A Two-Man Show: Stylometric Analysis of Personal Names in Rudolf Slánský’s Staged Trial Newspaper Reports

The paper is aimed at personal names (anthroponyms) in newspaper reports on Rudolf Slánský’s staged trial, which was held against the leaders of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia – mostly of the Jewish origin – who were “uncovered” as political enemies; the trial took place in an anti-Semitic atmosphere. The examined texts were published in the period of November 21−28, 1952, in Rudé právo, the main newspaper of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Proper names, mostly personal names, are analysed from several perspectives. The quantitative analysis is focused on the keywords of the studied texts and typical collocations of the names. The qualitative analysis, developing the quantitatively researched data, is aimed at the image of enemy or traitor and its presentation via thematization of personal names. The ways of language presentation of the Jewish origin of the accused are in the scope of the contribution as well. Within the scope of collocation analysis, the newspaper texts on the trial were contrasted with the ones published by Rudé právo on the occasion of Rudolf Slánskýʼs 50th birthday (July 31, 1951).

Introduction declared −, which was influenced by the that-time clash between the Soviet Union and the State of Israel (Šimová, 2014; cf. Palivodová, 2012). At the turn of the 1950s, the same stage trials, arranged according to the Soviet model, were held in other people's democratic countries in Central and Southern Europe -in Hungary (the trial of László Rajk), and Bulgaria (Traicho Kostov Djunev); in Germany (Paul Merker, Franz Dahlem) and Poland (Władysław Gomułka), the trials were prepared, but because of Stalin's death in March 1953 they were not launched.
The importance of the trial from the perspective of the Czechoslovak Communist regime is illustrated by the accent put on its public presentation. Every day, Czechoslovak people received information on the trial -it was presented through radio broadcasting, cinema newsreels, and through the coverages and other texts published in newspapers, too. The so-called "betrayers" were also condemned by a number of resolutions requiring death for them; many representatives of Czech culture expressed their stances, e.g., writers and poets Ivan Skála, Jan Pilař, Ivan Olbracht, Jarmila Glazarová, Karel Konrád, Josef Kainar, and also historian and minister of education Zdeněk Nejedlý (Brabec, 1969;Kourová, 2013;cf. Nejedlý, 1953). At the beginning of 1953, the full-text version of the trial acta 3 was published as a book in Czech (Proces, 1953a), Slovak (Proces, 1953b), German (Prozess, 1953), English (Trial, 1953), Spanish (Proceso, 1953), Russian (Process, 1953), French (Procès, 1953), and Hungarian (Bünpere, 1953); at the same time, a booklet analysing the trial was released, too (Bacílek, 1953).
In the paper, we aim at the texts that were published in Rudé právo, the main newspaper of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, during the days of the trial. The newspaper articles are now open source (see "Rudé právo" in the Corpus section of References). The first, main set of analysed texts was published between November 21 and November 28, 1952, as the facts about the trial day were always presented in the next-day issue of the newspaper. The corpus consists of everyday coverages of the trial, texts, and letters (written by ordinary people, mostly workers, and also by other supporters) condemning Rudolf Slánský and the accused and calling for capital punishment for them. The titles of the articles were considered part of the text, as well as the names of the authors, if indicated; the latter approach was adopted as the names are accompanied by the characteristics of the people (e.g., "J. Čudek, secretary of the factory committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia" − RP November 26, 1952, p. 1). The corpus, which will be henceforth referred to as "trial corpus", consists of 48 articles; from the quantitative perspective, there are 26,306 tokens, 8,344 word-form types, and 9,668 lemmata. The corpus is available as Slánský_corpus_1_1952 (see the Corpus section of References).
The second, complementary corpus comprises texts published in Rudé právo on 31 July 1951 and pertaining to Slánskýʼs 50 th birthday (henceforth referred to as "birthday corpus"). These include mostly festive and appreciative letters and essays concerning life and works of the protagonist. The corpus consists of 9 texts, 9,436 tokens, 3,689 word-form types, and 4,175 lemmata. The texts were made ready in the same way as the ones in the first corpus. The set of articles is available as Slánský_corpus_2_1951 (see the Corpus section of References).
The first-corpus texts were analysed via two quantitative methods − first, we calculated the keywords of the articles (cf. Davidová Glogarová & Kubát, 2020), taking -as the reference ones − the corpora of TOTALITA1952, TOTALITA1952−1969, and TOTALITA (their sizes are given in Table 1). The reference corpus is the background sample of language, to which the frequencies of words in the studied corpus are compared. The reference corpora of our choice encompass Rudé právo articles, propaganda books and booklets, and other printed propaganda material published in the given years (

