This book attempts to accomplish two things. First, it offers a new analytical matrix to capture multiple overlapping dimensions of transitional justice—ways of addressing legacies of past violence. Eva-Clarita Pettai and Vello Pettai present a very complex three-by-four model, which identifies different transitional justice mechanisms along multiple dimensions, such as type of actors (perpetrators or victims), time of justice intervention (transitional or retrospective), and types of transitional justice mechanisms (criminal-judicial, political-administrative, or symbolic-representational). The aim of this matrix is to create a unifying framework to discern patterns of truth and justice across countries in order to facilitate a more thorough comparison and replace the common problem in transitional justice scholarship of analyzing cases and mechanisms in isolation.

The second purpose of the book is to apply this complex matrix to the Baltic states and test the value of the framework in the comparison of transitional justice mechanisms implemented by the three states. This part of the book then provides detailed description of trials, lustration efforts, commemorative practices, and other transitional justice mechanisms that Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania pursued, to a varying degree, since their independence from Soviet rule. The authors conclude with an overview of larger international implications of the Baltic transitional justice experience and a general assessment of the level of commitment maintained by the three states in pursuing justice interventions—Lithuania showing the most sustained interest and Estonia the least.

Where Transitional and Retrospective Justice in the Baltic States is most successful is arguing for a theoretical reconceptualization of the temporal dimension of transitional justice. Instead of subsuming all types of postviolence justice under the concept of “transitional,” which should really be reserved for immediate justice after a political transition, Pettai and Pettai persuasively argue for two additional terms: “retrospective justice,” which deals with violence in the much more distant past (such as contemporary trials for Nazi- or Soviet-era crimes), and “post-transitional justice,” which is really justice about justice, or a post hoc evaluation of earlier transitional or retrospective justice efforts (pp. 23–24). This analytical distinction is useful because too often, transitional justice studies treat these different types of efforts as similar in nature, and evaluate them along similar dimensions, while their political purpose in fact may be quite distinct.

While these theoretical concepts can enrich the transitional justice lexicon and be quite useful for future research, it is in the treatment of Baltic history and its contemporary justice efforts that the book is far more problematic. What mostly plagues the empirical sections are political and historical decontextualization and a frustrating lack of critical analysis of the very phenomena the authors purport to examine.

The book operates within a very specific historical narrative of the atrocities of the twentieth century without being aware of its own contribution to further constructing this narrative. The authors’ fundamental and never seriously questioned premise is that the Nazi and Soviet totalitarianisms represented two sides of the same authoritarian coin; that they produced a “dual occupation” of the Baltic states with comparable levels of mass atrocity, and that similar retrospective justice mechanisms—such as trials for genocide—can be pursued for crimes committed by both regimes.

What frustrates the reader throughout the book is that Pettai and Pettai are well aware of the political nature of choosing “occupation” as the only descriptive of Nazi- and Soviet-era Baltic rule, even though there is much historical evidence for significant local collaboration and indirect rule in all three cases. They readily admit that “however mythologized it may be, there remains a strong sense in the Baltic states of being able to treat the entire Soviet era and regime as an externally inflicted tragedy” (p. 58) They are aware that the atrocity is politically externalized onto the Soviets to avoid discussion of domestic complicity, but they never follow up and critically analyze this essential part of the transitional justice story; just accept it as is.

This choice to acknowledge the political nature of the constructed historical narrative but then just accept is as a social fact is made throughout the book. For example, the authors choose to treat Nazi and Soviet crimes in the same breath, putting the “estimated human costs” of both regimes in a single table (p. 55), and listing such qualitatively and ideologically different crimes as forced deportation, arrests, torture, imprisonment, extrajudicial killing, genocidal extermination of Jews and Roma, forced labor, and counterinsurgency against anti-Soviet partisans together. The consequence of this conscious and highly political effort to retrospectively equalize these different kinds of atrocities is to accept the Baltic (primarily Lithuanian-led) legal construction of 1948–49 Soviet mass deportations in the Baltics as a crime of genocide, which then allows Baltic courts to prosecute Soviet communist apparatchiks for the same type of crime as guards of Nazi concentration camps. Pettai and Pettai acknowledge this politicization but then continue to use the term genocide uncritically, “owing to an understanding that these forced [Soviet] resettlements were ordered and carried out in a way that clearly suggests that they were aimed at harming particular national and ethnic groups” (p. 53). However, any student of human rights can readily notice that international law already has categories for such crimes—crimes against humanity or ethnic cleansing are the obvious choices—and that the use of “genocide” is a political and strategic one.

This hedging and careful stepping around substantive problems in Baltic historical memory is most obvious in respect to the book’s discussion of the Holocaust. Throughout, Pettai and Pettai indicate that there are many “controversies” and “debates” in all three Baltic states about their own complicity in the Holocaust and the continuing denial to address this legacy in a forceful manner. Yet, they blandly state uncritically that most of the retrospective justice in the Baltics was aimed at Soviet crimes and that very little, if anything, was done to deal with local accountability for the Holocaust. In perhaps their most infuriating sentence, they write: “Whether or not Baltic prosecutors could have shown more determination in pursuing criminal justice for Nazi-era crimes cannot be further discussed in this book” (p. 90). Why? How can any credible analysis of transitional and retrospective justice completely sidestep the critical question of political strategy in such a dismissive manner?

Pettai and Pettai also seem reluctant to discuss three additional problems in Baltic justice efforts. The first is the possibility that the exclusive state interest in pursuing justice for Soviet-era crimes serves as “screen memory” to obfuscate the countries’ continuing denial of their complicity in the Holocaust. Second, much of the intensity in exposing Soviet crimes serves contemporary political purposes of constructing new Baltic state identities as originally European and completely detached from Soviet legacies that were external and colonial, and never indigenized. Finally, the focus on Soviet crimes also has the added benefit of justifying some of the discriminatory practices enacted by the newly independent Baltic states against their Russian minorities.

Transitional and Retrospective Justice in the Baltic States would have benefited greatly from a serious critical treatment of these political motivations. By failing to more forcefully challenge the motivation and execution of Baltic transitional justice, Pettai and Pettai end up, even if inadvertently, themselves contributing to a particular narrative of Baltic political history that has significant consequences both for Baltic self-understanding of its place in history and for the field of transitional justice and its ethical obligations to our object of study.