1. A few recent works have noted the ways in which individuals sustained certain features of the Stalinist system through their language and behavior. See, for example, Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995) and Jochen Hellbeck, ‘Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: the Diary of Stephan Podlubnyi (1931-1939)’, Jahrbucher für Geschichte Osteuropas, v. 44 (1996), pp. 344–73.
2. Jerry Frug, ‘Argument as Character’, Stanford Law Review, v. 40 (April 1988). The author quotes from Aristotle when he writes that ‘in making [legal] arguments the speaker or writer “show[s] himself to be of a certain character”’, p. 872. Others also describe how stigmatized people try to distance themselves from the pattern of behavior which is ascribed to them through a ‘conscious performance against type’. See Kenneth L. Karst, ‘Myths of Identity: Individual and Group Portraits of Race and Sexual Orientation’, UCLA Law Review, v. 43, no. 2 (December 1995), p. 288.
3. The process of petitioning for rights may have amplified social conflict not only by providing another context for naming enemies, but also by providing another occasion or outlet for making claims and airing grievances against others more generally. Also, the fact that only a fraction of complaints were addressed in any way must have left many with lingering dissatisfaction and cause for further grievance. As some authors have noted, ‘there is a continuity to disputing that may not be terminated even by formal decision. The end of one dispute may create a new grievance, as surely as a decision labels one party a loser or a liar...’ William L. F. Felstiner, Richard L. Abel and Austin Sarat, ‘The Emergence and Transformation of Disputes: Naming, Blaming, Claiming’, Law and Society Review, v. 15, nos. 3–4 (1980–1), p. 639.
4. Jerry Frug notes that an argument is persuasive to the extent that it appeals to the audience’s view of themselves and the way in which they experience the world. See Jerry Frug, ‘Argument as Character’, Stanford Law Review, v. 40 (April 1988), pp. 869–82.
5. Martha Minow, ‘Identities’, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, v. 3, no. 1 (Winter 1991), p. 106