Social Rehabilitations, Restorations and Their Varieties

Abstract

Researchers of revolutions are challenged to distinguish social revolutions from related, intersecting but nevertheless different phenomena: reforms, revolts, riots, rebellions, strikes, social movements and civil war. Questions of definition are discussed in great detail in classical works on the sociology of revolutions, listed at the start of the previous chapter. As a result, there is a modicum of established vocabulary in the research on revolutions, even if revolution itself remains an essentially contested concept, and there is no universally accepted definition of revolution.

Researchers of revolutions are challenged to distinguish social revolutions from related, intersecting but nevertheless different phenomena: reforms, revolts, riots, rebellions, strikes, social movements and civil war. Questions of definition are discussed in great detail in classical works on the sociology of revolutions, listed at the start of the previous chapter. As a result, there is a modicum of established vocabulary in the research on revolutions, even if revolution itself remains an essentially contested concept, and there is no universally accepted definition of revolution.

Authors writing about restorations use several terms that are related in their meaning: revival, reconstruction, reconstitution, resurrection, regeneration, renaissance, renewal, renovation, repair, restitution, reestablishment, etc. Are these terms synonymous or do they denote different phenomena? Answering this question, we find ourselves in a more difficult situation only because there has been no intense theoretical engagement with the idea of restoration.

Searches of the keyword ‘restoration(s)’ in Google Scholar, Clarivate Analytics and Scopus display the largest numbers of publications in the twin fields of cultural heritage management and natural heritage management. Understandably, an outsider would struggle to master this literature. However, in these fields, there is a kind of established or shared wisdom on what restoration is and what it is not. This wisdom is summarised in charters and primers, promulgated by national and international organisations (Society for Ecological Restoration (SER); the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM) and others) of experts in ecological and/or cultural heritage conservation after prolonged discussions. They provide institutionally codified definitions of restoration, delimiting it from kindred albeit different phenomena. Knowledge of these discussions may protect fledgling research on social restorations from pitfalls or help researchers understand the common basic dilemmas when thinking about restorations of all kinds.

The community of experts in cultural heritage management is divided into the conservationists, who only approve of the protection from further decay of surviving damaged cultural artefacts or their remains, and the restorationists, who allow for their restoration, which means the removal of later additions or the insertion of missing elements. These changes are conceived as removals of damage to increase the value of the artefact. Paramount consideration in restoration is placed upon historical fidelity, which is the correspondence or closeness to the original before it was damaged by natural forces or human (intentional or unintentional) vandalism (Conti and Glanville 2007; Jokilehto 1999).

According to the still dominant view, inscribed in the Venice Charter adopted in 1964 by the Second International Congress of Architects and Specialists of Historic Buildings in Venice, the authenticity of restoration depends on the share of original parts (ICOMOS 1964). ‘Approximately it can be stated that restored object should preserve no less than 60% authentics, so additions in the memorial object could make up to 40% or less’ (Glemža 2002: 118). If the restored artefact includes no original parts, it is only a reconstruction, copy, simulacre or a fake, despite the similarity of its appearance or structure to that of the original.

The Venice Charter view strongly resonates with Kann’s view that restoration of the original social system is not possible without the participation of survivors from the original social system. He even claimed that after the passing of one generation (35–40 years), restoration would no longer be possible. Kann’s claim is contradicted by the actual success of the Baltic restorations, as well as by some of his own case studies (see Chap. 1). However, Kann’s basic insight is sound: with no survivors from original system A, system C, affirming its continuity with this system despite its break by intermediate system B, cannot qualify as an authentic restoration of A. Demographic continuity, which implies the presence of a sufficiently large share of survivors from A at the moment of restoration, is the most important feature of real restorations, distinguishing them from similar but nevertheless different processes of social change. For this reason, restoration of the State of Israel in 1948 was not a real or authentic restoration, but that of the Baltic states in 1990–1991 was because the populations of these countries still included many surviving citizens of the Baltic states that were made de facto extinct in 1940.

