Acknowledgments
I have been working on this book for the last quarter century, even before I knew it. I became interested in the end of totalitarianism in Europe and all that followed in real time in 1989–1991. During 1992–1994 I benefited from a grant from the Research Support Scheme of the Central European University in Prague. I have read many books since, but nothing could have substituted for the experience of Prague after the revolution. The Research Support Scheme does not exist anymore and the Central European University centralized in Budapest. But I want to thank George Soros for underwriting those two years. I spent the next four years teaching at the Department of Politics and European Studies of Palacky University in Olomouc in the Czech Republic, where I learned more than perhaps I cared to know at the time about the legacies of totalitarianism. In 1998–1999 I was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Politics of Columbia University in connection with a seminar on Transitional Justice directed by Jon Elster, Steve Solnick, and Tony Marx. During that year I confronted the issues and developed some of the ideas that led to Chapters 2 through 4. I thank the Mellon Foundation for underwriting the seminar and my stay at Columbia and Jon Elster and Steve Solnick for their intellectual companionship. I learned much from them. (Anthony Marx is a scholar and a gentleman, but his area of specialty is South Africa, and mine is not.) I also attended during that academic year Philip Pettit’s seminar on political philosophy at Columbia. You may hear echoes of his Republican political theory in this book, especially in Chapter 1. In 1999 I went back on George Soros’ payroll, as it were, as deputy editor of the East European Constitutional Review at the Law School of New York University. The chief editor was Stephen Holmes and I learned much from his realist philosophy of law and more about post-Communist legal systems. Both are reflected in Chapter 2. The graduate seminar I taught on Theories of Rights at New York University’s Political Science Department in the fall of 2002 led smoothly to Chapter 5. During 2003–2005 I worked on a research project about deliberative democracy at the Australian National University with Robert Goodin and John Dryzek. That project intersected with this one in my criticism of Habermas in Chapter 7; I absolve Bob and John from any responsibility for it, but I thank them for the time and intellectual environment they gave me to keep working on the ideas of this book. In the fall of 2004 I also benefited from a short fellowship on East Europe at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, where I drew the first plan for this book. During 2006–2008 I taught at Queen’s University Belfast, an experience without which Chapter 6 would have been considerably shorter. In 2008–2010 I went back to Prague. I wish to thank the Gvirtzman Memorial Foundation for underwriting this research stay when I completed the first draft of this book, and Eliezer “Laizer” Gvirzman in particular, without whose diligence and hard work these two years would have been impossible. In 2009-2010 I taught at the CEVRO Institute in Prague seminars on the Legacies of Totalitarianism where I shamelessly required the students to read drafts of the chapters of this book. I thank the rector, Josef Sima for this opportunity. In 2011 I benefited from an International Masters in Economy State and Society (IMESS) grant from the European Union to study the Baltic countries. At the University of Tartu in Estonia, I wish to thank in particular Vello Pettai and Eva-Clarita Pettai for their kind hospitality and earnest conversations about transitional justice. I enjoyed talking with Siobahn Kattago, Marek Tamm, and President Ilves in Tallinn and with Valters Nollendorfs in Riga. In 2011 I arrived at the University of Texas at Austin as Assistant to the Director of the Energy Institute, Raymond Orbach. I had there the opportunity to learn and research much about the new energy geopolitics and its effects on the post-totalitarian sphere and return to conduct research in my old post-totalitarian stomping grounds, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Bulgaria, and of course the Czech Republic (I was also in Rio, but that is a different story). The graduate seminar I taught at the Department of Slavic Studies and the L.B.J. School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin covered the topics of this book and so was useful in helping me articulate the issues. I thank Mary Neuburger for setting it up. I also benefited from discussing some of the themes of Chapter 2 with Larry Laudan, who returned to live in his native Austin when I was there.
Over the years I made numerous presentations about various aspects and parts of this book. I should thank the invitations and earnest discussions in Columbia University’s seminar on Transitional Justice at the Department of Political Science and in the Harriman Institute, New York University’s school of Law, the Journal Telos’ conference in St. Francis College in Brooklyn, New York, the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association in San Francisco and Boston, the Center for Central and East European Studies at the University of Trento in Italy, the Australian National University, the University of Melbourne, the Woodrow Wilson Center, George Mason University, University College Dublin, New Europe College in Bucharest, the London School of Economics, the twin Prague institutes for Contemporary History and for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, the Central European University in Budapest, The Prague Conference on Political Economoy, University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies, Minsk at the invitation of the Belarusian Philosophical Circle and the Visegrad Fund, the University of Tartu, Forum Wolnosci in Grodzisk Mazowiecki in Poland, the University of Texas in Austin, the University of Utrecht, and the conference ‘Totalitarian Regimes Heritage in Hate Crimes” convened by the Lithuanian Ministry of Justice in Vilnius to mark the Lithuanian presidency of the European Council.
Last but not least, I wish to thank the two women in my life, Veronika and Sophia, who enjoyed each other’s company while I was missing them writing and traveling. Sophia, in six years of life, has already lived in Prague, Berlin, New York, Austin, and Boston, mastered English and Czech, and visited Paris, London, Bangor, Dublin, Barcelona, Tallinn, Riga, Cologne, Amsterdam, Venice, and of course Zdikov. When I was at her age, I did not go further than a mile’s radius from my home. This is by way of an apology to her and Ms. Angela for neglecting Sophia’s violin instruction while I was sprinting to the finish of writing this book.
This book is a unique integral whole and not a collection of articles. But I used as raw materials parts of previously published articles. I thoroughly updated, revised, expanded, and recontextualized these materials. I thank the following journals and Cambridge University Press for allowing to use the following published works: The New Politics of Property Rights, Critical Review, 16 (2004), 377–402. “Paranoids May be Persecuted: Post-totalitarian retroactive justice,” and “Rough Justice: Rectification in post-Authoritarian and post-Totalitarian Regimes,” in Jon Elster, ed., Retribution and Restitution in the Transition to Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 181–205, 276–298. “Restoration and Convergence: Russia and China since 1989,” in The Global 1989: Continuity and Change in World Politics, George Lawson, Chris Ambruster and Michael Cox, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 157–178. “Jamming the Critical Barrels: The Legacies of Totalitarian Thinking,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 15, No. 3, (2010), 139–152. “Scarce Justice: The Accuracy, Scope and Depth of Justice,” Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, Vol. 11, (2012), 76–96. The article on the New Politics of Property Rights emerged from the graduate seminar on political theory that I taught in the fall of 2002 at the Department of Political Science of New York University. I am pleased to acknowledge with gratitude the assistance of my NYU graduate students Maria Ruibal, Jack Cahill, and Farrah Brown in writing that article and thereby some of the materials included in Chapter 5.
