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  • Communists and Their Victims: The Quest for Justice in the Czech Republic by Roman David
  • Christopher Roederer (bio)
Roman David, Communists and Their Victims: The Quest for Justice in the Czech Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), ISBN 9780812250145, 264 pages.

Communists and Their Victims is the product of over two decades of work on the topic by the author. Although, as the subtitle suggests, the book is an important country study, the work’s ambition and accomplishments go well beyond that. Professor David’s expertise is not merely in his country of origin, but includes Poland, Hungary, and Croatia, as well as South Africa and South Korea. Unlike some of us who dabble in the topic of transitional justice from an armchair, Professor David has lived in, and conducted empirical research in this wide array of countries. This wealth of experience has added to his conceptual approach to the subject and has sharpened his tools of analysis. The result is a well-informed, nuanced, yet coherent, treatment of the subject of transitional/transformative justice. Professor David’s and conclusions are logical, theoretically sound and compelling, in part because of the enormous amount of research that went into the work, and in part because of his ability to analyze and convey his results to the reader.

This work is not a high-level theoretical treatment of what justice requires in times of transition. He does not begin the work with his transformative theory of justice, and he does not use that theory to evaluate the various mechanisms designed to achieve justice in the Czech Republic. It is not a normative theory in that respect. It is a work of social science and not philosophy, so Professor David does not speak much about “justice” in the abstract, but of the measures taken to achieve justice, and the perceptions of his subjects that justice has been achieved.

This is not to say that there is no normative mooring for the project. He makes clear in his introductory chapter that he, like the “vast majority of scholars” in this area, adopts liberal democracy as the background norm of assessment.1 Three [End Page 217] guiding principles inform his normative framework used to assess transitional justice, namely, the principles that:

  • • transitional justice must be linked to its ability to transition to a peaceful liberal democracy;

  • • transitional justice needs to both, address the injustices of the past, and prepare the ground for a stable and just future; and

  • • transitional justice must take historical divisions within society into account, e.g. not only society at large, but victims and perpetrators.

Thus, transitional justice was successful on his account if it: (1) helped victims to overcome the consequences of human rights violations (healing) and to become socially integrated; (2) helped former or current Communist Party members internalize human rights and prevented them from passing on the denial of human rights to their offspring; (3) changed the material situation of the individuals who held different positions in the past regime (being a victim or a communist); and (4) changed their ideological preferences visà-vis the return to the communist regime.2

His theory is a middle range theory that he develops based on the empirical work that is documented and analyzed throughout the book. The introduction and the bulk of the work merely hints at the theory, which only comes with the conclusion. As the placement in the book suggests, his theory is a generalized conclusion that he draws from this empirical work.

The first two chapters set the context for the rest of the book by describing the injustices of the communist past and the mechanisms used to address those injustices in order to secure a more just future. The book’s first chapter is a condensed, but fairly comprehensive, look at the communist period and the injustices that took place there. It takes a nuanced view of how communism took hold in Czechoslovakia, the differences in communism during different periods of the regime, the role of the secret police, and the morally complicated situation of those who were recruited as secret informants on their fellow citizens.3

The second chapter details the numerous...

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