Transitional Justice and the Former Soviet Union Reviewing the Past, Looking toward the Future

In the twenty-five years since the Soviet Union was dismantled, the countries of the former Soviet Union have faced different circumstances and responded differently to the need to redress and acknowledge the communist past and the suffering of their people. While some have adopted transitional justice and accountability measures, others have chosen to reject them; these choices have directly affected state building and societal reconciliation efforts. This is the most comprehensive account to date of post-Soviet efforts to address, distort, ignore, or recast the past through the use, manipulation, and obstruction of transitional justice measures and memory politics initiatives. Editors Cynthia M. Horne and Lavinia Stan have gathered contributions by top scholars in the field, allowing the disparate post-communist studies and transitional justice scholarly communities to come together and reflect on the past and its implications for the future of the region.

Introduction Cynthia M. Horne; Part I. The Long Shadow of the Past: 1. Limited reckoning in the former Soviet Union: some explanatory factors Lavinia Stan; 2. Challenges to transitional justice in Russia Nanci Adler; 3. Public memory and communist legacies in Poland and Russia Mark Kramer; 4. Transitional justice attempts in Kazakhstan Alexei Trochev; 5. Historical reckoning in Belarus Nelly Bekus; Part II. Transitional Justice Programs, Practices and Legislation: 6. Lustration in Ukraine and democracy capable of defending itself Roman David; 7. Between politics and history: the Baltic truth commissions in global perspective Onur Bakiner; 8. Lustration: temporal, scope and implementation considerations Cynthia M. Horne; 9. Transitional justice and the revision of history textbooks: the 1932–33 famine in Ukraine Lina Klymenko; 10. Historical politics and court redress in the Baltic states Agata Fijalkowski; Part III. Layered Pasts and the Politics of Denial: 11. Confronting the Soviet and post-Soviet past in Georgia Robert Austin; 12. Transitional justice lessons from Moldova Lavinia Stan; 13. Confronting multiple pasts in post-Soviet Armenia Oana-Valentina Suciu; 14. Learning from Serbian failure: the denial of three repressive pasts Nenad Dimitrijević; 15. Entangled history, history education and affective communities in Lithuania Violeta Davoliūtė and Dovilė Budrytė; 16. Conclusion-transitional justice: uses, lessons and questions Alexandra Vacroux.

Cynthia M. Horne is Professor of Political Science at Western Washington University.
Lavinia Stan is Professor of Political Science at St Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia.