The editors of Ab Imperio asked Istvan Deak, professor emeritus of Columbia University in New York, to discuss a number of questions focused on the problem of historians’ judgment in the region of Central and Eastern Europe. Professor Deak’s works on the history of the Habsburg Empire and interwar Europe have become classic books in the subject, while his knowledge of the contemporary Central European landscape of historical judgment made him an ideal interlocutor for our conversation. In particular, Professor Deak co-edited and co-wrote with Jan T. Gross and Tony Judt a volume The
Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath (Princeton, NJ, 2000), which explored issues of the past’s use in the business of punishing and rewarding.

Ab Imperio: Why, in your opinion, did lustration come to the forefront of public debates in the former communist countries almost twenty years (span of a generation) after the Velvet revolutions? Can we detect an impact of these regimes’ evaluation by historians (democratic, anti-democratic, enjoying popular support) upon the legitimacy and prospect of lustrations? Do you believe there is a parallel between 1918 and 1989 from the point of
view of historical rupture and its overcoming?

Istvan DEAK: Why did the issue of lustrations come to the fore almost twenty years after the collapse of the communist regimes? I believe that it has to do with the course of post-communist transformations and the expectations people had of these changes. The expectation was that the coming of democracy would bring about prosperity without one’s having to make great sacrifices. Eastern Europeans were used to a leader who told them what to do, who showed them the way to better living standards. The lack of an immediate improvement in the living standards and the absence of charismatic leadership caused a certain degree of disillusionment with democracy, which is reflected, among other things, in the low voter turnout. Fifty to sixty percent of the potential voters do not vote in Eastern Europe. Another sign of disillusionment is that voters regularly turn against those whom they had elected to office only a couple of years earlier, as we see happening in Poland today.

AI: What is your personal take on lustrations? Who should be subjected to lustration? What kind of legal restrictions on rights, in your view, is appropriate and justified for those who collaborated with a totalitarian (or authoritarian, despotic) regime?

I.D.: It is so hard to decide, in a region like Eastern Europe, how far one should go back in time in the process of retribution; whom to make individually responsible for the tragedies of the past – back to the 1940s, perhaps? Most of those who perpetrated crimes in the 1940s are today dead. Should one therefore begin in Hungary with the events of 1956, in Czechoslovakia with those of 1968, and in Poland with 1980? Should General Jaruzelski be tried? I believe that he never will and probably should not. Those who committed the greatest crimes – say in 1956 in Hungary, the ones who are responsible for the death of thousands, who helped the Russians, who put young people on trial after the revolution and hung many – are very old today, a lustration of the whole group would achieve very little. But if one can prove in the case of individuals that they are guilty of crimes that are considered crimes under the laws of most countries, then those individuals should be prosecuted. Then again, there is the question of why also not deal with such persons who committed their terrible deeds during the years of German occupation – who are responsible for the death of Jews?

AI: Can de-Nazification and de-Sovietization of Central Europe be
compared?

I.D.: This is a very good question which is difficult to answer. When attempting a comparison, we must consider the differences between the two situations. De-Nazification followed an absolutely devastating war; it took place within the general process of post-war retribution, and it helped the peoples of Europe to believe that once the leading German Nazis and their foremost local helpers had been punished, they themselves could feel free of all guilt for their own wartime behavior. Within the Allied camp, the Americans were keenest to prevent a recurrence of the monstrous system of Nazism; they also hoped to prevent a future war by trying the main Nazi criminals at Nuremberg. At the same time, in every country once under Hitler’s rule, collaborators were punished. It was not always a pretty sight, innocents were often penalized, some women among them – just think of the women whose heads were shaven because they had had an affair with a German soldier – but such actions were felt to be necessary. And the new democratic regimes believed that in order to demonstrate that their country was not as guilty as it really had been, it was necessary to select a certain
number of traitors and collaborators for punishment. There was a general consensus that something had to be done in order to create a new and better society. This was not at all the case after 1989. First of all, there had been no war; second, there were very few, if any political prisoners in Eastern European jails at the time of the collapse of communism. Life was not unbearable; no one was dying of hunger as in the last years of World War II or immediately after. There was very little evidence of a popular hatred of the
old regime. All this helps to explain the lack of lustration in the immediate aftermath of 1989. With some exceptions – a handful of East German and Czech communist leaders were punished but none spent any significant time in jail – most of the accused were acquitted or if sentenced, were released immediately. And this was because the circumstances were completely different from those of the post-World War II era. The Soviet system died a peaceful not a violent death

AI: Do you think that professional judgments by historians had any
impact on the legitimacy of lustrations in Central and Eastern Europe? For instance, there is a trend in historiography that suggests that communist regimes enjoyed a great degree of genuine popular support. Do such evaluations have any meaning in terms of discussions of lustrations?

