WI: Trials after the Fall of Communism?

ThePest179

Banned
What if, after communism fell in Eastern Europe, people that had been involved in political repression and human rights violations were put on trial?
 
What if, after communism fell in Eastern Europe, people that had been involved in political repression and human rights violations were put on trial?

Some were, Ceausescu was tried in a kangaroo court and exectued, the leadership of the GDR was tried, some convicted and sentenced to prison.

Others like Wojciech Jaruzelski and Miklos Nemeth worked to end one party rule, so they weren't tried.
 

ThePest179

Banned
Some were, Ceausescu was tried in a kangaroo court and exectued, the leadership of the GDR was tried, some convicted and sentenced to prison.

Others like Wojciech Jaruzelski and Miklos Nemeth worked to end one party rule, so they weren't tried.

Well yes, but I'm talking about more trials than OTL of course, if possible.

Also, bump.
 

Tovarich

Banned
Well yes, but I'm talking about more trials than OTL of course, if possible.

Also, bump.
Domestic criminal trials, or a Nuremburg-style international court?

I don't think the latter would've been a good idea, the West was quite triumphalist enough as it was ("NATO! FUCK YEAH!"), but a good writer could pull off an interesting story there without it quite becoming ASB, I reckon.

Thinking about it, an interesting story could be where such trials have no Western involvement but all the former WP nations hold a collective tribunal - probably with the GDR having to keep out of it! - and this could lead to them retaining links along the lines of the EU.
 
The problem was that the post Communist states were sort of like post 2003 Iraq if you excluded people who had done dodgy things under the previous regime from government you don't have a government or a police or much of anything fairly quickly. I do think it would have been nice if more had been done to punish people but it was probably a good thing for the stability and growth of those countries that they let bygones be bygones.
 
Domestic criminal trials, or a Nuremburg-style international court?

I don't think the latter would've been a good idea, the West was quite triumphalist enough as it was ("NATO! FUCK YEAH!"), but a good writer could pull off an interesting story there without it quite becoming ASB, I reckon.

Thinking about it, an interesting story could be where such trials have no Western involvement but all the former WP nations hold a collective tribunal - probably with the GDR having to keep out of it! - and this could lead to them retaining links along the lines of the EU.

That and the level of dickery didn't rise to nuremburg levels for the WP nations. They mostly kept their military adventurism confined to their own backyard (Hungary and CSSR), and while some of the things the regimes did were heinous, they weren't even close to reaching Stalin levels of atrocity much less Hitler levels, plus they mellowed out a fair bit post Stalin.
 
The problem was that the post Communist states were sort of like post 2003 Iraq if you excluded people who had done dodgy things under the previous regime from government you don't have a government or a police or much of anything fairly quickly. I do think it would have been nice if more had been done to punish people but it was probably a good thing for the stability and growth of those countries that they let bygones be bygones.

Pretty much. After a half century of Communism, you would be extremely hard pressed to find people who didn't participate in some form of the system. If they do exist, they'll be extremely old like Adenauer, or really young and inexperienced.

This is why lustration has been such a drawn out process compared to Nuremberg.
 
That and the level of dickery didn't rise to nuremburg levels for the WP nations. They mostly kept their military adventurism confined to their own backyard (Hungary and CSSR), and while some of the things the regimes did were heinous, they weren't even close to reaching Stalin levels of atrocity much less Hitler levels, plus they mellowed out a fair bit post Stalin.

Still...tens of thousands were killed in Bulgaria after the coup in 1944 and a considerable number died in the Romanian gulag. (Does anyone know how many? I've seen estimates from very high to very low.) And there were the NKVD Special Camps in Germany, where 50,000 died- they were run by the NKVD but many of the staff were German. And according to the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, 20,000 people died from 1944 to 1956 in detention or labor camps. My point is that there were plenty of people involved in the pre-1956 crimes who could have been tried. In 1989, they would have been relatively young- old but not Oskar Groning old.
 
Still...tens of thousands were killed in Bulgaria after the coup in 1944 and a considerable number died in the Romanian gulag. (Does anyone know how many? I've seen estimates from very high to very low.) And there were the NKVD Special Camps in Germany, where 50,000 died- they were run by the NKVD but many of the staff were German. And according to the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, 20,000 people died from 1944 to 1956 in detention or labor camps. My point is that there were plenty of people involved in the pre-1956 crimes who could have been tried. In 1989, they would have been relatively young- old but not Oskar Groning old.

Yes but like others have said, there was a lot of post-Stalin mellowing. The few people left that had directed those kinds of crimes were either dead or old men. As it is, every former Nazi that pops up once in a while tends to get a free pass by public opinion because they're so old and decrepit it would seem inhumane to throw them in prison.
 
Yes but like others have said, there was a lot of post-Stalin mellowing. The few people left that had directed those kinds of crimes were either dead or old men. As it is, every former Nazi that pops up once in a while tends to get a free pass by public opinion because they're so old and decrepit it would seem inhumane to throw them in prison.

This, most communist states were gerontocracies from the start. You'd be hard pressed to find living leaders at the end of communism who had been responsible for the worst Stalinist crimes.
 
This, most communist states were gerontocracies from the start. You'd be hard pressed to find living leaders at the end of communism who had been responsible for the worst Stalinist crimes.

Yeah other than Romania the states had "liberalised" (to a given value of liberal) by 1960. Outside of the DDR and the stasi's crimes, there just wasn't much point in trying people for actions in a fairly normal dictatorship. A few trials might be possible for Hungery, czechoslovakia and what happened in poland in the early 1980's but for the most part people just wanted to put it all behind them.
 
Yeah, other than Romania, hard to find "jailable" people.

Wait, Egon Krenz got jailed, right? What if Honecker gets a dosage of jail as well?
 
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