On Thursday, Oct. 30, the Russian human rights group Memorial held a ceremony in front of the former KGB offices on Lubyanskaya Ploshchad to commemorate the Day of Victims of Political Repressions, reading off a list of about 30,000 victims of Joseph Stalin’s purges (this number only represents victims from Moscow in just 1938). Just a day earlier, the Canadian government stripped Helmut Oberlander of his citizenship, preparing to deport the 84-year-old alleged Nazi war criminal for his participation in mobile death squads. Last week, the intrepid Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon announced an investigation into the murders of more than 100,000 people by the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco. Throughout the month of October at the International Criminal Court in the Hague, a historic war crimes trial against the Congolese militia leader Thomas Lubanga stopped and started in fits and now hangs in limbo. Earlier, on Oct. 13, a deeply painful national political furor erupted in the Czech Republic after the magazine Respekt published an article identifying the famous author Milan Kundera as an informer for the brutal Communist secret police (the StB), whose collaboration in 1950 sent the spy Miroslav Dvoracek into torture and prison for 14 years. The common thread uniting these diverse cases, as well as many others, is the ongoing public need in society to adjudicate its own history, with an honest reckoning and acknowledgment of crimes committed by past governments – no matter how distant or fresh in memory. In many countries, especially young democracies, history carries a very heavy burden on the national conscience, and its discussion and interpretation can often become highly politically charged, which is made more difficult in societies where the remnants of the past regime remain active and visible in the current government.