Now there are two problems to consider. One has to do with terminology: how should systems that claim continuity of a prerevolutionary system but have no or too few survivors from it be designated? The other is substantive: what is the threshold value of the minimal share of survivors from A for C to qualify as a real restoration of A? Concerning the first question, one option would be to borrow terms from cultural heritage management and designate the event of 14 May 1948 in Tel Aviv as the ‘reconstruction’ of the Israeli state but call the events of 1990–1991 in the Baltic countries ‘restorations’ of the Baltic states.

However, in the English language, ‘reconstruction’ has no connotation of an orientation to the past. The act of demolishing a building in order to build a completely new structure without the slightest regard for historical fidelity to the antecedent buildings at the same place is as good a reconstruction as erecting an exact copy of the building that used to stand at this place.¹ Therefore, I prefer the terminological distinction between two kinds of restoration, proposed and elaborated by Robert Elliot (1997): token restorations and type restorations. The type–token distinction was classically formulated by the great American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, referring to the difference between naming a class (type) of objects and naming the individual instances (tokens) of that class (e.g. see Wetzel 2008). According to Peirce, the sequence A A A is that of three tokens of the same type (capital letter A). Token restoration ‘uses a past stage of an object as the model or template for shaping a later stage of that same object’ (Elliot 1997: 101). So this meaning of ‘token’ has nothing to do with the colloquial sense of ‘token’, connoting ‘superficial’ or even ‘fake’.

Token restoration involves continuity between earlier (past) and later stages of a given object and is concerned with its individuality and uniqueness. This kind of ‘restoration implies that some actual object, which has fallen into disrepair, or which has been damaged or degraded, although not destroyed, is brought back to a condition that is much closer to its original condition’ (Elliot 1997: 101). To provide an elementary example, if I write A on the board, erase it and write it again, I perform a type restoration of A. If instead of completely erasing A, I am just damaging it by erasing its ‘legs’ below the plank inside (and so transforming it into Δ) and then reattaching its two missing parts (to get A again), I perform a token restoration of A.

Token restoration is what experts in cultural heritage management call restoration as such, while type restoration is what they call reconstruction. ‘Type-restoring occurs where some particular object has been destroyed or so degraded that it cannot be token-restored. Type-restoring involves the recreation of a type of object previously instantiated through the creation of a particular object exemplifying the same type’ (Elliot 1997: 102). Using this terminology, I will describe restoration of the State of Israel in 1948 (as well as that of the Georgian or Sakartvelo state in 1990–1991) as type restoration. However, regarding the Baltic states, I will insist that they were token restored.

Elliot did distinguish token and type restoration as a contribution to the ongoing discussion in natural heritage management, which closely corresponds to that between conservationists and restorationists in the cultural heritage industry. Ecological conservationists are all for the conservation of still-surviving natural heritage (especially of its ‘wild’ parts) and reject the restoration of original ecosystems (forests, lakes, wetlands) devastated and degraded by human activities (deforestation, mining, pollution) as both undesirable and impossible.

Some of them argue that the very idea of human restoration of a natural ecosystem is an oxymoron because the concept of a natural ecosystem implies that it emerged without human intervention. Therefore, a restored ecological system can only be considered a human artefact, pretending to be a natural ecosystem. Thus, restorations can only be fakes, simulacres or ‘big lies’, as far as original natural ecosystems are concerned (Katz 1992). This is also the point of Elliot’s argument, who points out that almost all ecological restorations are type restorations and are thus not authentic.

Restorationists disagree, pointing to many cases of reputedly successful ecological restorations (e.g. the Everglades ecosystem in South Florida, in the United States). The Society of Ecological Restoration (SER) is an international association of experts and activists of ecological restoration. For the purposes of my research, the most interesting area of the SER’s activities is the codification of the basic concepts and principles of ecological restoration. The first was The SER Primer on Ecological Restoration, published in 2002 and updated in 2004 as the SER International Primer on Ecological Restoration (SER 2004). They were commented or elaborated in Clewell et al. (2005) and Keenleyside (2012). The most recent texts of this kind are the SER’s Code of Ethics (SER 2013) and two editions (2016 and 2019) of the International Principles and Standards for the Practice of Ecological Restoration (SER 2019), approved by the SER Science and Policy Committee and the SER Board of Directors. They reflect the state of the art in the field, where the most influential works include Allison and Murphy (2017), Van Andel and Aronson (2012) and Clewell and Aronson (2013).

