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EASTERN EUROPE : Post-Cold War Regimes Attempt to Exorcise Communist Ghosts

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Eastern Europe is taking its first steps to “de-Communize”--to purge itself of its Communist past--but the process has been spotty and often unpredictable.

In some ways, the new post-Cold War cleansing is reminiscent of West Germany’s “de-Nazification” program in the years after World War II, when the new Western-picked Bonn government mounted similar efforts to root out its political past. But for the most part, de-Communization in Eastern Europe has been superficial.

Gale Stokes, a Tulane University Eastern Europe historian, says the new democratic governments in the region’s four northernmost countries--Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the former East Germany--have moved to prosecute only those Communist officials found to have been embezzling or committing other crimes, and to ostracize from public office agents and informants of the hated secret police organizations. As a result, many ex-Communists remain in high posts.

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In Romania, where the new post-Cold War regime is run by ex-Communists who won office more by coup d’etat than popular revolution, the government is suspected of continuing to employ the despised Securitate secret police to spy on citizens and to manipulate events.

Although Securitate gunmen have been widely blamed for most of the 1,000 killings during the December, 1989, upheaval there, none of them has been brought to trial. “The working method of running Romania is still Communist,” a senior U.S. official says. “There is no change in the basic mentality about opposing dissent, free expression and the like.”

Bulgaria, in the far south, is a frustrating paradox. Under popular pressure, “all the old Communists, no matter how good and able, have been forced out,” a U.S. analyst says. Yet in a recent national parade, the army and police marched under red banners emblazoned with the Communist hammer and sickle--a visible sign that they are still not “de-Communized.”

All societies have found it difficult to come to terms with crimes of their states and use various rationales for their courses of action. East Europeans themselves offer two fundamental reasons--one practical and the other philosophical--to justify their seeming lack of fervor in rooting out the ex-Communists who oversaw 45 years of misrule:

First, virtually the entire Establishment in these countries--judges, teachers, political leaders and the like--are former party members, and shutting them out would leave no one around to run the bureaucracy and the economy. Economic efficiency is more important than social justice in this view.

Second, with so many citizens forced to collaborate with Communist regimes, it sometimes appears that everyone is guilty, so no one is guilty.

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“These nations don’t want to turn over too many rocks,” says Tulane’s Stokes. “They may not like what they find underneath.”

The numbers of citizens co-opted by secret police are staggering. East Germany’s Stasi, for example, employed almost 100,000 permanent staff members, with about half a million informants, who kept files on 6 million citizens--a full one-third of the population--and about 2 million West Germans as well. In Czechoslovakia, the secret police rolls listed more than 140,000 agents and informers--almost 10% of the country’s population.

There is a growing debate over what to do with files that the secret police amassed. Some reformers want to use them to track down and punish those who have abused their power and to expose the horrors of the Communist period. But with such an enormous potential for blackmail, there have been widespread demands in many countries that authorities destroy the records altogether.

In East Germany, on the other hand, there is strong opposition to any effort to whitewash past evils. An extensive public opinion poll conducted for the magazine Der Spiegel found that 73% of those polled did not want to forgive and forget but rather want authorities to determine “what happened and who was guilty.”

One middle course, used in Czechoslovakia, has been to quietly remove from public office those tainted by secret police connections. The country’s major political parties have set up a special committee to check top officials against their secret police files. Those found compromised are asked to resign. If they don’t, the government makes its evidence public.

Rita Klimova, a dissident who is now the Czechoslovak ambassador here, recalls an incident when--after the fall of the Communist government in Prague--she was invited to a meeting where she faced the chairman of the history department at Charles University, the man who had purged her in 1968 for having opposed the Soviet invasion:

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“He appears before me, bows and apologizes,” she relates. “For 20 years of my life gone up the chimney! Do I accept or hit him in the face?” She does not answer her own question. “He lost his job now, but he’s been elected a member of Parliament.”

Klimova is stoic. “Almost everybody in the country followed orders, so most of the people in our country were morally guilty” of helping or not opposing the Communists, she says. “But you can’t punish people for moral guilt--only criminal guilt. Can anyone speak of purging the national soul? No, no. That, everyone must do for one’s self. As a former dissident, I avoid taking any high moral ground.”

To be sure, there are important differences between the de-Nazification in Germany and today’s situation in Eastern Europe. Both before and during World War II, the Nazi Party had been popular in Germany. Membership was voluntary. With Germans averting their eyes, the Nazis embarked on unprecedented barbarism, including the genocide of millions at concentration camps. After the war, both the party and several associated groups were declared illegal. Nazis found guilty of a variety of crimes were punished--a few with death.

Even so, de-Nazification proved largely a failure. Historians say, ultimately, the need to reconstruct West Germany--then to rearm it against the Communist threat--took precedence over the drive to purge the country of Nazis.

By contrast, communism was imposed on East Germany--and all of East Europe--by Moscow. Although there were signs that communism grew in popularity, most party members were only opportunists who joined solely to work.

Even during the brutal reign of Josef Stalin, the Eastern Bloc countries never maintained Nazi-style camps in which people were systematically killed. Perhaps most important, the Communist Party--albeit with a name change or two--remains legal today in East Germany and in other states, while the Nazi Party was outlawed.

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Yet, Max Holland, a Woodrow Wilson Foundation fellow, argues that there are striking similarities between the aftermaths of communism and Nazism.

Although the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945 and then East Germany in 1989 were followed by political sea changes and housecleaning efforts, there was little serious interest in finding out who was responsible for the previous dictatorship. Says Hermann-Josef Rupieper, a history professor at West Germany’s Marburg University: “There is no period of mourning. . . . There is a collective denial of the past.”

The same is true for the five other states of the former Soviet Bloc--Romania, the most Stalinist regime; Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia, repressive but more civilized; even Hungary and Poland, which have been less preoccupied with the issue because they have been shedding communism for more than a decade.

Still, social philosophers believe that every country must eventually address the dark years of its past, of facing truth and purging its demons before it can grow.

A POST-COMMUNIST PURGE?

East Europe’s first steps to “de-Communize” have been unpredictable. Responses have included:

* In HUNGARY, the Parliament is debating whether to investigate mass murders dating to 1956, when the Soviets crushed a rebellion.

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* In CZECHOSLOVAKIA, a law was just passed to compensate former property-owners--or their heirs--for property nationalized by Communists.

* In BULGARIA, ex-dictator Todor Zhivkov is on trial for embezzling; his successors are investigating charges that Bulgarian secret police were behind the attempt to assassinate the Pope in 1981.

* In ROMANIA, the government is suspected of continuing to employ the despised Securitate secret police to spy on citizens and to manipulate events. Although Securitate gunmen have been widely blamed for most of the 1,000 killings in the December, 1989, upheaval, none has been brought to trial.

* In onetime EAST GERMANY, more than 100 former border guards are under investigation for their roles in shooting those trying to scale the Berlin Wall.

* In BULGARIA, popular pressure has “forced out” the old Communists, a U.S. analyst says. Yet in a recent national parade, the army and police marched under red banners emblazoned with the Communist hammer and sickle.

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