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The Politics of Forgiveness and Democratization

Anssi Kullberg - 3/5/2007

Chapter 1.

The consequences of human action are both difficult to predict and impossible to reverse. This causes many problems for people to solve since human language records social memory that attaches actions into the identities of individuals, families, generations and societies. At the same time man seeks justice and morals in his actions, which would be improbable unless there is an idea that actions somehow result in “what one deserves”, whether in earthly or at least in the transcendental life. Good acts are those that produce good. Evil acts are those that result in evil. The existence of justice is a necessity for any laws and rules to have a normative effect.

All this is after all less sensational and spiritual than one could believe. Even sociable animals are following norms in their actions and the social position of each individual depends on more than just occasional physical strength in a state of constant fight; in other words, there exists “reputation”, and for it to exist there must exist some kind of social memory that gives individuals their places in the community and release them from constant war. Thus we cannot claim social norms and the idea of justice to be uniquely human, “supernatural”, phenomena, but rather, remark that human society is based on a system of language and meanings that is, in its grade, uniquely complex. We can willingly admit that compared with any imaginable animal society, the human memory of justice extends to dimensions in time and change often incomprehensible even for ourselves.

A good example of this is that very often the burden of the irreversibility of the consequences of actions falls not only upon individuals, but “the deeds of our fathers” hang like Damocles’ sword over ever new generations. Guilt and responsibility – just as merits – are inherited with identities, whether we wanted this or not, and because of this we read and hear every day about sins, historical injustice or newer crimes committed by such imaginary perpetrators as the White Man, Christendom, America, the West, Islam, the Germans, nationalism, communism, capitalism and so on. Who carries the burden for a crime committed by “nationalism”? A nationalist, obviously. Thus, burdens for deeds and series of actions that are understood as (morally) unsettled are not only carried by the original culprits but also all those whose identity wears the stigma.

Hannah Arendt’s theory of action offers a remedy to the irreversibility of past actions: forgiving. For Arendt, forgiving “serves to undo” past actions, although in fact nothing that once was cannot be erased from history, if we understand history as “how things were”, independent on our contemporary memory. From archives and records, of course, any history can be “changed” by lie, if we understand history merely as a relative narrative of the past without the idea of unchangeable original reality. Like giving and keeping promises can offer “islands of permanence and security in the ocean of unpredictability”, forgiving can offer chances for new beginning, “zero hours”, for people who repeatedly commit mistakes and injustice. There life can begin anew – perhaps not from tabula rasa since also forgiven acts can still be remembered and repetition of past crimes is usually seen as evidence that nothing was learned from the past mistakes, but still from an acceptably cleaned account.

In fact forgiving is a rather radical conception for a remedy to human injustice. Arendt, who is herself a Jew, traces it back first and foremost to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, but Arendt separates them from their Christian context and sets them in a secular, religiously neutral, social and political context. Why forgiving was a socially radical invention? More traditional and conventional solutions in basically all cultures included revenge and punishment. Punishment is a logical alternative for forgiving, since punishment, like forgiving, seeks to end the story of something evil and to bring about a new beginning. Punishment is a payment for the debt caused by an unjust deed and settles the score. Revenge, on the other hand, represents for Arendt an opposite to forgiving, and is incapable of ending the evil, since its reaction to injustice just launches an endless sequence of feud.

In conflict societies revenge has traditionally dominated the scene of implementing social justice, because there is no longer a commonly accepted, legitimate and “just” authority to implement justice by punishment, and an ongoing conflict situation does not give opportunity to forgiving. In many of the areas where I travelled in the recent years, like Afghanistan, the Balkans and the Caucasus, catastrophic security situation inevitably maintained a dominance of the logic of revenge. However, also in the constitutionally autonomous Pashtun tribal agencies of Pakistan’s North-Western Frontier Province, justice essentially based on revenge was widespread.