These codifications contain many instructive distinctions. Of paramount interest is the distinction between ecological rehabilitation and ecological restoration. Ecological rehabilitation is just the improvement of a degraded ecological system by increasing its species diversity, structural complexity and productivity. Rehabilitation may lead to the creation of an ecosystem (e.g. a lake), which is a different kind of system compared to the original (e.g. a forest) but which is nevertheless superior compared to the degraded ecosystem (e.g. an abandoned quarry which emerged after deforestation and mining until the fossilised resources were depleted).

Ecological restoration is a variety of rehabilitation that aims to recreate the original ecosystem (e.g. a forest after deforestation or fire). Of course, it would be preposterous to demand that the restored forest should include some surviving trees from the original forest or consist of direct descendants of plants that grew in the original forest (e.g. by collecting the seeds of individual trees before cutting them down and preserving them until after deforestation). In this sense, almost all ecological restorations are type restorations. According to SER manuals, rehabilitation culminates in restoration if the new forest has a similar composition of plant and animal species. If this is the case, the lack of continuity (except for location) with the original forest does not detract from the historical fidelity of ecological restoration.

With proper modifications, the distinction between rehabilitation and restoration can be applied in the study of post-communist social transformations. Economic reforms called ‘market transition’ (including external and internal liberalisation, macroeconomic stabilisation and privatisation) were implemented as means of a capitalist rehabilitation of the economies of communist countries that had been in stagnation under the state socialist system since the 1970s. Political liberalisation and democratisation, including breaking the Communist Party monopoly over political power, constitutional reforms and the introduction of free and competitive elections paved the way for a democratic rehabilitation of their political systems.

Rehabilitations (both capitalist and democratic, or only capitalist—in the countries where authoritarian state socialism was succeeded by authoritarian capitalism) took place in all former communist countries. However, in some of them (the former Central Asian republics of the USSR), there was no capitalism before state socialism, and only in a few of the former communist countries were there democratic regimes at some time before the communist takeovers. As there were no attempts to revert from state socialism to feudalism or a tributary mode of production (Haldon 1994; Amin 2011),4F in these countries there were only capitalist or democratic social rehabilitations.

Differently from cultural artefacts (but similarly to social systems), which can only decay until their next restoration, ecosystems are complex dynamic systems that develop and evolve, going through stages (called ecological succession) that are characteristic for each specific type of ecological system and leading to its mature state. The aim of ecological restoration is not to recreate the ecosystem as it had been just before its degradation but only to return the degraded system to its historical trajectory of change. This aim is inscribed in one of the first definitions of ecological restoration: ‘restoration attempts to return an ecosystem to its historic trajectory. Historic conditions are therefore [the] starting point for restoration design. The restored ecosystem will not necessarily recover its former state, since contemporary constraints and conditions may cause it to develop along an altered trajectory’ (SER 2004: 1).

In this context, the concepts of reference system, reference model and reference site, used in the SER 2019 manual, are of utmost interest. A ‘reference ecosystem’ is the designation of what Kann called the ‘original system’. A ‘reference model’ refers to the model ‘that indicates the expected condition that the restoration site would have been in had it not been degraded (with respect to flora, fauna and other biota, abiotic elements, functions, processes, and successional states). This condition is not the historic condition, but rather reflects background and predicted changes in environmental conditions’ (SER 2019: 82). Thus, it is not the ‘reference ecosystem’ but the ‘reference model’ that is the benchmark for the success of ecological restoration projects. Reference sites refer to ecosystems that are used (in addition to the historical reference system) as benchmarks constructing the reference model.

These concepts help to rebut the caricaturing of social restorations (e.g. Bauman 2017) as retrospective utopias (or ‘retrotopias’), longing for the ‘impossible return of the past’ and neglecting the irreversibility of socio-historical change and the dynamic world historical context. The point behind the distinction between ‘reference system’ and ‘reference model’ is that to succeed, ecological and social restoration projects must take into account the irreversible changes in the broader environment that took place between the collapse of the reference system and the onset of restoration, as well as changes in the environment that will take place during the realisation of a restoration project.

