Throughout this book, I have been trying to resolve the puzzle of delayed transitional justice in East Central Europe. Why did some countries embark on purging public officials so late? In my explanations, I have been making a case for a positive approach to transitional justice. I have been arguing that rather than becoming a matter of retribution or “coming to terms with the past and moving on,” transitional justice legislation became a dimension of strategic interactions among actors eager to maintain their offices and advance careers. Thus, in Chapters 2 and 3, I explained why outgoing communists were not anxious that after leaving power, they would be punished with transitional justice and why the former opposition indeed refrained from exerting this type of punishment.

Unsurprisingly, the communists could not hold the opposition hostage to its threat of skeletons in the closet indefinitely. As one sees in Table 1.1, lustration was eventually adopted in virtually all East Central European countries. In the previous chapter, I explained this as the result of the emergence of new political parties with a pro-lustration agenda. I showed that lustration laws helped these parties weaken electoral competition and establish themselves as just and incorruptible. Their party manifestos no longer contained vows to reconcile and “let sleeping dogs lie.” It was virtually certain that after coming to power they would declassify secret police files and lustrate.