| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Laws passed since 1991 1 have opened the state security archives of the former Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe. Such legislation is in place throughout the former Soviet Bloc, but the focus here is on the opening of the German and Romanian archives. The process is far advanced in Germany and much less so in Romania. The contrast between the two very well displays the issues involved.
The opening of the archives has been an important tool of de-Communization. The process has been fullest in Germany because of the strength and self-confidence of the German legal system and because of the weakness of the Communists' political position. It has been partial in Romania because the legal system there lacks authority, independence, and self-confidence, and the Communists have remained strong.
Important differences exist between the various former Soviet bloc countries, but, generally speaking, the institutions which now hold the Communist-era state security records have four tasks:
1. to enable the connections of public officials with the former Communist security and intelligence services to be investigated so that those who collaborated with those services can be removed from public office ("lustration," as it is called);
2. to make available to targets of Communist-era surveillance and repression the records held on them;
3. to make records available for the prosecution of those who committed crimes during the period of Communist rule; and
4. to enable historians and journalists to write the history of Communist surveillance and repression more accurately and fully.
These four tasks serve the purposes of building stable democratic institutions which enjoy public trust, and of giving victims of the Communist security services a measure of retrospective justice.
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