It is necessary to remark that the relevant common cultural factor of these example cases is not Islam that would distinguish them from Jesus’s teachings like some might be tempted to claim in propagandistic purpose. Quite the reverse, the tradition of blood-feud is something essentially shared by Christian and Muslim societies of areas such as the Balkans and the Caucasus (and anyone can add dozens of other regions around the world). Rather, the primary common denominator between many revenge-based traditions of implementing justice can be found in the fact that a ruling power, widely seen as external, lacks legitimacy as a source of justice for the locals who prefer to take justice in their own hands. There is usually neither trust nor respect in the rulers, whether colonial overlords or local vassals, and the problem lies in the question of legitimacy of the rulers by the consent of those to be ruled. In most of these areas governments or occupiers are widely seen as criminals by the population, and in such circumstances the traditional and undeniable social institution – family – offers the only solid foundation for “reliable” justice that extends over generations. It is the family that guarantees that “great deeds” are rewarded with immortal reputation while “evil deeds” are punished with revenge. Families and clans maintain the vertical and horizontal legitimacy that states and empires have lost or perhaps never had in these regions.

It is remarkable that in addition to Jesus, Arendt finds mercy, as a principle of justice, to be heritage of the Romans only, who maintained a principle to “spare the defeated” (parcere subiectus). Yet we find this principle in various forms in so many cultures that I feel tempted to bet rather for its universal than uniquely Roman character. In Finnish we have the proverb “don’t beat the one who’s beaten already” (älä lyö lyötyä). However, we may understand Arendt better when remembering that the political and societal context of Jesus’s activities was not ancient state of Israel, but the Roman imperial colony of Palestine, which was ruled by Roman law, even though the relative autonomy that the Empire provided for its “ethnic minorities” like the Jews was in fact what led to Jesus’s death when the Roman administrator symbolically washed his hands, abandoning the new religious leader and prophet to the mercy of the enraged Jewish mob.

Arendt makes a point that the principle of mercy in the implementation of justice was completely alien to the ancient Greeks. If she is right – and indeed the absolute prevalence of the morality of reward and punishment is obvious in ancient Greek, Indian and Mesopotamian narratives – it might not be a coincident that the world of ancient Hellas was, like the current Caucasus or Pashtunistan, a mosaic of city states in constant war with each other, where the memory served justice by rewarding great deeds with immortal fame and obliged injustices to be revenged. Ancient Greeks lived in a world with the ethics of family, clan and mafia, rather than the kind of “state of law” that the Roman Empire implemented and that was to be known as Pax Romana in spite of all the constant warfare at the edges of the empire. The Roman Empire provided sufficient stability and undeniable legitimacy of its rule, thereby making it possible for such conceptions as mercy and forgiving to become rites fulfilling their social function widely in society, and not only in the private family sphere where prodigal sons may have been forgiven even before Jesus’s teachings.

Chapter 2.

Forgiving, punishment and revenge can all be seen as transition rites, to use an anthropological term. They all permit either individual or a society to transit into a new beginning. In this essay, I intend to shed some more unconventional light upon the upheavals of Eastern Europe and former Soviet Union, as well as the nemesis of communism in many of these countries after 1989-1992.

At first, however, I wish to cite my good friend Christian Jokinen, student of contemporary history at Turku University, who lived and studied two cases of recent transition societies that employed transition rites after major political injustices and upheavals: Germany after the World War II, and South Africa after apartheid. In his opinion article in Helsingin Sanomat, Jokinen writes about “Finlandization”, a Cold War term originally coined in West Germany that came to mean co-optation and submission of a Western society to Soviet influence and prerogatives in its political rhetoric and “political correctness”. Especially in the period of President Urho Kekkonen it meant that criticizing the Soviet Union or communism risked the person to be branded as an “anti-Russian” warmonger and completely politically incorrect, usually resulting in his isolation by the political and social elite, although this was never based on law and run counter to the liberal Finnish constitution.

“The atmosphere that is released from the Cold War’s grip has made it possible to discuss ‘Finlandization’ and its main architects, who should now bear responsibility for their words and deeds of that time. … The psycho-historian Jukka Relander has proposed that Finland should have a truth and reconciliation commission similar to the one in South Africa, which, in his opinion, is a better alternative than a court of justice to weight the question of guilt and responsibility.” (HS, 30 Jan. 2003.)

