Yan Vuks1; 1 University of North Texas, United States
Discussion
This paper examines the categories of population who became the targets for lustration legislation in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Estonia after the fall of Communism in 1989-1991. The communist bureaucracy and secret service informants became the objects for persecution in new Democratic Eastern Europe. The author analyzes the reasons why these groups were chosen as well as which lustration practices, both formal legal and informal societal, were used to ostracize these people. The paper also discusses how secret service archival information was used to determine the informants and what controversies were associated with such a method.
