Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-communism

"The book...examines key moments in 20th-century Hungarian history from oblique angles; how politically sensitive exhumations pluck the strings of contemporary nationalism; the significance of the banishment and revival of national holidays....One extraordinary chapter uses the creation of a ‘Pantheon of the Working-Class Movement' in Budapest's Kerepesi Cemetery to write an intricately wrought history of political burials in Hungary and elsewhere."—Chronicle of Higher Education

“This is a beautifully written book....Rev is remarkable for his capacity somehow to reconcile his own history with the analytical detachment of a scholar of great brilliance.”—London Review of Books

The book offers a vast panorama of Communism from the perspective of its collapse, and inspects the world beyond the fall in the distorting mirror of its imagined prehistory—providing in the process a perceptive analysis of a number of the fundamental issues of history writing.

Istvan Rév is Professor of History and Political Science, and Academic Director of the Open Society Archives at the Central European University in Budapest.