Yet Jokinen, who spent time in South Africa studying the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, sees problems in the South African solution:

“In South Africa, a suspect who made a full confession got full immunity against legal prosecution and suing by his victims. In fact, his victims, in the name of national reconciliation, were robbed off their right to forgive or not forgive. … This raises the question whether anyone has the right to forgive an injustice on behalf of someone else. Although national reconciliation was necessary, in its name justice was sacrificed.” (Ibidem.)

The approach and context of Christian Jokinen’s opinion piece in a Finnish newspaper, intervening 2003 debate over the Cold War legacy, were different from Hannah Arendt’s theory, but some of the core problems and considerations seem to bind these temporally and contextually distinct texts strangely together. Arendt grew up in the trauma of a German Jew after the horrors of the Holocaust and World War II. My friend Christian is son of Finnish air force officer and a German mother, who grew up in both Finland and Germany, thus inheriting over two generations and a Cold War some of the legacy that Arendt speaks about, entering the 21st century doing research on post-apartheid South Africa and witnessing the heated local debate over Finland’s past in the shadow of the Soviet. The crucial dilemma here is the controversy between justice and reconciliation. Jokinen writes that somebody should bear responsibility for the past “words and deeds”, referring to the injustices of the apartheid in South Africa and the time of “Finlandization” and censorship in Kekkonen’s Finland. However, political need – the “necessity” of reaching reconciliation – has robbed people off their “right to forgive or not forgive”, in other words, their freedom of choice about forgiving.

In fact Arendt noticed something very similar: forgiving could function as a remedy only when it was voluntary. This characteristic feature, like the conception before, Arendt traced back to Jesus’s teachings, which she presents in at least theologically quite radical light. According to Arendt, Jesus taught that human actions are not caused by God’s actions. In other words, when a human forgives, he does not act as an intermediary of divine forgiveness. Contrarily, “man first has to forgive to each other before they can expect forgiveness before God”. Forgiving was to be practised as an “obligation” because “people do not know what they are doing”, but this however did not apply to the ultimate crime, which was premeditated evil. Even in Jesus’s teaching, forgiving was possible in practise only when the perpetrator of injustice repented. The original evil, meanwhile, was to be left for God to take care of at the Last Judgement.

The strength of forgiving lies in the fact that it cannot be taken as self-evident, something predestined. It is for this very reason that it possesses remedy to the irreversibility of actions. Forgiving must be the victim’s own choice. And it is here that mistakes were made according to the South African criticism on their Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Christian Jokinen studied. Alex Boraine, vice-chairman of the Commission, actually remarked that forgiving cannot be demanded, although it is recommended. If forgiving becomes forced action, the whole idea is ruined, because it becomes possible for any perpetrator to calculate and count on guaranteed forgiveness before carrying out an evil fact already. It becomes like the past business of selling out licences for pre-forgiven sins that prompted the Reformation and bloody separation of the Protestants from the Catholic Church.

Applied for contemporary political practise, following Russian arguments on the Chechen War gives regularly a sinister feeling that Russia has learned to consider Western forgiveness as something self-evident, and so the attitudes of European countries is no longer even an issue in the Russian discourse. Meanwhile, US attitude, which Russians cannot count on with similar cynical certainty, still continues to matter. Towards the US, Russia still has to play poker, while Europe’s concerns can be dismissed as Europe has revealed their cards already.

In addition to “justice”, also “truth” became politicized in South Africa. Truth also caused lots of fear both in South Africa and in post-Cold War Finland. Professor Seppo Hentilä of Helsinki University expressed his horror about what would happen if the archives of the Soviet KGB would be opened for historians and journalists like the archives of East German Stasi: “Finns would tear each other apart”, he feared. Representative of the new post-Cold War generation, Christian Jokinen feared the opposite: that truth – and thereby also justice – would be subjected to political “necessities”, and that they would turn into predestined processes. Therefore Jokinen closed his opinion article with the recommendation that for there should not be truth commissions controlling the unwrapping of Finland’s “Finlandization”, but instead, good historians, and where treason has been committed, legal prosecution.

Chapter 3.

The collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989-1992 brought an end to a world-scale historical series of crime that was comparable with the horrors of Nazi Germany. Arendt refers to the crimes of the Nazis with Immanuel Kant’s terms as “radical evil”, meaning crimes that were so terrible that people are not capable of either punishing or forgiving them. The crimes of the Soviet Union and its communist satellite regimes not only reached the same level with the Nazis but also temporally lasted much longer than the short-lived Nazi regime, thereby putting several whole generations into grave without the chance to see justice.

