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The main purpose of this article is to assess the relationship between transitional justice and democratization in post-communist Eastern Europe since the fall of communism in 1989. The analysis is focused on the role of lustration and the opening of communist secret police files in encouraging accountability and promoting the rule of law. An overview of these developments in the countries of the region – including Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia – emphasizes the different approaches undertaken in dealing with the abuses and crimes committed by previous non-democratic governments. These differences are examined in relationship to three interrelated variables: (1) the exit mode from communism; (2) the nature of the communist regime; and (3) the politics of the present. The second part of the article provides an extensive analysis of the Romanian case, whose specificity lies in its violent and abrupt exit from communism. The unfinished reckoning with the past in Romania leads us to two main conclusions. First, the nature of communist elites and the opposition to them are of equal importance in understanding how the politics of the present shapes the way in which the past is addressed. Second, in the absence of any real possible reconciliation through public exposure – at least symbolically – of those involved in repression, delayed transitional justice is ineffective.

The outburst of the Polish insurrection and its evolution attracted the attention of the European Powers, due to the international political context in which it started, that of the liberal-bourgeois revolutions in France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and of the implications that were expected to occur due to power balance on the continent and in the Eastern Question. Russia's position in the political systems mentioned above depended on how the Polish Question would be solved. By subordinating all the Kingdom of Poland, whose political individuality, in the Russian political and institutional system, in which the decisions of the "Final Act" of the Peace Congress in Vienna (June 9th 1815) placed it, was about to be abolished by the Tsar, opened to the Russian Empire the path towards the consolidation of its positions in the Baltic region, strategically, political an economical, thus upsetting the other Powers in the European political system, on one hand. And secondly, because it would have relieved it of the necessity to divide its forces to oversee the evolution of the embarrassing Polish Question and would have been capable to focus its attention on a solution to the other problem, the Eastern one. This perspective was likely to happen, especially in the conditions of the peace Treaty that Russia had imposed to Turkey, at Adrianople, on September 14th 1829, which ensured the latter's "passivity" towards the Oriental policy of its victor.
These perspectives affected, in particular, Great Britain and France, the secular rivals of Russia in that area, so they tried, using only diplomatic means because of the very complicated international situation at the beginning of the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, to determine Russia to adopt a more conciliatory attitude towards the Polish insurgents.
The rivalries that aggravated the Franco-British relations, especially in Western Europe, prevented the two Powers to adopt a unitary position towards Russia, a fact that allowed the latter to dictate the law in the Kingdom of Poland.
A position, in some way singular, towards the Polish Question was adopted by another state, with direct interests in the Baltic sea area and with more specific ones in the Eastern Question. It is the United Kingdom of Sweden and Norway, created in the letter and the spirit of the Swedish-Norwegian Convention from Moss, on August 14th 1814.
Sweden's internal and external political circumstances in which, in 1810, the famous marshal of Napoleon I, Jean Baptiste Sebastien Bernadotte, prince of Pontecorvo, was proclaimed crown prince under the name Karl Johan, King Karl XIV Johan, from 1818, as the creation of the Swedish-Norwegian personal Union, determined the Swedish-Norwegian diplomacy favor the Russian interests in the Polish Question as well as in the Eastern Question. In the Polish Question, the one under our analysis, this was also because the insurrection of November 1830 started in the international conditions mentioned above and due to the fact that the liberal internal opposition to the conservative and absolutist monarchical policy of King Karl XIV Johan was becoming more active and could have constituted a reason for the Norwegians to evade the personal Union, which they did not favor and against which they fought, first through arms then by institutional means.
The forms in which Great Britain, France and Sweden took position in regard to the reprisal of the Polish insurrection of November 1830, very well documented by the diplomatic reports of the British diplomats in St. Petersburg and of the Swedish ones, accredited in Petersburg and in London, which we had the opportunity to consult in the funds of manuscripts of British Library, in London, and those of the National Archives of Sweden, in Stockholm, constitute, in our opinion, a contribution to the knowledge of the history of European diplomacy, on one hand, and to the research of the international relations in the first half of the nineteenth century, on another. This is the reason why we intend to approach them in this study.
All the documents selected from Sveriges Riksarkivet, in Stockholm and cited in these pages are included in the volume X, part I, of the Collection "Europe and the Porte", which is still in manuscript, for this reason we indicated the archive quotations.