I.D.: Historians have had very little to say about lustrations; moreover I do not think that we have reached the point in time when there would be a consensus regarding popular approval or disapproval of the communist regime. I would argue that the post-war communist regimes, just like the tsarist regime before WWI in Russia, enjoyed considerable popular support. But then I hear statements – it so happened that I heard it at a conference
recently – that the Hungarian people as a whole rejected the communist system in 1956 and supported the movement for freedom and national independence. This is largely true but not completely so, because it ignores those who had greatly benefited from the introduction of communism in the late 1940s. Quite a few people profited from the communist takeover, whether in the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary or the rest of Eastern Europe, by being allowed to rise from the lowest classes of society, by being able to send their children to higher-level schools, and by obtaining land to
cultivate. True, that land was later collectivized, but at least for a while the poor peasants could feel that they, too, owned something. All in all, despite all the disillusionments of the Stalinist and post-Stalinist years, there were many reasons for a good number of people – how many we do not know – to look with some sympathy at the communist regime. Under communism parliamentary elections were meaningless – a bad joke really; but in the two
instances after World War II when free elections took place within the Soviet orbit, they showed significant support for the Communist party: thirty-eight percent in Czechoslovakia in May 1946, and seventeen percent in Hungary in November 1945.

AI: What is your attitude to historians who were active under the communist regime in Hungary?

I.D.: I would approach the question by inquiring when the historian
wrote his books and articles. If he wrote in the late 1940s and 1950s, even in the early 1960s, it is certain that he would tow the Marxist-Leninist line. One can well excuse this kind of behavior by saying that the person had to earn a living; that he had no choice if he wanted to work as a historian. But in the 1970s and 1980s, especially in Hungary, Poland, and temporarily at least in Czechoslovakia, historians could make a choice. Some remained Marxist-Leninists; others tried to travel in order to learn from the rest of the world, from the Annales school in France, from the post-structuralists, or from anyone else who had something new to say. The progressive historians in the communist countries reinterpreted history and posed new questions based on archival evidence. Such Hungarian historians as Péter Hanák, for example, provided a wealth of new information in their works. Regarding the history of the Habsburg Monarchy, the Marxist-Leninist line was that the monarchy had been a semi-colonial dependency of Western capitalism, and that within the monarchy, Hungary
was a semi-colonial dependency of Austria. It was all explained in terms of banks, bank loans, and investments. But then the same historians, began to reinterpret the same historical developments, and in the 1960s stated that there had been no such thing as semi-colonial dependency, and that the Hungarian economy and society had profited from its association with Austria, an economically and politically more advanced society. Hanák’s aim was to show that association with a stronger economic power was not necessarily disadvantageous – after all, János Kádár cultivated this kind of
relationships with the Soviet Union. Certainly, there was an opportunistic element in this reinterpretation of Habsburg history: those who engaged in it were more often invited to international conferences, were more likely to receive research fellowships to foreign universities (the role of George Soros is crucial here) than those who had remained Marxist-Leninists. The innovative historians learned to attach what in Eastern Europe was called a “red tail” to the book or article they had written, namely a few
quotations from the classics of Marxist-Leninism, and the rest of the book could then be free of ideology.

AI: Do you believe there is a parallel between 1918 and 1989 from the point of view of historical rupture and its overcoming?

I.D.: Well, I believe that the differences were profound: in 1918 the monarchy and the dualistic system came to an end; the entire Habsburg realm fell apart, Hungary became a defeated and truncated country. All this led to two successive revolutions – one democratic, the other communist. The leaders of the two revolutions felt that they had the opportunity to build a completely new society. The communists especially were persuaded that the country would emerge as part of a great new proletarian international. So 1918, and especially 1919, signified an attempt to break completely with the past. No longer a monarchy but a republic; a society no longer based on the traditional social classes and the historic parliamentary system, but rather, the dictatorship of the proletariat. There is no trace of any such drastic expectations in 1989; what you have then is a rather smooth transition from a communist system that had been gradually dismantling itself, to a capitalist system. Much of the state property fell into private hands, but society did not change fundamentally because former party bureaucrats were still running most of the show, and because
the social achievements of the defunct regime, such as free health care and free education, continued. So in that sense, while 1918–1919 signified a dramatic and complete rupture with the past, the transformations of 1989 were on a much smaller scale.