When the Iron Curtain finally fell, there were hopes all over Eastern Europe of some kind of a “red Nuremberg”, but nothing of the kind ever emerged. The victims of communism, their close ones and descendants, and whole nations collectively branded by the Soviet regime, like the Chechens, Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks, never witnessed “justice” in the sense the victims of the Nazis after the World War II and the Blacks of South Africa after the fall of apartheid did. It should not have been a surprise that the centres of communist empires, Moscow and Belgrade, as well as the “master nations” of the communist world, Russians and Serbians, were not particularly willing to repent any of their historical crimes, and the same applied to many former communists of many countries in East and West.

For many of the young people I personally met in Eastern Europe those years, the biggest shock was that the West, “winner of the Cold War”, which had for decades represented freedom and democracy for the wishful peoples of the East, seemed to suddenly take its former enemy’s side, against those very people this enemy had cruelly oppressed.

In those former Eastern Bloc countries that quickly adopted Western-type democratic political culture, it was possible to create an atmosphere that could, at least psychologically, offer “justice” and relief to people’s minds. In Poland, Hungary, Baltic countries, Czech Republic, Romania, etc., the society as a whole, culture and media have ever since discussed the crimes of communism. Because “Europe” was one of the slogans of the 1989-1992 upheaval, it had been the wish of the East Europeans that the entire Europe would have awakened to a conscious “Red Nuremberg” – condemning Soviet communism and offering justice for its victims in public opinion.

However, the reactions in the West were something quite different. Western European governments, who were used to live according to the conditions of Realpolitik and their attitudes toward Russia were dominated by unlimited wishful thinking and political “necessities”, granted Russia billions of cheap loans in the middle of the horrors of Chechnya. They were also incapable of acting in the Balkans in any way to stop the Serbian aggression against their neighbours; in fact, Western European governments were coolly watching aside when the Serbs erected concentration camps and cleansed the cities of Srebrenica and Zepa from their Muslim population, only 50 years after Europeans had sworn that what the Nazi regime of Germany did would “never happen again”.

It was not enough that the Western European governments were emotionally unmoved to defend Bosnians or Chechens – they seemed to give direct support to Serbia and Russia. No Western intervention stopped the Serbs in the Balkans until the Americans got involved – and even they waited until the Serbs were about to lose the territories they had conquered to the united resistance of Croats and Bosniaks, since only then Russia and China removed their veto against an intervention in the UN Security Committee. When the same happened in Kosovo, European reluctance was vocal and the US was compelled to act unilaterally. In the Caucasus, Western powers not only silently accepted whatever Russia did to Chechens but even participated in the propagandistic branding of the Chechens as “Muslim terrorists”.

It was not only the Western governments that betrayed the Eastern peoples, but also Western civil society. Even as late as in 1998-1999, when it could be imagined that disillusion at Western “intelligentsia” was complete, my Balkan friends in Lund, Sweden, expressed their shock and outrage when all the Western youth, speaking in the name of “peace”, “democracy”, “anti-fascism” etc. passionately defended the Serbian national-socialist regime against “American imperialism”. Any demonstration to protest Russian or Serbian atrocities in the Caucasus and Balkans gathered only few immigrants from these areas and odd lonely activists, while any demonstration against whatever America did easily filled the streets with raging mobs with all the symbols of the oppression East Europeans had experienced: red flags, sickles, hammers, pictures of Lenin and Che Guevara...

Some of the Albanian students who had lived in Sweden were among the first victims when the Serbian “anti-terrorist operation” in Kosovo was launched with an assault of paramilitary troops to the University of Prishtina. Serbian paramilitaries in Kosovo were commanded by a thug, “hero” still to many Serbs, called Zeljko Raznjatovic and better known as Commander Arkan, who was wanted by the Interpol for organized crime, including bank robberies in Sweden. Yet Western European “alternative” magazines preferred to reprint Serbian propaganda about Albanian mafia that had, of course, something to do with the CIA. The conflict in Kosovo had in fact continued since 1992, when Kosovo declared independence (before Bosnia and Macedonia), but Western intelligentsia thought the conflict only began at Rambouillet, because it was only then that the US involvement gave them a motive to go to the streets – against America.

