The change of government is often accompanied by exposures and the associated lawsuits and accusations. The term "lustration" will not surprise anyone. The word is known even by the most unenlightened. But what lustration means remains incomprehensible to almost everyone.
History of the lustration procedure
So, in Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece, there was a rite of purification. The tradition related to the cleansing of infants by offering sacrifices to the gods. In modern conditions, asking the question: “Lustration - what is this?”, We can talk about the processes of purification of all levels of government from a certain type of officials.
Most often, lustration concerns all high-ranking state officials, as well as all representatives of the law and order system and the country's security. Ministers, representatives of the executive and legislative branches, security officials, judges and police officers - this is an incomplete list of civil servants in relation to whom the concept of “lustration” is used.
What is lustration used for?
The initiators of the process are always the new ones that came in the course of a revolution (or coup) of power. They strive with all their might to show their non-involvement in everything that happened in the country before them. Often, the people of a country transfer all the “merits” of previous rulers to new ones. And this does not at all increase people's loyalty to the new government, but rather aggravates the already complex transitional processes.
Therefore, the new government adopts a law on lustration, which stipulates the conditions under which officials can occupy their posts. Everyone who is somehow involved in the violation of human rights, oppression of the people, falsification of political and historical facts, etc., is not allowed into the governing bodies created by the new regime.
Lustration is revenge on predecessors
Lustration - what is it? Revenge to the predecessors. This is how some European and American political scientists and historians evaluate this process. After all, it is not always possible to convincingly prove the guilt of an official in offenses regarding freedoms and human rights. Often, a sufficiently timely “signal” is sent to the commission that deals with this issue, and the official has a lot of problems.
The Poles and Czechs faced a flood of denunciations, in which officials were lustrationed after the overthrow of the Communist Party. The number of applications from citizens indicating the names allegedly involved in the violation of human rights in these countries has reached such a scale that only at the first stage - upon receipt of a signal - they were already sorted into three categories. The first were officials whose guilt was proven and did not require verification; secondly, those whose sins have not been proven, but they hid the fact of their cooperation with security agencies. And in the third group there were people whose misconduct was almost impossible to deduce due to the limitations of their functional responsibilities. Most often, no case was brought up against these petty officials, but this category was the most numerous.
Fundamental principles of lustration
As already mentioned, lustration is the definition of the names of officials at various levels who are forbidden to work in government. This process was most common in Eastern Europe after the overthrow of the power of the communist regime. Despite the differences in the methods for identifying human rights violators in different countries, there were still similar principles for conducting lustration.
First, all states condemned the activities of the communist regime, the directive governance of the country and the use of the media to pressure the people. Secondly, the entire time period of the communist regime is defined as criminal. That is, with a small caveat for the development of the situation - this is 1948-1990. Thirdly, in a number of countries, the restriction of the access of former officials to senior posts has affected not only government bodies and the rule of law, but also educational institutions and religious organizations.
All other ideas about what the lustration of power was, had national characteristics. The longest and loudest processes of lustration were experienced by the Czech Republic and Poland.
Lustration in the Czech Republic
The split of Czechoslovakia into two states and the overthrow of the communist regime led to the fact that the Czech Republic carried out a rather harsh and deep purge among officials. So, lustration - what was it in practice?
Since 1991, the Czech Federal Council has adopted a number of laws on decommunization. In particular, one of them - “On the illegality of the communist regime” - decided that the responsibility for everything that happened in the post-war period in Czechoslovakia rests with the Communist Party and its leadership. They were accused of not only the economic directive management of the country and the political course on socialism, but also practically comprehensive surveillance of each other.
The "softness" of mass lustration in the Czech Republic
As a result of all the actions, more than 140,000 people were tested - officials of all ranks, judges, rectors of universities, directors of scientific institutes, etc. As soon as a signal came to a particular official, he was immediately fired from his job (if it was about work in state structures) and a special committee initiated an audit against this person. According to the established procedure, the audit should have been conducted no more than two months, but often was delayed for six months or more.
If the committee managed to prove a person’s guilt, or at least the facts of his possible cooperation with security agencies surfaced, he would lose the opportunity to occupy leadership positions in all state structures for 5 years. It is for such a “punishment” that Czech lustration processes are called soft.
Abuses of lustration processes
Despite the transparency of all processes that the new authorities were striving for, by 1996 there were not enough leadership posts for everyone. Therefore, already representatives of the new, democratic government, began to abuse lustration processes to neutralize political opponents.
Even Wencesl Havel, who was the first president of the Czech Republic and advocated the decommunization of administration and authority, got it. The state security archives also found a dossier on him, in which, after another conversation with a government official, Havel was described as "a possible candidate for cooperation."