Therefore, the reference model (or model of a restored ecosystem) does not depict the historical or original system before its degradation, but the ecosystem that would have evolved out of the historical reference system, had it not degraded, but would have moved along its counterfactual normal trajectory. This means that the reference model should be grounded in explicit or implicit or retrospective scenarios (see Norkus 2016, 2018), describing alternative counterfactual pathways of development of the reference system had it not suffered damage.

The concept of a reference site accounts for how the construction of a reference model can avoid becoming just an expression of fantasy and wishful thinking. This is ‘an extant intact site that has attributes and a successional phase similar to the restoration project site and that is used to inform the reference model. Ideally the reference model would include information from multiple reference sites’ (SER 2019: 82). In fact, it is not impossible to provide plausible counterfactual retrodiction for how a freshwater lake, which was damaged by 30 years of industrial pollution since the construction of a cellulose plant on its shores, would have looked like after 30 years had there been no pollution. The basis for this kind of counterfactual retrodiction provides us with knowledge on how similar lakes with no exposure to industrial pollution changed during a period of similar duration.

The relevance of these distinctions for theorising social macro-restorations should be apparent by now, helping us to understand the actual aims of the real proponents of most social macro-restorations. The aim of the most influential politicians in the restoration camp of France after 1815 (including King Louis XVIII) was not to take the country back to 1789, reversing all the changes that happened in 1789–1815, but rather to make France as similar as possible to what it would have been like by 1815, if revolution would have been avoided, allowing France to develop along its prerevolutionary trajectory, perceived by mainstream restorers as ‘natural’, ‘historic’ or ‘normal’. In other words, their reference model was not identical to historical France before 1789, yet also reflected their beliefs about inevitable changes in the counterfactual non-revolutionary France of 1789–1814.

These beliefs were mainly informed by the observation of England (which provided asylum for Louis XVIII and many French ‘white émigrés’), which for them served as a ‘reference site’ for supposedly ‘normal’ or ‘historic’ development (Bigand 2010; Cubitt 2007; Mellon 1958). The acceptance of parliamentary representation in the 1814 Charter instead of reversal to absolute monarchy was based on the implicit concession that a similar institution should have emerged by 1814 if the course of the history of France would not be disturbed and (temporarily) derailed from its ‘historic’ trajectory by the crime or catastrophe of revolution. Differently from restorers of damaged buildings or artworks, the architects of social restorations design an improved version of damaged institutions.

In the Baltic restorations (the same applies to other post-communist restorations), the state of Baltic societies in 1940 or 1934 (there were divisions in the restorationist camp regarding the exact status quo date) was the reference system in the minds of most participants of the independence restoration movement. However, very few (if any) proponents of the restoration of independence included all the specific features of the economic and political systems of the interwar period in the restoration reference model, or their vision of a desirable future. Had this been the case, the governments of the Baltic countries during the period of extraordinary transitional politics in 1989–1995 would have pursued re-agrarianisation and de-urbanisation policies and reduction of the welfare state to its pre-1940 scale. In fact, policies such as these were not even considered, because their knowledge (rather fragmentary, selective and idealising) of pre-1940 conditions was only one source for the reference model for restoration of independent states (Tamm 2016).

Another source of ideas shaping this model were ideas (not always clear or coherent) about what these countries had lost during 50 years of forced ‘straying off’ from their natural historic trajectories of development. These ideas were suggested by taking small, advanced Western countries (mainly Nordic—Finland, Denmark and Sweden) as of 1990 as reference sites for inferences about what the Baltic countries would have been like by this time had there been no Soviet occupation and externally imposed state socialist development. ‘For Baltic Popular Front activists, who generally painted their inter-war years in bright colours, it was obvious that the conditions of the post-war republics would have been much better, comparable to Nordic development, if history had been more favourably disposed to the Baltic area’ (Karlsson 2002: 182). Therefore, the Baltic restorations (like most others) were not only about the recovery of their lost past (before 1940) but also about the recovery of their lost past futures (in 1940–1990). With a reference model of this kind, the new power elites could be and were very selective about the legacies of the intermediate Soviet system.