AI: What is your position on the problem of restitution? Can we distinguish between restitutions related to genocide (the Holocaust in particular) and restitutions related to regime change and social transformations? What is the ultimate purpose of post-communist restitution?

I.D.: One might well distinguish between the genocide of the early
1940s and the suffering of many under communism, but in reality today all this makes little difference: restitution should be applied to such survivors who are poor, sick, elderly, and those who have lost their family members. These victims of the two evil regimes, Nazism and communism, should be supported so that they may live and die in dignity. But not much more than that; I don’t see any point in restoring large scale property to its former owners. It is wrong to return factories, palaces, ecclesiastic property,
because these properties changed hands many times and have been changed and developed further. Where should restitution begin? After all, property was seized illegally during and after the revolutions of 1848; during and after World War I, during and after World War II, and in the years following 1948. The same Jewish family may have been hit by the Nazi deportations in 1944, the Soviet deportations in 1945, and the wave of nationalizations
beginning in 1948. The needy among them should be helped, but this is all.

AI: So where would you place post-communist claims for restitution in the context of the larger culture of historically grounded claims?

I.D.: Well, I made clear that I am against collective restitution, restitution to groups and ethnic communities. I don’t believe that every Jewish survivor should be rewarded just for being a Jewish survivor; but individuals who are poor, who are old, should be helped. The same applies to Germans persecuted in Poland or Czechoslovakia after 1945; after all, many were killed at that time; the rest were expelled to German territory. It would be
impossible for these groups to be adequately compensated for their losses. Or consider the fate of such monastic teaching orders as the Cistercians or Jesuits whose schools before WWII were supported by the enormous properties these orders possessed. Today, several monastic orders again have their school but no property and thus they are completely dependent on state support. The high-school I attended in Hungary, that of the Cistercian order, had hundreds of members who were highly qualified teachers, they provided excellent education and tuition was very low. Today these same schools are entirely dependent on state subsidies. What does all this show?
That it is impossible to return to olden times: there are practical obstacles to restitution; it is not simply an ethical problem.

AI: So you think that historians ought to provide their professional judgment regarding problems such as restitutions, lustrations, and legitimacy of political parties? Should we get involved?

I.D.: In the first instance, we are already involved. In Hungary after 1990, the prime minister, the minister of education, some other ministers, and the president of the parliament were all historians. But this was an unusual development, and I don’t believe that in today’s Polish government, for instance, there would be any historians. But I absolutely believe in the obligation of historians – a personal obligation, to be sure – to publicly
express their professional views. I recall a situation back in the late 1960s when a controversy erupted over the question of whether the American Historical Association should condemn the United State’s fighting the war in Vietnam. The Association’s convention in 1968 witnessed heated debates on this issue. At the general assembly of the Association, one historian got up and said that we should be involved – that he, a Holocaust survivor from Germany, saw the absolute necessity to protest the war. Then another person stood up, who also said that he was a Jew and a Holocaust survivor
from Germany, and referring to the same historical period in Europe, he argued that condemning the war against communism would be equal to Prime Minister Chamberlain’s appeasing Hitler in 1938. Different political points of view can be substantiated with the same historical experiences. Although I cannot give any answer as to the collective stances of historians, I certainly know that when I am asked to sign some manifesto, or protest, I try to make my own decision.

AI: What is the role of the US – to be more precise, of the Anglo-Saxon historiography of Central Europe – as an arbiter of Hungarian history and historiography?

I.D.: The impact of US and, in general, Anglo-Saxon historiography on the Central Europeans has been very significant. But while saying this, we must also confess that the US historians are very often East Europeans or of East European origin. Some people in the home country resent this and do not wish to be preached to by their former compatriots or even by “bona fide” Britons and Americans. I also heard a British historian at one of the scholarly meetings denounce refugee historians, suggesting that they could not be unprejudiced analysts of East European history. At another meeting,Western historians offered their assistance to Eastern Europeans in writing new history textbooks; after all, they said, the old textbooks were all Marxist and no longer usable. This led to an uproar of indignation; the East Europeans said: absolutely not! They did not want outsiders to tell them what to teach: they already had had a bad enough experience with the Soviets. The lesson to be learned is that we should cultivate good relations with historians in Eastern Europe, but that we should avoid preaching to them.