The following is the final contribution to our ongoing symposium on Mark Drumbl and Barbora Holá’s new book Informers up Close. It was written by Cynthia Horne, a Professor Political Science at Western Washington University. To see all of the other submissions to the symposium, click here.

Lustration was a particular form of vetting used in most post-communist transitional justice programs. Although lustration differed by national context, at its most basic, individuals were screened for evidence of employment in or collaboration with the secret police and/or high-ranking communist party membership drawing on information found in the secret police files.  Evidence of collaboration could negate eligibility for public office or employment in a range of public and semi-public positions. In some cases this evidence was also publicly disclosed, with the intention of shaming individuals to recuse themselves from consideration for positions. 

A core goal of lustration was (re)building trust.  This was an acute issue in post-communist countries, which suffered from especially high levels of both social and political distrust. The Vice Minister of the Interior of the Czech situated the lustration of informers within this trust-building context: 

The network of [secret police] collaborators is like a cancer inside Czechoslovak society. Is it so difficult to understand that people want to know who the former agents and informers are?  This is not an issue of vengeance, nor of passing judgments. This is simply a question of trusting our fellow citizens who write newspapers, enact laws and govern our country.

How was lustration supposed to support trust-building?  First, removing those with a past tainted by collaboration was alleged to improve citizens’ trust in the capacity and integrity of public institutions. Second, the threat of revelation was expected to prompt the recusal of collaborators from public office, catalyzing bureaucratic change.  Third, the process of revealing the files and acknowledging collaboration was intended to support “the purification of state organizations from their sins under the communist regimes.” In essence, a combination of personnel changes and changes in the ‘moral culture’ of citizens was expected to build trust in the state and public institutions.   

Interpersonal trust was expected to change, although how was not entirely clear at the start of the transitions from communism to democratic governance. Finding out that your neighbors, co-workers and family members were spying on you could break any remaining social trust networks. Alternatively, although painful, revealing the scope of the spy networks might help society confront its own complicity in past harms. 

So, what actually happened? Trust-building did not go exactly as planned. Countries with more extensive lustration programs generally experienced more political trust-building, but not with the speed or at the levels originally hoped for.  The effect on interpersonal trust was unclear, with some studies showing no change or limited changes in social trust. Why this is the case has remained undertheorized.  Informers Up Close points us in the direction of a better understanding. 

How does ‘Informers Up Close’ add to our understanding of trust-building?

First, the assumption that previous regime collaboration was evidence that an individual was an ideological ‘true believer’ and therefore could not be trusted to support the new democratic regime is called into question by the range of motivations unpacked in Informers Up Close. Informers sheds light on the diverse range of human emotions, rationales, and survival tactics shaping decisions to collaborate: to protect families, to gain materially, to advance communism, to avoid punishment, to punish others…the list goes on. Informers reminds us that under totalitarianism, decisions to inform were not necessarily in support of communism and were certainly not unidimensional. Both decisions to collaborate and society’s reactions to it reflected the complexity of the political and social landscape of totalitarianism. 

Second, the human narratives presented in Informers Up Close help us to better understand the far more complicated range of societal reactions to revelations than were expected. Just as decisions to collaborate were varied, societal reactions to revelations ran the gamut from feelings of judgment, forgiveness, anger, sadness, and even empathy. Informers provides readers with a personal exploration of the files, and tempers the expectations that revelations of complicity would provoke prescribed and predictable reactions of shock and distrust from citizens. 

Third, although the operating assumption of lustration was that the integrity of informers was compromised by their secret police complicity and therefore removing them would be better for society, Informers asks us to question the certainty of this foundational assumption. Many collaborators did not recuse themselves from positions of public trust and people continued to elect/appoint informers to political office. In practice, collaboration did not necessarily mean an individual’s integrity was compromised, as we have come to see that even freedom fighters like Lech Wałęsa, who became Poland’s first democratically elected President in 1990, had informer files. Informers helps us to better understand why there was more limited bureaucratic change and more muted trust effects from file revelations than originally predicted.

Fourth, revelations of collaboration were expected to catalyze a “changing of hearts and minds” according to Vojtěch Cepl, former justice on the Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic and a contributor to the Czech Constitution.Revelations of collaboration were expected to compel both individuals and society as a whole to face the extent of their complicity with the former communist regime. Rosenberg described the expected emotional tumult: 

The Eastern Bloc dictatorships were conspiracies of all of society. Just as almost everyone was a victim of communism… almost everyone also participated in repression… Their complicity was hidden, even from themselves, by the fact that every ordinary citizen behaved the same way. 

This societal catharsis moment of atonement and purification (to use Cepl’s words) relied on an assumption that file revelations would provoke opprobrium from society and/or shame and guilt from collaborators, something which did not universally transpire. Instead, revelations elicited more muted effects on interpersonal trust. One of the lasting effects of this failure to “change the hearts and minds” has been a rise of nostalgia for the past in some corners of the former communist space, undermining respect for democracy and its freedoms.  

In conclusion, Informers Up Close enriches our discussion of transitional justice and trust by providing us with firsthand evidence of the complex motivations surrounding decisions to collaborate. We are provided with a fuller picture of why all collaboration might not have been judged as morally corrupt, and why revelations evoked a much broader range of societal responses than simple social opprobrium.  Informers Up Close is a valuable addition to our thinking about file revelations as transitional justice, with potential broader resonance across trust-building dynamics in other transitional societies.