The academia did hardly better. In spring 1999, Swedes of Estonian origin organized a seminar on communist-era human rights violations in the Baltic states. They had invited as a speaker to the seminar Andres Küng, an Estonian Swede who had written a moderate and humanistic book on the topic. However, the Faculty of Political Science of Lund University prevented the seminar from being held in their premises due to its “obvious political bias”. The same pretext was used also to prohibit a seminar on Caucasian nations organized by the Swedish Azerbaijani Society. It was more conspicuous that the Faculty’s policy seemed to have no impact on the solidarity events concerned of Palestine and Kurdistan that took place without interruption. At the same time, the Faculty also offered its premises, and advertised, a seminar organized by “European Workers’ Party” on the subject “How American-British war imperialism must be crushed by an alliance of Russia, China and India, and Sweden must support this either independently or through EU”. This seemed not to contain “obvious political bias” for the Faculty.

All in all, “mercy” was applied in the West in a way that seemed to be in the spirit of the Roman wisdom of “sparing the defeated”, if we dare to assume that communism indeed was “defeated” in the Cold War. (I am not sure if I could make this assumption in some of the university campuses of Western Europe.) This principle first obliged the US and Western Europe to strongly support the sovereignty of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, their unity, and later the inviolable sovereignty and borders of the Russian Federation and “Serbia and Montenegro”. Western governments and Besserwisser advisors strictly prohibited their Baltic, Ukrainian and Caucasian admirers and various democracy activists from “destabilizing Gorbachev’s perestroika”. Communism should not be branded guilty, and it would be even worse if the states of Russia and Yugoslavia would be demanded some responsibility. Let alone the Russian and Serbian nations.

Probably most of the Westerners who thought like this did not see themselves defending communism or the leaders of Moscow and Belgrade. Instead, they were mainly occupied by “political correctness” and good intentions. When reading many Western analyses of this period, one can read between the lines that was there to be a reform in the Eastern Bloc, it would start from the imperial centres. This, of course, run counter to all the evidence from the field, but after all, the prevalent Western analyst was not in the field but in an academic or political armchair safely located in a Western capital. When the West acted like this, it ended up blaming all those who wished justice of a proper account of the near history, as anti-Russian or anti-Serbian fanatics stuck in the trenches of the Cold War. In its arrogance, Western Europe thought that it had the right to forgive the injustice suffered by East Europeans on behalf of the latter. By doing so, Western Europe robbed them of their right to forgive or not forgive.

The collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union from inside came as a “shock” and “surprise” for most Western leaders. It should not have been a surprise since even I, a teenage boy, could foresee it and considered it “inevitable” for years before the Berlin Wall fell. Once the Cold War was history, “justice and forgiving” started in the westernmost part of the former Eastern Bloc. These countries escaped safely from the centre of the “Evil Empire” as well as from the smaller evil personified in the character of Slobodan Milosevic. Many former dissidents who had become statesmen acted as catalysts for this process. Their “romantic” picture of freedom and democracy was not as faded as in the pragmatic and real-political West. Václav Havel, Lech Walesa, Lennart Meri, Vytautas Landsbergis and Emil Constantinescu, to mention some of them, were not essentially different from Milo Djukanovic, Ibrahim Rugova, Zviad Gamsahurdia, Ebülfez Elchibey and Jokhar Dudayev. The latter, however, experienced a very different fate from the first. Therefore in Serbia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Chechnya justice and forgiving could not be applied. Instead, any development was interrupted by violence and coups d’état by the nomenclature. Open discussion on the past was suppressed.

Also among those “new” states the most successful were those that were born by separation from disintegrated socialist empire, the ones who, backed by West, managed to make clearest divorce to Moscow and Belgrade. Slovenia and Estonia are good examples. Situation is worst in those countries that forcefully remained parts of Russia or Serbia. None of the latter cases avoided genocidal activities, ethnic cleansing and massive human rights violations. It could be said that if Estonia and Slovenia reached “healthy” process of dealing with the past with conceptions including forgiving, revengeful Russia and Serbia ended up physically eliminating those who “criminalized” the Soviet legacy. Elimination targeted both entire separatist nations and individual dissidents and reformist politicians among the “own” nation. In the passing week of writing this article, this policy of eliminating dissent claimed one more victim when the reformist Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic was assassinated.

