ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to process jurisprudential clarification by turning towards the historical experience of the communist takeover. It reflects on the historical processes befalling Central and Eastern Europe at the dawn of the postwar era in an attempt to grasp the politico-legal significance of this period for a more detailed picture of state communism. The chapter unravels the historical intricacies that the transition to communism had to deal with - in short, the fascist dictatorial legacy and the Holocaust. It addresses the legal apparatus of takeover by inquiring into the postwar trials and the transition to communism. The chapter seeks to explore the symbolic construction of the new regime. It also seeks to look for the arche, the unreachable, yet always already reenacted, origins of state communism in Central and Eastern Europe. The chapter develops under the aegis of a search of the primaeval roots of the nomotic act of appropriation and of the setting of the laws of communism.
