democrats, communists, and anarchists could work together,
promoting Esperanto among the working classes of all nations.
Through Esperanto, the worldwide proletariat would arrive at a new
social order.
Neutrality, Adam wrote, was false consciousness, and he exhorted
his readers to disavow the “bourgeois miasma” of the “neutralist”
UEA, with its “dandyism” and its “desire for prestige and other
bourgeois affairs. ”3 Homaranismo and even Zamenhof himself were
cut down to size:
The author of Esperanto lacked a clear concept about the
ongoing, ceaseless, more or less bitter, battle among the
social classes.… Tolerance about religion, race or nation,
and the possibility of mutual understanding is not enough
to do away with enmity and to bring about justice. And
where there is no justice, war is latent. 4
Eugène Adam, or Lanti, the heretic
[Österreichische Nationalbibliothek]
Adam also refused to align the group with bourgeois pacifists,
including the pacifist UEA, though he had already distanced himself
from a cell of anarchist terrorists in Paris. SAT members would not
be pac-batalantoj (peace fighters); instead, they would wage class
warfare, propelled by a revolution in language.
With the founding of SAT, Adam felt it was time to rename the
workers’ journal—and himself. The first issue of the new Sennacieca
Revuo (Anational Review) came out over the name of “Lanty.” It
was a coy transcription of the French “L’anti,” a nickname he had
acquired by being tirelessly oppositional, and a fine nom de guerre
for an iconoclast. There was another reason for a pseudonym, as E.
Borsboom, Adam’s biographer, points out. Having joined the French
Communist Party at its inception in 1920, he was in danger of losing
his teaching job; besides, the chauvinist Poincaré government
fiercely opposed the teaching of Esperanto.
But this particular alias, the name by which Adam was henceforth
known in the Esperanto world, was more than a pseudonym. It was,
in Borsboom’s words, “a metamorphosis” 5 by which he passed from
one life to another. In 1921, he issued a press release noting the
suicide of his “predecessor” Eugène Adam, and duly printed a death
notice in the next issue of the Sennacieca Revuo. Teo Jung, the editor
of Esperanto Triumfonta, realized the hoax, but Edmond Privat, editor
of the UEA’s monthly Revuo Esperanto, composed a somber obituary:
E. Adam, editor of Sennacieca Revuo, killed himself in
October 1921. He wrote thus in his wilclass="underline" “Be silent about
my death. If I have friends, they should be not be funereal,
but on the contrary, joyful.” … In spite of the desire of the
deceased, we can’t be silent about his disappearance and
we must remember that he was an experienced, large-
thinking, and progressive Esperantist with real ideas. He
energetically led the interesting Sennacieca Revuo, now
edited by E. Lant[i]. 6
A new name for Adam, a new name for the journal, and a new
name for the lingvo internacia: lingvo sennacieca—the nationless
language.
* * *
In 1922 Lanti—as the name was commonly spelled—traveled to the
Soviet Union to see the workers’ revolution firsthand. He went in
search of a laboratory for putting Esperanto to work for worldwide,
classless anationalism. What he found on the streets, as he reported
in “Tri Semajnoj en Rusio” (Three Weeks in Russia), were potholes,
beggars, prostitutes, and peddlers; in the halls of government, a
warren of corrupt, heavily guarded bureaucrats, hopelessly
disorganized and overworked. He assailed Lenin’s New Economic
Policy of 1921, which permitted a modicum of capitalist enterprise,
as an egregious compromise of socialist principles: “Politically, the
Proletariat won; but economically, the victory still seems far
away. ”7 Most samideanoj received him warmly, especially the
intellectuals who edited La Nova Epoko (The New Era), none of
whom was a party member.
Language was a crucial reason for the visit. Lanti knew that the
Comintern was debating the role language might play in unifying
the Soviet Union’s diverse ethnicities and educating its largely
agrarian society. A year earlier, at the Tenth Congress, Lenin had
rejected a proposed Russification program, an act that appeared to
open the door, even a crack, to an auxiliary language. But as Lanti
learned in Moscow, the commission set up in 1919 to study the
matter had already been liquidated. In future, language matters
would be under direct control of the Comintern. In Lanti’s view, this
failure put Esperanto into eclipse, a condition exacerbated by the
cowardice of Esperantists who were party members. After a visit to
the Moscow Esperanto Club, Lanti wrote:
I have the impression that the Esperantist communists are
almost embarrassed by their Esperantism. Since the leaders
of the Comintern are not interested in the thing, it seems
that our samideanoj are afraid of compromising themselves
by propagandizing in communist circles. Severe communist
discipline, for many, suffocates the enthusiasm and fervor
for Esperanto. 8
Sennacieca Revuo, “Three Weeks in Russia,” 1922
And in Lanti’s eyes, the one Esperantist with the fervor and
influence to convince the Comintern to endorse Esperanto was too
preoccupied with his own prestige to be counted on.
Ernest Drezen was a young Latvian-born engineer from a family
of means. After serving in the Red Army, he attained a post in the
Comintern as the right-hand man of Mikhail Kalinin, the president
of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, and officially the
head of state. Recently, Drezen had become president of the newly
formed Soviet Esperanto Union (SEU). In a striking photograph
Lanti included in his articles, Drezen appears in his Red Army
uniform, his aristocratic features and broad forehead topped by
thinning hair. His face is swiveled toward the camera, half in
shadow; his gaze is intense; his lips are pursed, as though he is
choosing his words carefully.
Lanti and Drezen were Esperanto’s Hitler and Stalin; its Rabin
and Arafat. Our sole source for their meeting was Lanti, who
lambasted the phalanxes of guards and paper-pushers barring access
to Drezen’s lair in the Kremlin. Finally reached after hours of effort,
Drezen told his French visitor to come back later. At five p.m., after
scant minutes of conversation, Drezen phoned for a car to whisk
them off to his house, where his wife (a non-Esperantist) had
prepared a lavish dinner. Once home, Drezen showed off his
Esperanto library, trying to impress Lanti with his love of “nia afero”
(our affair), but Lanti’s “affair” was the recently inaugurated SAT,
and he and Drezen most definitely did not share the same view.
“[Drezen] doesn’t want to collaborate with anarchists and social
democrats,” wrote Lanti. “But, strangely, he is president of the
Soviet Esperanto Union, in which are not only anarchists but