Many cases were located between these extremes. In Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship worsened towards its end, and Albania’s communist regime remained entirely isolationist. Therefore there was not the kind of softened gradual collapse that for example Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika offered for most of the Soviet satellites. It is perhaps for this reason that Romania in December 1989 and Albania in summer 1997 experienced their violent transition rites. The execution of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu after their helicopter flight ended in Târgoviste, offered an excellent modern example of the “scapegoat” phenomenon, long known for anthropologists. Scapegoat takes with it the sins and traumas of a community to the grave, and so the community can feel relieved and continue with a cleaner account. Also Franjo Tudjman’s death in December 1999 visibly lightened the burden of the Croatian nation. Reluctance to reforms and widespread frustration were so much personified by the characters of Ion Iliescu in Romania and Vladimir Meciar in Slovakia that their defeats in the elections of Romania in 1995 and Slovakia in 1998 brought about a permanent change in the political culture in these countries. Even Serbia, when Djindjic was still leading the country, got quite a good start, as it even sent its own scapegoat, Milosevic, to be convicted in the Hague – a kind of mild Nuremberg.

Processing of the past and forgiving it proved successful in the western part of former Eastern Bloc. This was manifested for instance in the repeated comebacks of former communists along the 1990s, without raising any very traumatic feelings, and being able to plausibly present themselves as social democrats of a new era, leading their countries to the membership of EU and NATO. In Poland, first Aleksander Kwasniewski became president, and then former hard-line communist Leszek Miller became prime minister. Miller was one of the signatories of the recent public letter of several European leaders supporting US war on Iraq. The same public letter was also signed by Hungary’s new prime minister Péter Medgyessy, who used to work in the communist secret police. In Lithuania, Algirdas Brazauskas came and went as a prime minister, and when the former communist Arnold Rüütel was elected Estonian president, only the “old school” anti-communists were having a grudge. The youth saw Rüütel more in the light of his participation in the 1992 Popular Front.

Even Iliescu, who had turned his coat during the five years he stayed out of power after his defeat, became a euro social democrat dedicated to Western values and finally returned to Romanian presidency in 2000. In the second round of that election he was voted also by those Romanian friends of mine, “youth of the European era”, who had been at barricades against him in 1995-1996. They preferred even Iliescu rather than the candidate of the extreme right, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, who appealed on communist nostalgia.

In the eastern part of the Eastern Bloc things developed quite differently. Everything had begun just like in Central Europe and the Baltics. Especially Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova and Ukraine followed closely on the footsteps of the rest of Eastern Europe. Also in Russia proper in 1989-1993, there was a period of liberalism like never before in that nation’s history, maybe best portrayed by the government of Yegor Gaidar, a Jew. Later, Derzhavnik thinking and the security machinery returned their hegemony in Moscow, which was immediately followed by campaigns to return Moscow’s leadership also everywhere else where it was possible.

Once the new security doctrine, advocated by the renamed secret services, had been pushed into power in Moscow security council, wars were launched. Russia attacked Moldova, where it supported the Stalinist separatists of Transnistria, changed government and parliament in Chisinau and prevented Moldova’s planned annexation to Romania. Instead, Moldova was annexed to the paradoxically named Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Moscow’s structure to revive the Soviet imperial space. In Georgia, former KGB officers overthrew President Gamsahurdia, the government and the parliament in a bloody coup, and invited former KGB general Eduard Shevardnadze as new president. The same happened in Azerbaijan with less bloodshed, because terrified by the Georgian events, President Elchibey chose exile. KGB general Heydar Aliyev was made president. Georgia and Azerbaijan were annexed to the CIS. In Armenia and Kazakhstan massive electoral fraud was suspected to have ensured the shift of power. In Tajikistan, Russia supported former communist nomenclature to return to power in a bloody civil war. In Belarus, a hard-line communist Alyaksandr Lukashenka gained power in apparently democratic means, but instantly made himself a dictator. In Ukraine, power shifted to the authoritarian Leonid Kuchma who represented the nomenclature.