They accepted those parts that were perceived as generically modern (shared by both capitalist and state socialist modern societies) and rejected those which were perceived as alien impositions, which had to be replaced by local original survivals or by borrowing from reference sites. As a result, the land property rights regime, inherited from Soviet times, together with collective farms, was radically dismantled, with the restitution of property rights to previous owners as of June 1940 or their legitimate heirs. However, the restored states did not dismantle their inherited Soviet welfare state institutions (like the pension or education systems) but reformed them, adapting to capitalist market economy needs and conditions. The assumption was that similar institutions (only much better) would have emerged anyway, had ‘historic’ development not have been derailed by Soviet occupation. Similar attempted recoveries of past futures lost in 1945–1989 or 1948–1989 took place also in other post-communist transformations in countries with a record of capitalism or democracy before their socialist revolutions.

The constitutional doctrines of the restored Baltic states assert their identity to their interwar-era namesakes. They define the de facto extinctions of the Baltic states in 1940–1990 as mere occupations, differing from that of Norway or the Netherlands by Nazi Germany in 1940–1945 only in terms of duration. The practical implications of this doctrine continue in the form of the denial of citizenship rights to immigrants into Estonia and Latvia from other Soviet republics and claims upon the Russian Federation as the continuator state of the occupant power (the Soviet Union) to return border territories that were detached in 1944–1945 and to pay reparations for damages incurred under occupation (see Part II).

Instead of considering the doctrine of the continuity of the Baltic states as legal fiction, I prefer to consider it as an expression of a basic sociological fact about the post-communist Baltic countries. Under this approach, the conceptualisation of restorations in the sociology of restorations should assume real continuity and identity of the Baltic states over time, despite the 50 years of foreign occupation and change in their economies and societies during this period. To quip, the sociological reality of the Baltic restorations, which implies continuity and identity between the interwar and contemporary Baltic states, is of similar importance in the sociology of restorations as is belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ in the Christian faith. This faith promises universal bodily resurrection, and the warrant that this promise will become truth is the belief that Jesus did resurrect as a human.

That’s why the analysis of these cases can provide the solution to the second problem, related to distinction between two varieties (token and type) of restoration. This is the problem of a suitable threshold value of the minimal share of survivors from A (original system) for C (restored system) to qualify as a real restoration of A. This problem is visualised in Fig. 3.1 containing Venn diagrams representing the relation between the population of original system A at the moment of its destruction and the population of restored system C at the moment of its restoration.

Fig. 3.1

Relation between survivors from original system A and the population of restored system C in token and type restoration. Author’s own production

When the intermediate system endures less than one generation, survivors from the original system (represented by the intersection of populations of the original and restored systems) may still make up a considerable part of the population of the restored system. All the key actors of the French restoration in 1815 were socialised under the Ancien Régime, so restoration was performed by the survivors of this regime. Napoleon (1769–1821), Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754–1838), Joseph Fouché (1759–1820), Alexander I of Russia (1777–1825), Arthur Wellesley first Duke of Wellington (1769–1815), Klemens Metternich (1773–1859), Robert Stewart (Viscount Castlereagh, 1769–1822), Francis I of Austria (1768–1835) and Frederick William III of Prussia (1770–1840) (with only a partial exception for Metternich, who was a 16-year-old in 1789)—all the above were adult men by the time of the outbreak of the revolution, with 47.4 being the mean age of this small sample (Ballard 2012).

