The same year, post-apartheid South Africa established its Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which harked back to a number of “truth commissions” that had functioned in countries such as Argentina, Chile, Nepal, and others. But Yeltsin was omitting the fact-finding component of the process, focusing solely on reconciliation, or at least agreement. Indeed, Yeltsin was proposing to dispense with all three of the “energies” that Etkind has described as components of postcatastrophic recovery—knowledge, grief, and justice—and proceed directly to some imaginary future in which reckoning had been
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