The Transcripts of the JAFC Trial as an Extended Conversation: Words, Sentences, and Speech Acts

ABSTRACT

The trial of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC) lasted many days and resulted in eight volumes of transcripts. It was, in effect, an extended conversation between and among 15 – later 14 – defendants and the presiding judge, with a few minor contributions from the other two judges. This paper proposes to treat the language of that conversation as a linguistic phenomenon, looking for repeating patterns of linguistic behavior that can shed additional light on patterns of ideology, thought, and emotion. The first part of the paper is more narrowly focused on the words natsionalizm, natsionalist, and natsionalisticheskii [nationalistic]. This group of words was central to the charges and the verdict; the corresponding concepts were central to the ideological disputes that occupy much of the proceedings. The second part of the paper widens the focus to the entire transcript as a continuous discourse that evolves over time. The discourse strategies of the defendants show both their hope to survive and their need to assert their decency after years of relentless pressure that continued at the trial itself. Methodologically, this research would be much more difficult without two electronic resources, the Kindle edition of the English version of the transcripts and the Russian National Corpus (RNC). The first of them was of great help in searching for patterns in the text, and the second in comparing those patterns with the language at large, as reflected in the corpus.

KEYWORDS:

• Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
• 1952 trial
• nationalism
• nouns
• adjectives
• speech acts
• judge
• prosecutor
• defendant

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Wayles Browne and Alice Stone Nakhimovsky for their comments. There were moments when this article would not have happened without their support and encouragement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Alexander Nakhimovsky holds an MA in mathematics from Leningrad University (1972) and a PhD in linguistics from Cornell (1979) with a graduate minor in computer science. After a career in linguistics, 1977–85, he taught computer science at Colgate from 1985 to 2013. He is the author of several books and articles (jointly with Tom Myers) on XML programing, Web applications, Web services, and the Semantic Web. He has also published on linguistics, and since 2009 has been director of Colgate’s Linguistics Program. Since 2013, his research has focused on the history of the Russian language in the twentieth century.

Notes

1. The defendant who died was a government official, Solomon Bregman. The highest placed defendant in this group was Solomon Lozovsky, the head of SovIninformburo, the war-era information agency, which oversaw the JAFC. Everyone, in essence, worked for Lozovsky, though Yosef Yuzefovich, his deputy, was closest to him. Ilya Vatenberg, a graduate of Columbia Law School, was an editor and translator. The other ex-New-Yorkers were the secretary/translator Chayka Vatenberg-Ostrovskaya, the editor Emilia Teumin, and the journalist/translator Leon Tal'mi. There were three poets. Itsik Fefer had accompanied the actor and public intellectual Solomon Mikhoels on the trip to America that set in motion some of the political underpinnings of the trial (Mikhoels, then the head of the committee, was murdered by Stalin in a purported accident in January 1948). Leyb Kvitko and Perets Markish were famous poets, widely read in Russian translation, though their profiles were very different: Kvitko was a children’s poet, and Markish a rabble-rousing modernist. Dovid Hofshteyn was a poet; Dovid Bergelson was a novelist. Boris Shimiliovich was the medical director of the Botkin Hospital. Lina Shtern, the first woman to be appointed to a professorship at the University of Geneva, was an internationally known scientist (and member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences), though by the time of the trial she was already under attack along with others in the natural sciences.

2. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 11.

3. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud; Rubenstein, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom. The English translation has some additional redactions.

4. Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 122.

5. Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, 131.

6. Applebaum, Gulag: A History, 122.

7. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 315. See also the essay by Anna Schur in this issue.

8. Rubenstein, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom.

9. Natsionalʹnyi korpus russkogo iazyka, “Osnovnoi korpus,” http://ruscorpora.ru/search-main.html

10. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 379.

11. Ibid.

12. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 275–276.

13. XIV Party Congress, vol. 7, 375.

14. Culled from Selishchev, Russkii iazyk revoliutisionnoi epokhi.

15. Natsionalʹnyi korpus russkogo iazyka, “Osnovnoi korpus,” http://ruscorpora.ru/search-main.html.

16. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 23.

17. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 205.

18. Ibid.

19. To unmask [razoblachit'] is another Soviet word meaning to expose the hidden wrong beliefs, attitudes or activities. It can be a public action or a secret denunciation [donos].

20. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 215.

21. There is an episode in Chekhov’s “Lady with the Dog,” in which the main character after a dinner at the club tries to talk to his dinner companion about his feelings, but the companion responds with “You were right, the whitefish did have that little smell [dushok].”

22. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 54.

23. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 264.

24. Redlich and Kostyrchenko, Evreiskii antifashistskii komitet v SSSR, 184. Suslov was at the time the head of the Central Committee section on international relations; he lived to be the main party ideologist under Brezhnev and early Gorbachev.

25. Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live by.

26. See more examples at http://www.lang.osaka-u.ac.jp/~sugimoto/MasterMetaphorList/metaphors/.

27. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 58.

28. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 33.

29. Ibid.

30. For clarity, the English version inserts an adjective: “this is a consistent line.” Rubenstein, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, 47.

31. The distinctions between moods and convictions, or between isolated mistakes and consistent lines, were also part of the defendants’ worldview. The trial transcripts are thus an important source for understanding “Soviet subjectivity.” Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind; Naiman, “On Soviet Subjects and the Scholars Who Make Them.”

32. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 311.

33. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 321.

34. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 138–139.

35. Vatenberg’s remark only makes sense as a correction, with an emphasis on “perhaps.” Vatenberg says “perhaps indeed he is right;” Cheptsov tries to twist his words: “If (as you are saying) he is indeed right …?” Vatenberg corrects.

36. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 272.

37. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 69.

38. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 198.

39. http://members.tripod.com/mr_sedivy/usgov_9.html.

40. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 271–272.

41. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 279.

42. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 69–70.

43. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 70.

44. Ibid.

45. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 61.

46. Sledovatel' [interrogator] conducts the investigation; prokuror [prosecutor] has legal training and performs a supervisory role.

47. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 81.

48. Ibid.

49. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 81. This is a reference to Bergelson’s novel of the 1920s, see Murav, this issue.

50. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 92.

51. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 138.

52. When Krestinsky, in the trial of 1938, tried to go back on his testimony, he was quickly silenced by Vyshinskii, because he could not bring himself to say that the testimony was forced. See A.S. Nakhimovsky, this issue.

53. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 194.

54. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 198.

55. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 198–199.

56. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 58.

57. Paul Novick (1891–1989) was a radical Jewish-American journalist, best remembered as the long time editor-in-chief of the Communist Party Yiddish-language daily Morgen Freiheit (Morning Freedom).

58. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 291.

59. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 321.

60. See, for instance, Sebag-Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. The book’s entire passage on the EAK trial is quite inaccurate.

61. Malenkov was appointed by Stalin as his successor in the position of General Secretary but was outmaneuvered by Khrushchev after Stalin’s death in 1953. In 1957 Malenkov was put on trial for an attempt to overthrow Khrushchev.

62. Zametki po evreĭskoĭ istorii, Fedor Li͡ass, “Rasstrelʹnye spiski” Stalina i “Delo Evreĭskogo antifashistskogo komiteta,” http://www.berkovich-zametki.com/Nomer28/Lyass1.htm. Riumin was the head of the Investigative Unit for Especially Important Cases, including, after the fall of Minister of State Security Viktor Abakumov, the investigation of members of the JAFC.

63. Note from Zhukov to the Central Committee, November 19, 1956. http://www.alexanderyakovlev.org/fond/issues-doc/1003173.

64. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 151.

65. For details and terminology see Grice, Studies in the Way of Words.

66. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 304.

67. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 134–135.

68. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 140.

69. Mikhail Kalinin was the titular head of the Soviet state. In Stalin’s time, throwing a dinner for Goldberg on the day of Kalinin’s death was a transgression worth informing on. People were arrested for less. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 55.

70. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 336.

71. Naumov, Nepravednyi Sud, 366.