None of the countries belonging to the CIS has proceeded much in processing their past. The same applies, even more, to Russia herself. Georgia and Ukraine have been the most advanced of these countries to proceed in democratization and emergence of a civil society. In Moldova, progress can also be seen, but economic hardships and isolation from the West helped communists to win in the elections of 2001, after which development there has been negative, with alarming rise in human rights violations. In the cases of Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova, possibly also of Belarus, change of leadership could, in principle, bring about the necessary transitional rite, but only if the Moscow-backed nomenclature cannot capture the change of generation in the leadership of these countries. Otherwise there are probably more tragedies ahead.

Also “ethnic forgiving” became true in the “western group” much more than in the “eastern group” of post-communist states. Where public discussion on the crimes of communism and speaking about things with their real names made it possible to process the past, it also enabled forgiving. Therefore, even though Western press has been eager to find “oppression of ethnic Russians” in Estonia and other former East European countries, the reverse is actually true. Very few Estonians blame Estonia’s ethnic Russians for the crimes of the Soviet time. While in the Soviet times bars and nightclubs operated according to a strict apartheid – Estonians and Russians separately – nowadays the youth of this country becomes one mass in modern hip dance places, and xenophobic violence occurs only to the extent similar to the folkhem Sweden or any other West European state. At the same time in Russia representatives of ethnic and religious minorities have been killed, not only in Chechnya, but also in racist violence in Russian cities and in pogroms that have taken place in Southern Russian villages. The occurrence of hate-related crime in Russia has increased alarmingly since autumn 1999.

In many countries of Eastern Central Europe and the Baltics there have been individual lawsuits and trials against some individuals accused for communist-era crimes. Most of these have been high-ranking officers of the communist secret services and, in the case of the Baltic countries, those who participated the deportations. Russia has strongly protested against such trials with diplomatic and propaganda means. Even more absurdly, also Western countries and their media have regularly “warned against” and “regretted” such trials. It has been a widely accepted principle for example in Estonia that persons who are in official duty are expected to reveal their possible background in Soviet secret services. Those who “confess their sins” are forgiven and can continue in their jobs unless the electorate decides otherwise in the next election. Those failing to confess their past risk being fired. Truth is expected from them, but not public humiliation. It is quite strange that such practises have been regretted for example in Finland – a citizen would rather wish honesty to be demanded from civil servants and elected officials also in this country.

Chapter 4.

The purpose of this long but cursory account is to indicate that the function of forgiving in a society works only when it is based on people’s “right to forgive or not forgive”. The social function of forgiving does not succeed unless the following criteria are met:

1. There must be a minimum state of relative stability and legitimate system of political power, as in the Roman Empire during the Pax Romana and in the more western part of Eastern Europe in 1990s.
2. Those who are expected to forgive in the name of “common good”, must possess the liberty and right to forgive or not to forgive.
3. Those who committed crimes and injustice must show some kind of repent or disappear from the political scene. The former perpetrators can, for example, retire or significantly turn their coats. At least the past crimes and injustice must be recognized and condemned in open and public discussion. In such circumstances people tend to exercise mercy and forgive.


In the western group of East European countries public discussion has made it possible for forgiving to fulfil its social function, although an even better and more healthy outcome could have been reached if the entire Europe full-heartedly participated the processing of past. This could also have helped those countries of the eastern group, where open processing of the past has so far been impossible. It has been characteristic that the communist era has stroke its heavy impact also to the Western countries, which – also others than Finland – have suffered “Finlandization”, each of its own type.

It is difficult to imagine anyone in the West anymore praising Stalin, even a communist. Still many could feel, like Professor Osmo Jussila, that it was only at the 50th anniversary of Stalin’s death that the pages of the biggest Finnish daily, Helsingin Sanomat, had wide discussion on the crimes of Stalinism, including the editorial. However, we can stop to wonder why the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Helsinki reacted to this by publishing in Helsingin Sanomat a protest letter, which was, to the vocabulary and tone, like a cold wind-blow from the Soviet Union.

* Originally published in Finnish in The Eurasian Politician on March 15, 2003.