Already in 1996, all interested Czechs could familiarize themselves with their files, if any were in the archives. But since a whole series of “scandalous revelations” arose, and critics of lustration began to increasingly indicate the erroneousness of this process, some restrictions were placed on the disclosure of information regarding journalists, scientists and university professors.
Lustration in Poland
The Polish Solidarity movement took the baton of power from the hands of the Communists. Everything looked very peaceful and lawful. The new government guaranteed members of the Communist Party immunity and security. However, the radical part of the representatives of Solidarity, in their desire to get maximum access to power, proposed introducing punishments for cooperation with the communist regime in the form of imprisonment.
These proposals were not accepted, but the flow of denunciations of their colleagues turned out to be so great that the process literally swept the whole country. As a result, the Polish Sejm passed a law on lustration, in which the circle of officials was limited only to ministers, senior officials, deputies and judges. At the same time, entering a managerial position, the incriminated official had to repent publicly and receive people's forgiveness for working for the communist regime. Initially, that was all.
Mass exposures of new officials
By 2007, several major scandals swept across Poland. After the disclosure of archival documents went to Vice Prime Minister Janusz Tomaszewski, the legendary human rights activist Lech Walesa, Alexander Kwasniewski (seventh president of Poland) and many other well-known Polish politicians and public figures.
In 2006, the Polish Sejm adopted amendments to the lustration law, according to which the circle of people whose activities during the reign of the Communist Party was to be publicized was expanded. Journalists, scientists and university professors, school principals and other small officials also had to submit a lustration application when applying for a job or undergo verification if they were already at the time of the adoption of the amendments. And again, the flow of denunciations has grown to an unprecedented scale, so that the Polish Constitutional Court in 2007 had to recognize a number of these amendments as illegal.
The latest scandal, giving an answer to the question “lustration - what is it”, erupted in 2007 in the ranks of the Catholic Church. Stanislav Velgus was forced to leave his post as Metropolitan of Warsaw, who had hidden his interview with the Polish state security organs in the 70s at an interview in the Vatican.
Lustration should affect all spheres of human life, however, it is necessary to take into account the nuances and conditions in which people were.
Lustration in the post-Soviet space
The former republics of the Soviet Union, which gained independence in 1991, have also repeatedly stated that lustration, the value of which is for the most part overestimated, is necessary.
In Russia and Ukraine, they repeatedly tried to initiate lustration, but not a single bill was passed. In Russia, under the law on the rehabilitation of the repressed by the totalitarian regime, a norm was introduced according to which all judges and officials involved in the repressions should be brought to court. However, this practice did not find much distribution, and all subsequent attempts to conduct lustration of the authorities did not receive support.
In Georgia, during lustration, communist and fascist symbols were banned. Significant posts are not allowed for former cadres of security agencies and functionaries of the Communist Party.
Lustration in the Baltic States
Lustration reached its greatest resonance in the Baltic countries. In Estonia, for example, the law provided for the criminal prosecution of persons who participated in mass repressions during the communist regime. Latvia and Lithuania were more loyal to the past of their population, but even here the relevant laws limited access to power by consciously cooperating with the security agencies of the Soviet Union. True, as in Europe, there were those who wanted to take revenge on their personal enemies - the wording “conscious cooperation” is very capacious, and therefore it costs nothing to blame a person.
Ukraine and the struggle for the purity of power
“Lustration in Ukraine should be carried out immediately!” It is with such slogans that the protesters are not the first revolution. For the first time, they started talking seriously about lustration after the 2004 “Orange Revolution”.
Then in the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine 2 bills on lustration were registered right away. According to one of them, lustration should be carried out in relation to persons involved in the government, with the exception of the president and the functionaries of his administration. In another bill, restrictions were imposed for anyone who had explicitly or indirectly collaborated with the USSR state security agencies.
The willingness of Ukrainian society to forgive
Neither then nor now has any draft law been adopted. According to experts (sociologists, political scientists, etc.), lustration in Ukraine is now impossible, because society is too hungry for revenge and is unlikely to be fair to all officials without exception.
The requirements for the “interim government” by Maidan activists in 2014, in particular, stipulated the following requirements for candidates: non-involvement in governing bodies, starting in 2010; practical experience of at least 5 years in leadership positions, including in government agencies; non-involvement in the 100 richest people in Ukraine , etc.
As of April 9, 2014, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine has already registered 4 bills that purge all levels of the Ukrainian government - these are processes such as lustration of judges, senior and minor civil servants, law enforcement officials, etc.