Material and Methodology
The level of significance was set up to 0.0001; whether the difference between the frequencies of the word is statistically significant was determined on the grounds of log-likelihood test. The minimal researched frequency of the word occurrence was 5. The results of the analysis were wordforms, i.e., words in various morphological forms (not lemmata). The relevance of the difference in the occurrences of the word in the two corpora is expressed by DIN (Difference Index), which is mathematicised as follows: where � � (targ) stands for the relative frequency of the word in the trial corpus (= target corpus) and � � (ref) for the same in the respective reference corpus. In the analysis, only words with DIN>0.97 were taken into account, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and numbers being excluded. The results were obtained using the KWords software, which is part of the Czech National Corpus analytical tools. 4 Both corpora were involved in the analysis focusing on collocations of lemmatized proper names "Slánský" and "Gottwald". The research was carried out in the LancsBox software (Brezina et al., 2015), which was also used for lemmatizing "Gottwald"; as to "Slánský", we lemmatized it manually. The span of the collocate occurrence was given as −5/+5. The collocations (with the minimal occurrence of 5) are determined on the basis of the Mutual Information score, the formula of which reads as follows: where N stands for the corpus size (in words), �(�) for the frequency of the studied lemma ("Slánský" or "Gottwald"), �(�) for the frequency of a collocate, and �(��) for the number of cases of their co-occurrence (Cvrček, 2019). We opted for this measure, as it finds "exclusive" collocations and takes into account low-frequency words (McEnery et al., 2006, pp. 57). We analyse the MI scores of 5 and higher values, as it has been empirically found out that the lower ones tend to capture collocations with functional words only.
4 See the References section of the paper.
The results of the analysis are presented in Tables 2, 3, and 4. Grammatical abbreviations are used to specify the contexts in which the words were used (except the situations in which the English form literally renders the Czech one -e.g., noun and adjective nominatives). The semi-colon indicates that the wordform is ambiguous as to its morphological structure (e.g., "gen; acc"). The list of the abbreviations is given in the appendix to the study.    There are several points to be commented upon. First, with the reference corpus changing, there is a rising number of keywords, which may indicate that the vocabulary used in the 1950s Rudé právo was not employed so much in later decades. It needs to be noted that many of the expressions are openly expressive and inimical ("monster", "gang", "scoundrels", "disgusting", "base"), and they are closely linked to the anti-espionage and enemy-denoting lexis used at the beginning of the Communist era in Czechoslovakia ("espionage", "spy", "conspirators", "cosmopolitan", "nationalist"). The same logic seems to apply for names -whereas in the TOTAL-ITA1952-referenced research, keyword names are not mentioned, the way the alleged perpetrators were being forgotten over time is symbolized by their soaring prominence in the other two investigations (see, for instance, "Reicin", "Frejka", "Evžen" [two people of the same name -Löbl and Klinger], even "Tito"). The only exception in Table 2 is "Vlado", the first name of the Communist minister of foreign affairs Vlado (Vladimír) Clementis; this may be due to the fact that it is an unusual name form in the context of Czech anthroponymy, but there may also have been a connection with the special circumstances of Clementisʼs accusation -he was arrested in January 1951 on the grounds of "bourgeois nationalism" and added, as a very prominent person, to Slánskýʼs trial later.

