Moral Autopsy

Truths, Secrets, and the Judicial Afterlives of Communist Secret Service Archives

Saygun Gökarıksel

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Law
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009653770
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

While communism was proclaimed dead in Eastern Europe around 1989, archives of communist secret services lived on. They became the site of judicial and moral examination of lives, suspicions of treason or 'collaboration' with the criminalized communist regime, and contending notions of democracy, truth, and justice. Through close study of court trials, biographies, media, films, and plays concerning judges, academics, journalists, and artists who were accused of being communist spies in Poland, this critical ethnography develops the notion of moral autopsy to interrogate the fundamental problems underlying global transitional justice, especially, the binary of authoritarianism and liberalism and the redemptive notions of transparency and truth-telling. It invites us to think beyond Eurocentric teleology of transition, capitalist nation-state epistemology and prerogatives of security and property, and the judicialized and moralized understanding of history and politics.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Reviews
• Series page
• Title page
• Imprints page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Author’s Note on the Cover Image
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Prologue: End Times
• Introduction Moral Autopsy after Communism
• Part I Contextualizations
• Part II In the Court of Law
• Part III Public Tribunals of Judgment
• Conclusion: Of Truth and Political Responsibility
• Epilogue: Democracy Unrestorable
• Bibliography
• Index