Central and East European Seminar Series
Date: Wednesday 31 October 2018
Time: 17:30 - 19:00
Venue: Room 915, School of Social and Political Sciences, Adam Smith Building, Bute Gardens G12 8RT
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Speaker: Professor Aleks Szczerbiak and Professor Andrzej Zybertowicz
Document: Panel Szczerbiak Zybertowicz - Politicising Polish Communist (PDF)

It is impossible to make sense of today’s Polish political scene without understanding contemporary debates about the nature of the country’s communist past and disagreements about its contested transition to democracy. Professor Aleks Szczerbiak’s book, published as part of Routledge’s prestigious British Association for Russian and East European Studies series, examines why disagreements about transitional justice, vetting officials and public authority figures for their links with the former communist security services – a process known as ‘lustration’ – and opening up these services’ extant files for public inspection, became one of the main causes of political divisions in post-1989 Poland. Poland is a fascinating case of how post-communist states have dealt with their past because the lustration and file access issue keeps recurring in the country’s political debates. It does so because these processes are felt by some to be part of the ‘unfinished business’ of the country’s democratic transition and an important means of revealing the hidden mechanisms and informal elite networks which many politicians and commentators have argued distort the working of democracy in the post-communist state.