While dissident Vladimir Bukovsky was in prison in the mid-1970s, he and his cellmates had a discussion: Would they jail the Communists if the tables ever turned?
"Oddly enough, only one of us was in favor of prosecution in a criminal sense," Bukovsky recalls."The rest agreed that there must be a trial, but it shouldn't be a criminal trial. . . . It should be a trial which would allow us to present the evidence to the public at large and to condemn the activity of the system, rather than people," he says.
Fifteen years and a revolution later, Bukovsky finally has what he wanted. Russia's Constitutional Court is trying the Communist Party - but not its individual members.
The court adjourned Monday, probably for weeks, to consider documents and testimony presented since July 7 by lawyers in the case.
The panel of 13 judges must decide sometime this fall whether the party was constitutional and whether to lift a ban on it imposed by President Boris Yeltsin after the attempted hard-line coup in August 1991.
Should not someone go to jail for all the killings, repression and corruption of the Communist era?
In Romania, former dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was executed after a summary trial. In Bulgaria, Communist-era strongman Todor Zhivkov now is in the dock.
East Germany's Erich Honecker was sent home last week to face manslaughter charges after taking refuge for more than a year at Chile's embassy in Moscow.
Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia have avoided trials.
"We are all guilty," Vaclav Havel, the former president of Czechoslovakia, said after his nation's Velvet Revolution, even though he, like Bukovsky, was among the jailed rather than the jailers in the Communist era.
So far, Russia has not prosecuted any of its former rulers. Fourteen former senior officials are awaiting trial, but only for their role in the August coup, not for the party's crimes.
Yeltsin's government also is holding Mikhail Gorbachev's feet to the fire by investigating the alleged disappearance of billions of dollars in party funds. But Yeltsin's top lawyer, Sergei Shakhrai, said he expects no prosecutions.