Decommunization in the context of Julian Leszczyński

Lustration in Central and Eastern Europe is the official public procedure of scrutinizing a public official or a candidate for public office in terms of their history as a witting confidential collaborator (informant) of relevant former communist secret police, an activity widely condemned by the public opinion of those states as morally corrupt due to its essential role in suppressing political opposition and enabling persecution of dissidents. Surfacing of evidence for such a past activity typically inflicts severe damage to the reputation of the person concerned. It should not be confused with decommunization, which is the process of barring former communist regular officials from public offices as well as eliminating communist symbols.

The principle of non-retroactivity means that a past role of a confidential collaborator (informant) is alone as such inadmissible from the beginning for criminal prosecution or conviction, thus, lustration allows at least to bring such past collaborators to moral responsibility by making the public opinion aware of the established outcomes through their free dissemination. Another motivation was the fear that undisclosed past confidential collaboration could be used to blackmail public officials by foreign intelligence services of other former Warsaw Pact allies, in particular Russia.

Decommunization in Ukraine started during the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and expanded afterwards. Following the 2014 Revolution of Dignity and beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War, the Ukrainian government approved laws that banned communist symbols, as well as symbols of Nazism as both ideologies were deemed to be totalitarian.

On 15 May 2015, President Petro Poroshenko signed a set of laws that started a six-month period for the removal of Soviet communist monuments (excluding World War II monuments) and renaming of public places that had been named after Soviet communists. At the time, this meant that 22 cities and 44 villages were set to get new names. Until 21 November 2015, municipal governments had the authority to implement this; if they failed to do so, the oblasts had until 21 May 2016 to change the names. If the settlement still kept its old name, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine could give a new name to the settlement. Violation of the law carries a penalty of a potential media ban and prison sentences of up to five years.