Similarly to the Polish insurrection of November 1830, the Lithuanian one, occurring in March 1831, retained the attention of the Swedish diplomacy from the very beginning. This was made possible, in the first place, by the fact that the events were connected by a strong link of causality, in the sense that they aimed at severing Poland and Lithuania from the political-institutional system of the Russian Empire and at reconstituting the old one, i.e. the Polish-Lithuanian Union. But the latter's victory would have first resulted in the radical upheaval of the ratio of forces in North-Eastern Europe, which could have also affected the Swedish-Norwegian political-institutional system, since it was assumed that the Norwegians would not have spared any time in following the Lithuanian and Polish example by denouncing the personal union with Sweden. Moreover, the revolutionary wave sweeping over Europe in 1830 was not one to avoid Sweden. Unlike other areas, the Swedes that opposed King Karol XIV Jan's government went no further than to criticise it, despite the fact that both the criticism and the programme of the opposition kept increasing in boldness. The Swedish diplomacy therefore approached the issue of the Polish and Lithuanian insurrections from the same perspective, taking particular care to observe their evolution, placing itself in a position of reserveless condemnation of such behaviour. The documents transcribed in the following pages are the diplomatic reports of N. Fr. Palmstjerna, the chargé d'affaires of Sweden in Petersburg, and were selected from the Sveriges Riksarkivet, Kabinettet/UD Huvudarkivet, E2D, 702, the Petersburg fund, 1821, Jan.-iuni. They sometimes contain very detailed information pertaining to the early phase of the Lithuanian insurrection. By introducing them to the academic circuit, we express our hope that they will contribute to the expansion of the research horizon of the history of North-Eastern Europe from the first half of the 19th century.

This article examines the dynamic relationship between the two major dimensions of memory and justice in the context of post-communist countries: truth-telling and retroactive justice. This interdependent and uneasy relationship is illustrated by recent attempts at constructing a new historical narrative of the communist past in Romania in the wake of the de-secretization of the files of both the Communist Party and the communist secret police (Securitate). A systematic analysis of the activity of institutions that have been directly involved in research and public education about the recent past – the National Archives, the National Council for the Study of Securitate's Archives, and the Institute for the Investigation of Crimes of Communism – is undertaken. The work of these three institutional actors shows a direct relationship between truth-telling in its various forms (access to archives, opening the files and exhumations) and any subsequent retroactive justice and restitution. The main argument of the paper is that while deep-seated dichotomies between former communist and anti-communists in addressing the past still persist, a more nuanced way of seeing the regime that explores the ambiguous line that divides outright repression from cooptation is emerging.

The documents selected by the editor from the National Archives of Sweden offer information reflecting the preoccupation of the Swedish diplomacy to be well informed with regard to the Eastern Question developments. In 1813 such information was necessary in order to guide the Swedish government's policy in reaching its essential goal, the integration of Norway in the Swedish political system. In order to have a broader perspective on the international events and circumstances of the period marking the end of the Napoleonean Empire is necessary that these documents shall be corroborated with other documentary sources, such as, for instance, the ones included in the seventh volume of the foreign policy documents collection entitled "Europe and the Porte. New Documents on the Eastern Question". Résumé: Les documents sélectés par l'éditeur des Archives Nationales de la Suède offrent des informations qui reflètent la préoccupation de la diplomatie suédoise d'être bien informée sur le cours du développement de la question orientale. Pendant l'année 1813 ces informations ont été nécessaires pour l'orientation de la politique du Cabinet de Stockholm en vue d'accomplir son but essentiel d'alors, c'est-à-dire l'intégration de la Norvège dans le système politique suédois. Mais pour avoir une perspective plus large sur les événements et les circonstances politiques internationales de la période qui a marqué la fin de l'Empire Napoléonien il est nécessaire que ces documents soient corroborés avec d'autre sources documentaires, comme par exemple celles incorporées dans le tome VII de la Collection de documents extérieurs intitulée "Europe and the Porte. New Documents on the Eastern Question".

The purpose of this article is to clarify the relationship between forms of political legitimacy employed by communist regimes in East and Central Europe and subsequent models of revolutionary change in 1989. The conceptual basis of the analysis lies in Max Weber's theoretical framework of legitimacy. The four cases selected for comparison are Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Romania. The attempts of de-Stalinization and reformation of these party-state regimes through the introduction of paternalistic and also more goal-oriented measures could not prevent their disintegration in the 1980s and their subsequent collapse in 1989. But, I argue, it was the withdrawal of ideological support by elites that ultimately brought communism to an end. The differences in revolutionary scenarios and transitions to democracy in the four cases indicate the importance of a shift in both rulers and masses towards interest in dialogue and compromise. Hungary and Poland represent the clearest scenarios in which communist parties acted as agents of regime change in a rational-legal direction. The Bulgarian case stands as an intermediary case between these two and Romania. Finally, Romania represents an extreme case of violent revolution and the overthrow of a traditionalist and sultanistic regime and illustrates the difficulties following a complete collapse of political authority.

The relationship between the Saxons and the German Balts has been already investigated, but the available archival material, however, allows me to deepen the problem of cultural relations between the two German minorities. This relationship has taken both an institutional and a personal form. The first form involved cooperation between clubs, societies and editors of publications, while the second consisted of direct contact between cultured people. The two kinds of cooperation have created in the 1920s a network of mental relations based on the solidarity of all Germans living abroad. A special contribution in the establishment of these relations was brought forth by the Cultural Office of the Germans in Greater Romania, founded in 1922 in Sibiu by Richard Csaki, and by the "Ostland" magazine, which was also published in Sibiu starting with 1926. Csaki and others worked in the field of cultural policy together with representatives of the German Balts such as Ewal Ammende, Werner Hasselblatt, Axel de Vries or Max von Ravick. This article investigates these bonds as part of the wider frame of German cultural networks operating in-between the Baltic and the Black sea.