Analysis and Interpretation
It is of importance that in Tables 3 and 4, besides the names of the protagonists of the trial, their alleged victim became salient, too − Jan Šverma, martyr of the anti-Nazi resistance movement. This supported the claim that Slánský and his companions may have been responsible, at least metaphorically, for the death of cardinal members of the WWII Communist underground (including, as another example, Julius Fučík, a Czech journalist put to death by the Nazis Moreover, their accusation of the crimes was frequently linked to their gangster aim to kill the president Klement Gottwald as well (see Part 4). In general, the general oblivion of the accused in the newspaper may have been an intentional strategy used by the Communist party, but it is more probable that the topic was closed and did not need any reopening in the press.
As presupposed, the atmosphere of the trial must have been anti-Semitic, as "Zionism" is a keyword even within the context of the TOTALITA1952 reference corpus. The trial records confirm this orientation, as, for instance, the list of the accused give information about their nationality -they were sorted as Czech, Slovak, or "Jewish origin" 5 (Proces, 1953, pp. 44-45). Moreover, in their staged interrogations, they linked their alleged anti-Communist business with their Jewishness − the accused were connected with such activities as espionage and conspiracy, which had been typical features forming the image of Jewish people as enemies in European history (cf. Steiner, 2002; Košťálová, 2012;Šimová, 2014). During the trial, legends about original Jewish surname Salzman of Rudolf Slánský also appeared, but they were not based on the truth (cf. Slánský's birth record) 6 ; the argument was thus not used at court. However, in case of André Simone, the fact that his original name was Otto Katz was several times mentioned, with his characteristics as "international spy, Zionist and Trockyist" (Proces, 1953, p. 14).
On the other hand, dealing with Zionism in the Rudé právo articles was very sophisticated, as it was presented as an extremist concept of the same harmfulness as anti-Semitism (a keyword in Tables 3 and 4); this may have contributed to the fact that even though taking place soon after the end of the Second World War, the trial was not reminiscent of the Nazi treatment with Jews. This strategy can be exemplified upon the following excerpts.
"Our party, as a strictly international party, has always fought anti-Semitism. In the same way, it needs to fight and crush Zionism" (RP November 24, 1952, p. 1).

"[…] And it is Zionism that is a racist chauvinism, in the same way, as it is anti-Semitism, in both of which our people sees an expression of the most disgusting barbarism" (RP November 24, 1952, p. 1).
Moreover, all accusations of potential anti-Semitism present in the trial were categorically refuted by Zdeněk Nejedlý, the minister of education, in his radio speech delivered on December 7, 1952.

