East European Politics and Societies 405
74. Russia is certainly not the only place where a former secret police agent achieved the pinnacle
position of power in the post-communist system. In Hungary, the past prime minister,
Peter Medgyessy, was exposed just following the 2002 parliamentary elections to have
been a counterintelligence officer. While anti-communist programs correcting for past
injustices are generally weaker in Hungary than the rest of the region, this revelation was
highly damaging. The Medgyessy case differs importantly from the Putin case, since
Medgyessy had hoped to keep his background a secret, whereas Putin extolled his years as
a KGB officer and even praised the former KGB chief, Aleksandr Kriuchkov, the leader of
the failed 1991 coup attempt, in the months leading up to the presidential election. Vladimir
Putin, First Person (New York: Public Affairs, 2000). That said, Medgyessy remained in
office despite this revelation.
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