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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.