The same applies to both Bourbon kings of Restoration France—Louis XVIII (1814–1824) and Charles X (1824–1830), who were known as the Count of Provence (1755–1824) and the Count of Artois (1757–1836) before taking their crowns, were younger brothers of the ill-fated Louis XVI (1754–1793, reigned in 1774–1792). Actually, both of them together with their closest entourage did survive the revolution and post-revolutionary times in emigration, returning in the wagons of the victorious armies of the sixth anti-French coalitions, as the Bonapartist propaganda claimed in 1814–1815. With life expectancy at birth in France by 1816 close to 40 years, its 14.6 million male population in 1815 included 35.9% of survivors from prerevolutionary times who were at least 10 years old in 1790 and 29.7% who were aged 15 or older in this year. In the 15.7 million female population in 1815 (France at its 1861 borders), the shares of survivors aged at least 35 and 40 from the times before 1790 were 30.4% and 37.0% respectively. Counting all males born before 1790, who were at least 15 years old in 1815, their share in the total male population was 49.6%, while in the female population of France in 1815, the share of their peers was 51.7% (Vallin and Meslé 2001).

Very differently, according to HMD (2022), in the population of Russia proper by 1992, only 1–2% of witnesses of the Russian Revolution were still alive, counting as such persons who were at least 10 years old (in 1917; no adult participants were alive in 1992). Even if we take the most permissive count, there was no noticeable overlap between the populations of prerevolutionary and post-socialist Russia. In the East European countries, the situation was significantly different. The share of the population born before 1948 made up nearly one third of the total population, with more than 20% receiving basic socialisation (complete by the age of 10; see Gaitán 2009) before the socialist revolution. This included most of the first heads of states and governments under post-communism, e.g. Tadeusz Mazowiecki (1927–2013), Ion Iliescu (b. 1930), József Antall (1932–1993), Árpád Göncz (1922–2015), Vytautas Landsbergis (b. 1932), Algirdas Brazauskas (1932–2010), Waclav Havel (1936–2011) and Zhelyu Zhelev (1935–2015) (Roszkowski and Kofman 2008).

However, how much overlap is necessary for the restoration of an extinct state, political regime or economic system to still be possible? Answering this question, the Baltic states should be considered as paradigmatic cases, simply because among all the cases of post-communist transformations, they have the least disputable status of being successful restorations, although demographic continuity between the restored and original system was rather tenuous in 1989–1991. Rather than posing a problem, the Baltic cases provide clues for how to solve the issues of minimal threshold values or having a critical mass of survivors.

As it was already pointed out in the Introduction, the shares of survivors from interwar independence times in Latvia by 1990 can serve as a benchmark for finding minimal demographic continuity (intersection of populations of original and restored systems; cp. Figure 3.1) due to its most consistent, resolute and successful (as of 2023) implementation of restorationist policies. Abstracting threshold shares from Latvia as a paradigmatic case of restoration, for token continuity to be valid, the population of the restored state should include at least 7% of survivors from the original system who were 15 years or older at the time of its de facto extinction, at least 10% of survivors who were at least 10 years old at this time and at least 20% of survivors who were born under the original system.

The cruel custom of tribal societies to kill all boys and males of the vanquished groups older than 10–15 years of age, as reported by anthropologists and human ethologists (Keeley 1996: 83–88; Edgerton 1992: 66; Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1979), may provide seemingly macabre but nevertheless very firm support for the choice of 10 or 15 years of age as threshold age values to distinguish the surviving members of the original society from the ‘children of the revolution’. The share of survivors who were at least 15 years old at the termination of the original system is most important for ensuring ‘living continuity’ between the original and restored systems, as it includes persons who completed their basic socialisation under the ‘ancient regime’ and are thus the least susceptible to being implanted with new values, attitudes and loyalties. At the same time, they are dangerous to the new regime as bearers and transmitters of cultural legacies perceived as impediments for its complete triumph.

Importantly, the threshold values are abstracted not from shares of survivors in the Latvian population in 1990 from Latvia in 1940 but from Latvia in 1934, because reenactment of Latvia’s Constitution of 1922 in post-communist Latvia, suspended by Ulmanis’ authoritarian coup on 15 May 1934, also served in the restoration of democracy in Latvia. There is continuity not only between the Latvian state and capitalism as of 1940 and since 1990 but also between Latvian democracy as of 1934 and since 1990. As a matter of principle, the distinctions between social rehabilitation and restoration as well as between two varieties of restoration apply not only to transformations of socio-economic systems or political economies but also to changes in political regime.