"We allegedly triggered a wave of anti-Semitism through the trial -rude, brutal, racial anti-Semitism. […] And talking about it, they [= Western media] made of the accused people without homeland and conscience poor victims of their faith who had not thought about politics
and bad acting at all; they just kept their religion, and therefore they died, therefore their lives were taken by the ugly, atheistic Communists.
[…] Nobody can wish Jewish people their national independence more than us. However, nothing can confuse us in our behaviour towards Zionism, if the movement is serving to America" (Nejedlý, 1953, p. [14][15][16]. Using this hyperbolic rhetoric, the press succeeds in creating the image of monsters that seek to push through their own (e.g., Semitic) interests in a most selfish way.
The outcomes of the collocation analysis (for the workings, see Part 2) are presented in Tables 5, 6, 7 and 8. For the meaning of the morphological abbreviations, see the appendix of the paper. The total occurrences of the "Slánský" and "Gottwald" lemmata in the trial corpus are 194 and 92, respectively; as to the birthday corpus, "Slánský" appears with the frequency of 176, and "Gottwald" occurs 63 times.
As can be seen, the collocates linked to Gottwald in the first corpus are more numerous and indicate a firm position of the that-time Communist leader, stressing his determination ("leadership"), stately character ("president", "Republic"), affiliation to the Socialist cause ("comrade", "party"), popularity ("beloved"), and steadiness ("around"). In the birthday corpus, he is, moreover, presented as a close friend of Slánskýʼs ("side", "together"); if the accepted MI score value is lowered to 3, "Slánský" even appears as his collocate. In the trial corpus, Gottwaldʼs full title is stressed many times ("the president of the Republic"), so as to show the officiality of his position -in comparison to the conspiracy-based, self-proclaimed management of Slánský, who is referred to as "head" of "companions", which is very vague and implies lack of organization. 5 In his memory book Doznání [The Confession], Artur London states that the accused were originally classified as people of "Jewish nationality"; this was later changed to "Jewish origin" (London, 1969, p. 198). 6 Jiří Čutka, who interviewed Josefa Slánská, Rudolf Slánskýʼs wife, in 1968, introduced his text as follows: "A family without a father -how many in the same situation there are in Prague, in the Republic! However, this father's name was Slánský, and the family bears his name. And last year, somebody carved the name Salzmann into the door" (Slánská, 2018, p. 226).     Table 8 Collocation analysis of the "Gottwald" lemma -the birthday corpus Furthermore, the trial-corpus collocates around "Slánský" are very expressive ("traitor", "gang") and form almost an epithet-like apposition "Slánský, head of the anti-state conspirational centre". This notion has multiple associations -first, as aforementioned, it indicates lack of structure; second, it focuses on the fact that the main protagonist of the trial is the brains of all the operation ("centre"); and third, it underlines its secretive and illegal character ("conspirational"). On the other hand, in the birthday corpus, Slánský is referred to as "comrade" and "secretary", and the importance of his literary works is emphasised as well (collocate "studies"). The use of collocate "comrade" in the genitive and accusative cases may manifest his link to Klement Gottwald, which is thus mutual. Furthermore, it is also important that in the trial corpus, the first name of Gottwald ("Klement") is not a collocate, whilst "Slánský" is typically linked with "Rudolf" -this may imply that Gottwald is basically an institution ("comrade Gottwald"), not a person in itself; it is an embodiment of the ideology he proclaims. On the other hand, Slánský has been deprived of all his political functions -he is thus a has-been, and the only thing that cannot be taken off him is his name. This interpretation is further supported by the fact that Gottwald is quoted as a high authority (collocate "words"), whereas Slánský is self-contained − his deeds are not widespread, they are merely a dangerous deviation from the main course of the state. Finally, yet importantly, a specific group is formed by the Gottwald collocates "life" and "gang" -they refer to the alleged attempt of Slánskýʼs group to assassinate Klement Gottwald with the help of doctor Vladimír Haškovec, who is characterized as a "freemason". The collocate "gang", which is the only one shared by the two protagonists, signifies a point of culmination, through which the actions by the anti-state centre, kept secret so far, were supposed to burst into the presidentʼs life. To conclude, the polar differentiation of the two main figures of the trial seems to be an important feature of the trial corpus. Given the situation in the birthday corpus, it was vital to keep the former co-workers apart, to isolate Slánský from the party policy, and stress out the personal character of his supposed treachery. This is connected to the seemingly paradoxical fact that in both corpora, the lemma "Gottwald", even though appearing much less frequently than "Slánský", manifests a slightly denser collocation network (8 collocates versus 6 ones in the birthday corpus, 14 collocates versus 15 ones in the trial one). The reasons for this fact are different in either corpus: in the former, Gottwaldʼs role is predetermined and limited, as he is presented as a companion of Slánskýʼs; in the latter, it is needed to put him in the first place and underline his statesmanship, likeability, and merits − this calling, once again, for a high number of fixed collocates.

Collocation Analysis
The analysis, which was focused on the treatment of personal names in the opinion journalism texts referring to Slánský's trial, showed the following features of their usage.
1 Even though the trial took part in the anti-Semitic atmosphere, this fact was presented in a rather sophisticated way. The trial took place only seven years after the end of the Second World War, and its organizers did not want to wake up recollections of the Nazi treatment with Jews; moreover, the accused personsʼ collaboration with Nazis was frequently emphasized. The strategy used during the trial was based on fully understandable allusions. The persons were accused of Zionism, and their Jewish origin was mentioned; in case of André Simone, his original name Otto Katz was recollected as well.
2 In the perspective of keyword analysis, the texts were not aimed at personal names in general. It is possible to explain the fact with the Communist regimeʼs goal to sentence the criminals and not to come back to the case details in later issues of Rudé právo; there, only several names were recollected, but in general, the trial was regarded as a closed case.
3 Despite the previous conclusion, the polar differentiation of the two main figures, Klement Gottwald and Rudolf Slánský, seems to be an important feature of the that-time trial presentation, which was proved by the collocation analysis. This built-up antagonism is even more visible when contrasted to the situation during the celebration of Slánskýʼs birthday (the end of July 1951). The fact that Gottwald and Slánský were presented as closely linked at that time made the necessity to separate them even more urgent. During the trial, Klement Gottwald was thus showed as the authority, in the contrast to Rudolf Slánský, who was the head of the anti-state centre and whose aim was to assassinate the embodiment of the Republic.