Retroactive Justice is a collection of extraordinarily intelligent and profound studies about Hungarian society and its struggles to establish a comforting relationship with its twentieth-century past. But the ghosts of this past—including the Treaty of Trianon, the Stalinist terror, the suppression of the 1956 uprising, the peaceful change of systems in 1989 without much participation on the part of the population, and, most of all, the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews with considerable help from Hungarian state agencies in 1944—still haunt Hungarians to this day and explain, at least to a certain extent, why their society and political system do not find a more comfortable way of dealing with this terrible burden.

In seven chapters, Isvtán Rév, who teaches at the Central European University in Budapest, explores the complexity, the contradictions, and the irony of the relationships between the dead and the living and between present and past times. One of the major topics of the book deals with the very close, and often almost creepy, ties between János Kádár, the Communist leader who ruled the country for thirty-two years, and Imre Nagy, the symbol of the Revolution of 1956. Rév explains, for example, how Kádár, who wanted to have Nagy executed even against concerns within the Soviet leadership (because Khrushchev was interested in improving relationships with the West at this time) in 1958, tried everything to get rid not only of Nagy, but also of his corpse, his name, his face (in photographs) and all other possible forms of object and ritual that could be used for remembering the dead hero. But like Macbeth, the Hungarian party secretary could never liberate himself from the memories related to Nagy; the blood stains followed Kádár almost literally to his own grave. Shortly before his own death, Kádár was urged to use the Necronym (81), the very name of the person whose death was his responsibility, Imre Nagy, and this reminded Kádár that his own wife was forced to renounce his name during the time (the Stalinist period) when he himself was imprisoned.

Nagy, whose public reburial in June 1989 was celebrated and embraced by a new reformist party elite, became the symbol of the ultimate end of Hungarian communism. The functionaries who tried to use the reburial of Nagy in order to rescue the political system by reinterpreting him as a symbol of “communist reformism” did not notice that they tried to revive a system that was already dead as a dodo, at least in Central Europe. Apart from the overwhelming symbolic power the dead can exert on the living—in very specific moments in time like the final crisis of communism—Isvtán Rév also believes that the end of communism with the most symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 can be explained by the unpredictability of the process of transition. Nobody, neither the new reform-oriented communists nor the small, but increasingly influential opposition movement, wanted to have a repeat of the bloodshed of 1956. Ironically, “in this process, unexpectedly, without proper knowledge of what they were doing, the secret police collaborated with the opposition to the regime. It was not only Imre Nagy's body that served as a tie between 1956 and 1989: in a strange way, the peaceful transition was the post mortem, late—for too many too late—victory of the revolution” (335).

Retrospective Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism is a book that contains a quality and richness of theoretical and philosophical sophistication unusual in the field of twentieth-century historiography in Hungary.