The establishment of democracy in a country with no democratic past amounts to a democratic rehabilitation of its political system. For token democracy restoration to take place, there should be demographic continuity between populations under the original and restored democracies. Besides that, the original regime should endure sufficiently long to educate its loyalists. This condition, emphasised by Kann (1968), cannot be neglected, even if his minimal duration threshold (35–40 years) is too high. Instead, I abstract both minimal duration of the original system and demographic continuity values from Latvia’s case, which provided proof of the possibility of a token restoration of democracy by deed, simply by reenacting its 1922 Constitution after a break of 56 years.

This happened on 4 May 1990, when the democratically elected Supreme Soviet of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic passed the declaration on the Restoration of Independence of the Republic of Latvia and partly reintroduced its interwar constitution (Jundzis 2017a, b). On 6 July 1993, its full reintroduction by the first assembly of the newly elected parliament (Saeima) followed, and since this time the Latvian democratic political system continues to function according to its good, old constitution. Accepting Latvia as a paradigm case, the minimal duration of the original democracy to make this kind of token restoration possible is 14 years. Conveniently, this is the duration of democracy in the ill-fated Weimar Republic (1919–1933). Acceptance of this threshold value qualifies democracy restoration both in West (in 1949) and East (in 1989) Germany as token restorations.

The Latvian case of democracy breakdown much earlier than the communist takeover is not an exception but the rule. At the time when WWII broke out, democratic regimes were defunct in all the countries where they had been established as part of the Versailles rehabilitation of international order (Berg-Schlosser and Mitchell 2001, 2002; Lee 2008 (1987)). This provides us with a reason to describe the transformation as not only a post-communist but a post-totalitarian rehabilitation. However, because of the lack of demographic continuity in other formerly communist countries, token restoration of democracy was possible in only five: East Germany, Estonia, Latvia and the two successor countries of Czechoslovakia.²

The socio-demographic possibility of token restoration does not mean that this kind of restoration is in fact performed. Post-communist Slovakia and Croatia exhibited sufficient demographic continuity between the populations of the (nominally) independent states of Slovakia (1938–1945) and Croatia (1941–1945) and those of Slovakia and Croatia in 1989 and 1991, and token restoration was possible. However, unlike the situation in the Baltic states, the Slovaks and Croats established new states, denying continuity with their namesake states that existed in the World War II era. They were created as satellite states of Nazi Germany, so any affirmations of continuity would not have brought any advantages. Therefore, streets were not renamed and monuments were not constructed to commemorate Ante Pavelič (the head of fascist Croatia), Jozef Tiso (his Slovakian equivalent) or other important World War II Slovakian and Croatian nationalist activists, who were then decimated by communists. Despite the socio-demographic possibility of token restoration of the pre-communist states, the new states of Croatia and Slovakia were established, which indicates type restoration.

The distinction between token and type restorations helps to illuminate the difference between the restoration of capitalism in Russia (and most other fSU republics) and in countries where socialist revolutions did take place after 1940. The difference is that in the latter countries, the transition to a market economy included the restitution of private property lost during the revolution or compensation for its loss. This is a distinguishing feature of the token restoration capitalist economic system because restitution of private property rights constructs institutional continuity between pre-communist and post-communist institutional orders.

As a matter of principle, the rights of former owners or their heirs may be ignored, privatising state assets, consisting of nationalised and newly created wealth, despite the availability of survivors in numbers at or above the Latvian thresholds. This was what happened in the 1990s in Moldova, Albania and some former Yugoslavian republics (Bazyler et al. 2019). In Restoration France (1815–1830), the owners dispossessed during the French Revolution received only compensation for their lost properties. Even in the Baltic countries, this was only possible as an outcome of political struggles during ‘extraordinary politics’ of 1988–1991 over the different modes of independence restoration (see Part II). However, with the nearly complete dying out of survivors (after two or more generations have passed, which was the case in fSU republics under communist rule from 1917–1920), restitution of property rights and so token restoration of capitalism becomes legally and politically impracticable because of difficulties in identifying all legitimate heirs and resolving conflicts among them, exacerbated by the conflicts between claimant heirs and present users.

