bourgeois of a certain type. This contradiction, thus far, I haven’t
been able to clarify.” 9
Ernest Drezen, President of the Soviet Esperanto Union (SEU)
After three weeks of visits to party bureaucrats, cultural
commissars, electrical stations, cooperative farms, and Esperantist
intellectuals, as well as after-hours wandering in the streets of
Moscow and Leningrad, Lanti lamented “the ruin of my beliefs.” In
his bitter “Post-voyage Reflections,” he reviled the Soviets for
compromising their communist principles by endorsing capitalist
stimuli for industry and agriculture. He was still, he asserted, a
communist, and he confirmed his support of the Third International.
But, he asked, “must a communist close his eyes when he sees
something bad or ugly? Is communism a new religion [in which] …
no one can discuss anything, unwilling to risk being considered as a
heretic? ”10 He would never shed the name “Lanti,” but in 1924
began to write under yet another pseudonym: “Sennaciulo”—the
anationalist.
* * *
Lanti underestimated the rigor, tenacity, and stealth with which
Drezen would strive, for nearly twenty years, to convince the
Comintern that Esperanto was indispensable to the success of the
Soviet empire.
Drezen was as much of a contrarian as Lanti himself. For years,
he fought the intellectuals who, in line with Marxist thinker Antonio
Gramsci, dismissed Esperanto—or any other planned language—as
“rigidified and mechanized. ”11 Not until the late 1920s did the
Comintern endorse the materialist, class-based linguistic theory of V.
Y. Marr who, though not an Esperantist himself, claimed that
Esperanto might indeed play a role in a world-language revolution.
Drezen published a monograph theorizing the role of Esperanto in
the victory of world socialism with an introduction by Marr, whose
views were endorsed by Stalin in 1930 at the Sixteenth Congress of
the Communist Party. 12
Meanwhile, to settle scores with Lanti and prove his mettle to the
Comintern, Drezen pummeled SAT, claiming that its “anarchists
[and] social democrats are more dangerous enemies for the
revolutionary movement than the openly bourgeois.” 13 After La Nova
Epoko printed a satirical piece about him, Drezen had the journal
suspended. Rumors, probably with some degree of truth, began to
rumble: Drezen had had a hand in the disappearance of a Nova
Epoko editor; Drezen had betrayed a fellow Esperantist who had
protested Soviet persecution in the Ukraine. Within months, eighty
anarchists, among them several leading Soviet Esperantists, had
been killed in purges in Moscow and Leningrad.
Even as he was failing to Sovietize SAT, Drezen advocated the use
of Esperanto to Sovietize European workers. In 1924 he saw his
moment, when the Comintern set up a system of worker-
correspondents to propagandize to socialists and syndicalists in
Western Europe. Drezen enlisted Soviet Esperantists to participate,
hoping not only to propound Stalinism, but also to expand the use of
Esperanto among Soviet workers. 14 The SEU organized Esperanto
correspondence campaigns in several cities and translated Esperanto
letters from other countries into Russian. According to Lins, in the
early days of the campaign, about two thousand Esperanto letters
per month were sent from the cities of Minsk and Smolensk alone. 15
Meanwhile, an Esperanto group in Belarus sent more than four
thousand letters to workers on five continents and received even
more. In 1926, the official Soviet newspaper Izvestia declared the
Esperantists’ correspondence program a model for the whole Soviet
Union, and the Komsomol (the Communist Party’s youth wing)
published a brochure entreating youthful comrades to learn
Esperanto. Textbook sales soared, and Esperanto classes were held
in factories and offices. The more successful the Esperanto
correspondence project became, the more Drezen was emboldened
to pressure Lanti’s SAT to fall into line with the SEU.
But the very success of the project alarmed Drezen’s Comintern
superiors, who worried that propaganda composed by so many
hands—Esperantists, no less, whose loyalty was always suspect—
was not reliable. They demanded that Drezen take tighter control of
the campaign. In 1927, he instructed correspondents to confine
themselves to talking points for Sovietizing—read: Stalinizing—
Western European organizations. But by this time, Lanti in Paris had
published an anonymous Soviet letter describing unemployment,
homelessness, housing crises in cities, and ignorance in the
countryside. 16 Drezen’s drastic response was to monitor al
Esperanto correspondence, screening all incoming and outgoing
letters and translating them into Russian to allay the Comintern’s
suspicion.
After 1927, when Stalin officially turned his back on international
communism, advancing nationalistic “socialism in one country,”
Lanti would never again pay dues to the Communist Party. To
Soviets, he was a “heretic”; to Soviet-backed communists within the
SAT, a “neutralist”—an ironic slur for the author of For la
Neutralismon. Once Drezen accused Lanti of “sins and crimes …
against the revolutionary tradition,” 17 schism within SAT was
inevitable, though the endgame took three years of internecine
plotting, extortion, and threats to play out. Finally, in 1931, when
the SEU denounced SAT as “counterrevolutionary,” the rupture was
official. But the boycott of SAT did not keep European Stalinists
from the 1931 SAT Congress in Amsterdam. They went to heckle
Lanti, whose concluding remarks were disrupted by cries of
“charlatan,” “fascist,” “liar,” “bourgeois,” “Spinozist,” “schismatic,”
and “cheater.” 18 For a man who had stood up to the will of Stalin, it
was all in a day’s work.
* * *
In 1934, Lanti took a page from Zamenhof’s book, resigning the
presidency of SAT to become, as he put it, one of the ordinary
“SATanoj.” Having done so, Lanti had more pressing business than
lamenting “the ruin of [his] hopes.” With seventeen years of
journalism behind him, he began to publish books and collections of
essays. He was no philosopher; he abhorred theory as a tool of
absolutists. His articles about language and anationalism rumble like
city buses in plain, fluid prose, stopping short, from time to time, to
admit a metaphor. In a controversy over the introduction of
neologisms by Esperanto poets, Lanti argued that neologisms were
essential to the growth of the language. And somehow he found time
to translate Voltaire’s Candide; Lanti’s remains the standard
Esperanto version. In 1930 he published the first comprehensive
dictionary entirely in Esperanto, in an unlikely partnership with the
UEA; it has been in print (in revised editions) ever since.
The same year he resigned the presidency of SAT, Lanti was
married for the second time, this time to the woman who had