crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
Renata Uitz*
Instead of success: hope for truth – at best
1. An uneasy introduction
The organizers of the European hearing on the crimes of totalitarian regimes asked me to give an
account on ‘success stories’ of reconciliation, and coming to terms with the totalitarian past, in post-
Communist Central Europe, with special emphasis on the Hungarian experience.
Coming from Hungary, few tasks sound more ambiguous. Hungary is a land of no reconciliation.
The two dominant political forces are divided by a deepening rift – over the proper reading of the
totalitarian (the Nazi and the Communist) past. This “war over pasts” commenced at the dawn of the
transition to democracy, in the summer of 1989, when the ruling Communist elite and the emerging
political forces faced the need to situate themselves along a continuum of relevant traditions for the
purposes of defining their paths into the future. Unfortunately history did not supply Hungarians with
a set of unambiguous heroes and events which could be fitted along a grand narrative of uncontested
memory.
As István Rév explains so well, the transition itself in 1989 has been a non-event, with no genuine
days to commemorate or celebrate. 1 Democratic transition in Hungary commenced when prominent
figures of the Communist Party openly suggested that the 1956 counter-revolution might have been a
revolt or indeed an uprising. The most cataclysmic event of the summer of 1989 had been the reburial
of the Imre Nagy, the executed prime minister of the 1956 uprising. The reburial turned out to be
the largest anti-Communist demonstration, displaying enormous support for transition from the old
regime, which nonetheless has happened largely independent of the Roundtable Talks (i.e. the forum
where a blueprint for transition to democracy was being carefully drafted). The emerging vocabulary
of “revolt”, “uprising” or – increasingly – “revolution”, together with the image of Imre Nagy might
appear as suitable material for a founding myth for a new regime to be built on the ruins of a Communist
system, which emerged in the tracks of Soviet tanks suppressing the dissenting voices of 1956. There is
only one problem. Imre Nagy would have been a perfect martyr or hero for the emerging democracy of
1989, had he not died remaining faithful to his convictions as a Communist. A negotiated and peaceful
regime change is difficult enough to narrate as a heroic epos to begin with – but with the last true
believer of the evil system as its protagonist?
From this truly post-modern scenario, no master narrative emerges. Hungarian public memory
is the comfortable home of the millennial heritage of St. Stephen, together with the constitutional
achievements of the anti-Habsburg 1848 revolutionaries and the interwar rule of Admiral Horthy, and
certainly the achievements, heroes and memories of the 1956 revolution. In the years that followed,
participants of the political scene built such strings of events into founding myths that suited their own
aspirations. The true successors of duelling heroes have been competing themselves for exclusive rights
to inhabit the public space in any matter of daily politics ever since.
In light of this somewhat dramatic introduction, I rush to admit that this national experience –
which I happen to be the most familiar with – deeply influences my perspective on the issues to be
explored in my paper. Instead of providing a systematic overview of a select few national experiences
on coming to terms with the past, I hope to concentrate on a those issues and problems which are central
for exploring and explaining the current state of affairs in several post-communist democracies. Since
by trade I am a lawyer, primarily I am interested in the contributions that constitutions, constitution
makers and constitutional players (including governments, political parties and courts) make in ensuing
social and political developments.
At first I will recall a few familiar yet important reminders about how constitutionalism and the
rule of law do not automatically deliver justice after grave past injustices. Rather, well-known examples
demonstrate that the language of the rule of law can be and was used by constitutional courts to justify
* Renata Uitz, Associate Prof of comparative constitutional law, Central European University, Budapest, Legal Studies. Ideas from this
paper were presented at the European hearing on “Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes” held in Brussels on April 8, 2008.
1
See István Rév, Retroactive Justice. The Prehistory of Post-communism, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2005.
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