A fine article in Wired describes the huge job now under way to piece together millions of shreds of documents which the Stasi secret police feverishly ripped up as East Germany’s peculiarly grubby and vicious form of Communism abruptly ended.

Of course in the few hours they had available the Stasi would have tried to destroy the worst (ie most incriminating) archive material first, so this mammoth effort is worthwhile for the light it casts on the sheer loathsomeness of communist rule in that part of Europe.

But it is laborious work. Even with high-tech help it will continue for many years to come.

A lot of Polish politics (and not only Polish) is about how Europe comes to terms with the communist past.

As soon as the Berlin Wall came down, those who had benefited from or were especially cruel players in the former communist regimes across Europe vigorously urged ‘reconciliation’ and the need to ‘move on’ and ‘build a new society’. Not because they believed in any of that. But because they had hit a bad patch and needed time to regroup.  

Thus the more that public attention was steered towards the future and away from revealing and accounting for the past, the better the communist/KGB elite’s chances of tip-toeing away from their countless crimes. Not merely unpunished – maybe even as some sort of heroes. 

This thought – that when communism was ending the emphasis should be on avoiding divisions, not on ‘witch-hunts’ – was remarkably seductive in Western circles too. Hence when Communist Party rule crashed in Russia we saw the failure of Western governments to insist that the revolting Lenin object in Red Square be removed from its place of honour .

I was part of the policy chain in London in the frantic months in 1991 when all that was happening. I can not explain now why the British Government did not press this vital symbolic demand. There must have been an argument that ‘Yeltsin needs time to consolidate his democratic authority, so pushing this now is not a priority, plus it may give his demoralised opponents a new chance to mobilise against him’.

Well, OK.

On the other hand, by far the best time to give one’s deadly enemy the thrashing he so richly deserves is when he is weak and on the ground. Yet at this supreme moment in world history … we pulled our punches.

And Lenin is still there, a malignant Mordor-like phenomenon darkening the European political space. Indeed, Russian communists smirk that the Mausoleum is part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Really Perfect Crime is not defined by the fact that no-one knows who did it. 

Instead it is to commit a truly atrocious deed and then arrange things so that we all know exactly who did it – but prefer to look away from the victim, to offer the criminal a drink, and chatter excitedly about ‘moving on’.