SUMMARY:

While Soviet rule was the vehicle of communist ideology in all of Eastern and Central Europe, religious, national, and regional traditions considerably transformed it in the Warsaw Pact countries as well as in the westernmost Soviet republics from the 1960s on. In the post-communist period, these pre-communist and communist variations are particularly obvious when looking at attempts to come to terms with the communist past. Four categories of post-communist cultures of remembrance can be identified in Eastern and Central Europe: (1) Societies characterized by a general consent concerning an “alien” communist rule forced upon from the outside – Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania being prominent examples; (2) cases where such a consent does not exist and where fierce political controversies on the interpretation of the dictatorial past have taken place – as in Hungary and Poland, but also in Ukraine; (3) societies dominated by an apathetic ambivalence toward the communist past – Bulgaria, Romania and other Balkan countries belong into this category; and (4) states with a continuity of authoritarian structures and without a clear dissociation from communist rule – like the Russian Federation, Belarus, Moldova, and other CIS republics. That categories (1) and (2) are divided from (3) and (4) by the line separating western and eastern churches – with Ukraine cut in two – is probably less surprising than the fact that Poland is a driving force in establishing an institution of European societies’ remembrance.