SER codifications provide an elaborate system of qualitative and quantitative criteria for the assessment of success of ecological restoration projects. The recent version (SER 2019) contains an elaborate scale, with its values ranging from minimal (18 points) to complete (90 points) success. Many indicators in this scale are very suggestive. According to older SER codex (SER 2004), restoration is successful, if (1) the restored and reference systems have a similar biotic community structure, which means that assemblages of species in both systems are very close; (2) the restored ecosystem ‘consists of indigenous species to the greatest practicable extent’; (3) this assemblage includes all functional groups (primary producers and consumers) ‘necessary for the stability and/or continued development of the restored ecosystem’; (4) ‘the physical environment of the restored ecosystem is capable of sustaining reproducing populations of the species necessary for its continued stability or development along the desired trajectory’; (5) the restored system functions normally for the type of ecosystems and stage of ecological succession it actually represents; (6) the restored system is ‘suitably integrated into a larger ecological matrix and landscape’; (7) external threats to the ‘health and integrity of the restored ecosystem’ are reduced or eliminated; (8) ‘the restored ecosystem is sufficiently resilient to endure the normal periodic stress events in the local environment that serve to maintain the integrity of the ecosystem’; and (9) the degree of self-sustainability of the restored system is not less than that of the original system and ‘has the potential to persist indefinitely under existing environmental conditions’ (SER 2004: 3–4; Higgs 1997).

One very important consideration is the removal of invasive species to make the biological species composition of the reference and restored systems as similar to each other as possible (SER 2004: 3–4). It resonates with the ideas of radical Baltic restorationists, who insisted that restoration of independence should include decolonisation—the departure of Soviet-era emigrants, who were considered as ‘colonists’ in the Baltic republics (e.g. Par Latvijas dekolonizāciju 2002). The restoration of capitalism leads to the re-emergence of socio-economic classes of capitalists and small entrepreneurs that had been extinguished by the socialist revolution, simplifying the social structure much like what happens during the degradation of ecosystems. The re-emergence of extinct classes increases the socio-economic heterogeneity or diversity of society, bringing it back to prerevolutionary levels.

However, the importation of restoration success criteria from restoration ecology into the sociology of restorations would lead us astray. Conceptual frameworks for cultural and environmental heritage protection are marked by the assumption of the superior value of the original or reference system. In these frameworks, the intermediate system can only be conceived as decay. When it comes to architecture, a restored work of art cannot surpass the original in terms of its value.³ A restored ecosystem may occasionally be more productive (producing more biomass) than the reference system. This may be sufficient to attest the success of the rehabilitation of an ecosystem.

For the success of restorations, experts in ecological restoration consider superior productivity of the restored ecosystem as irrelevant, focusing on the increased biodiversity, similarity to the reference system (historical fidelity) and resilience as the most important issues. Acceptance of the normativity of the historical past is a distinguishing feature of social restoration. However, historical fidelity or maximal possible similarity with the original system cannot be considered as a criterion of its success, because to endure the restored system should perform better than both the original and the intermediate systems. So, successful restoration should not include restitution of the features of the original system that made it vulnerable to revolution in the first place.

All considered, only criterion (8) (resilience) from the SER list can be included on the list of obligatory yardsticks for evaluating the success of social restorations. Again, the reason is the preoccupation of restorations with the prevention or preemption of revolutions. Usually, they break out when the state, political regime or economic system suffers a shock (unexpected stress event). However, the same system may succumb to shock after surviving unscathed a much stronger shock of the same type, and social systems of the same kind may display very different ranges of vulnerability to shocks of a different kind. This kind of variation is related to differences in their resilience (Scheffer 2009).

• CRR (criterion of restoration resilience): A successfully restored social system is more resilient in comparison with the original system both in the sense of its capacity for rapid recovery after shocks and its lesser vulnerability to systemic change, shifting it into an alternative equilibrium.⁴

I will discuss in more detail the relevance of this criterion for deeper knowledge of the Baltic restorations in the Concluding Discussion.