Recently, while scrolling through Central Asian circles on Facebook, I came across a slogan posted on someone’s profile: “The fact that you do not have a criminal record is not your merit, but our failure.”

This quote, which was shared the way one might share an inspirational maxim, was attributed to Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka secret police and one of the principal architects of the Red Terror. Seeing it brought back memories of seeing the same slogan pinned to cabinet doors and taped matter-of-factly above desks in the police stations and security service offices in Kyrgyzstan.

Whether Dzerzhinsky actually said it is doubtful. What is not in doubt is Dzerzhinsky’s governing philosophy: “We represent in ourselves organized terror — this must be said very clearly,” he once said. 

But the historical accuracy of that slogan is somewhat beside the point. What matters is that generations of officials have found it meaningful enough to display decades after the state that produced it ceased to exist.

When the U.S.S.R. collapsed in 1991, the prevailing assumption in Western capitals — and among many citizens of the successor states — was that democratic governance would follow more or less naturally.

The early signs were encouraging. Elections were held and new constitutions were adopted. Market economies, however chaotic, emerged while the symbols of Soviet power were taken down from public squares.

What the optimism of that moment failed to take into account was how durable state institutions built with the Soviet mindset turned out to be. Unpacking that requires a genuine reckoning with the past, no matter how uncomfortable it may be.

Germany’s long, imperfect and ongoing process of confronting the legacy of Nazism is the reference point most often cited precisely because it was exceptional. It established, through law, education and public culture, a broad consensus that the previous system was not merely defeated but illegitimate.

Only a few of the nations that emerged from the U.S.S.R. attempted a comparable process. The Baltic states undertook genuine lustration, opened their KGB archives and built their post-Soviet identities around the........

© The Moscow Times