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Paper short abstract

Through an ethnographic study of a court trial of an academic historian who was accused of being a communist spy, I will discuss how communist secret service archives have become a site of contending notions of truth, democracy, solidarity, and justice in postsocialist Poland.

Paper long abstract

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. In Poland, lustration is initiated as a transitional justice process to publicly disclose and ban the persons identified as communist spies from public office on the basis of using communist secret service documents as a source of evidence and truth. However, these documents have been much contested for containing incomplete and misleading information. By drawing on my recently published monograph, I will offer an ethnographic analysis of the lustration court trial of a history professor to study how legal officials and the lustrated professor navigate the uncertainties and suspicions inscribed into the surveillance documents in the mode of what I call “moral autopsy” that treats communism as a dead past and regime of criminality and treachery, the truth of which is to be “dissected” in the persons associated with communism. But as my ethnography suggests, the court proceedings also harbor moments of rupture that unsettle the legal-moral ideology of lustration, that is, moral autopsy, and flesh out an alternative history of friendship and solidarity that unravels through legal performances.