However, the obstacles to their activities Esperantists in Germany faced pale by comparison with those existing in Russia. In 1904, the year before the first Russian revolution, the censorship showed signs of easing, making it possible to publish Esperanto journals. After the revolution, the conditions for recruitment improved, and thus the ability to increase the membership of Esperanto groups.
But the authorities continued to regard the Russian Esperantists with suspicion. Although they avoided social and political topics, of the kind that might give the censors a pretext for again slowing the movement, the publications of the Esperantists left no doubt about their position that 'Esperanto is not a goal but a tool', and that the movement had to be based on the struggle for democratization, attention to 'disseminating education among the masses' and the battle against 'national exclusion'.[126]Between the lines they took the opportunity, whenever it presented itself, to criticize the current conditions in Russia. In the autumn of 1905 the censor disallowed the publication in Ruslanda Esperantisto of the contri- bution 'Rachel and Leah' by the publicist Aleksandr Yablonovsky[127]; the article compared the biblical story of Jacob, who received Leah as his wife instead of Rachel whom he loved, with the national Duma (parliament) given to the people instead of a democratic constitution.[128]
At the time, the Esperanto movement had already made considerable progress in other countries where the strict thought control practiced by the Russian bureaucracy was unknown. As a consequence, the Saint Petersburg censor increasingly intervened to stop foreign publications in Esperanto from entering the country if their content was considered dan- gerous. The Esperanto novel Paŭlo Debenham 1 by the German-British writer Heinrich Luyken, was blocked in 1912 because of a reference to the 'unhappy country' Russia and its 'unhappy peoples'.[129] A similar fate befell several books of political or religious character.
I f censorship softened somewhat, on the other hand there was an increase in incidents that revealed that the ruling classes and their servants, the police, regarded activity for Esperanto strictly in terms of internal security. In 1906, a police officer appeared in a meeting of Esperantists in Vladivostok and ordered them not to speak publicly about Esperanto.[130]
We might note, though, that in the same city in 1909 there was an Esperanto circle in operation among political prisoners.[131] Particularly at the provincial level, occasional denunciations of Esperantists occurred. In 1911 the police chief in Petrokov ordered that street signs with Esperanto texts be removed because people did not understand them.[132] And also, apparently only because of Esperanto activity, the representative of UEA in Kronstadt was arrested; he was kept in jail for over a month and subse- quently was refused permission to continue living in the city.[133]
Despite these continued obstacles, new recruits, both intellectuals and working people, were attracted to Esperanto. With the growing strength of the revolutionary movement, the police turned increasing attention to radical elements among the Russian Esperantists. In 1912 a circular of the Tsarist Okhrana (secret police) warned of the activities of revo- lutionary Esperantists in Paris, whose Russian sympathizers were the subject of a recent report by a special agent.^[134] Less than 20 years after the authorities had first drawn attention to the use of Esperanto among the Tolstoyans, Zamenhof's language was increasingly feared as a vehicle for the most dangerous thought. When in 1913 an Esperantist from the Caucasus asked permission to publish an 'international language bulle- tin', the request was refused because 'Esperanto, having appeared among worldwide socialists, will become ... a means for spreading harmful ideas among the people'.[135]
Other than among the Russian Esperantists, police surveillance or direct harassment was directed at Esperantists only in a few economically less devel- oped countries. Among the earliest was an incident in 1907 on the Greek island of Samos, at that time an independent principality. Shortly after the founding of an Esperanto club in the capital, two lawyers, perhaps in jest, persuaded a local villager that Esperanto was a form of freemasonry and had anti-religious goals. The overwrought villager succeeded in convincing several neighbors in a nearby village that these impious Esperantists had to be pun- ished. Some 30 countryfolk, armed with sticks, pitchforks, clubs and axes, marched on the Esperanto society's meeting place, where, finding nobody present, they broke the frame of Zamenhof's portrait, ripped up books and broke the furniture. They clamored for the death of the Esperantists. In the end, yielding to the entreaties of the people, the ruling prince ordered the society's dissolution because 'public order was undermined'.[136]
More serious incidents were reported from China, where apparently the propaganda of Chinese anarchists in Paris marked Esperantists in several Chinese locations with the stigma of activities against the state. In December 1911 the leader of the Esperanto group in Mukden was threatened with arrest as a revolutionary guilty of adoring Tolstoy and Esperanto; he was able to escape punishment only by fleeing the city. Another leader in China was killed by an unknown assailant, after which the mayor declared that 'Esperanto will cause a revolution'.[137] In October 1913 several German-language newspapers reported that in the Hungarian town of Szekesfehervar the chief of police had forbidden a publicity meeting of Esperantists, apparently on the grounds that they were using a 'thieves' language'. Questions were raised in the Hungarian parliament. It was not clear whether the police chief had prevented the meeting because it had to do with Esperanto or because it was not announced in the proper fashion. But he himself later confessed that he had warned the Esperantists not to use Esperanto as a secret language that their employers could not understand.40
The impression that could be conveyed by these examples, namely that at the time Esperanto was irrevocably linked to or associated with 'left- ism', nonetheless requires some adjustment. Two facts weigh against the simplistic notion that in the years before the First World War there was a clear dividing line between progressive Esperantists on the one hand and reactionary opponents on the other. First, the people learning the language were for the most part apolitical, and the movement at that time was firmly in the hands of individuals whom a convinced socialist would have regarded as 'class enemies'. Secondly, the established workers' parties for the most part paid no attention to the Esperantists and only excep- tionally supported them or even opposed them. Efforts by the French socialists Jean Jaures and Edouard Vaillant to put on the agenda of the Socialist Congress in Stuttgart (1907) a proposal that Esperanto be used in official announcements of the Brussels-based International Socialist Office collapsed, primarily because of the opposition of the German social democrat Paul Singer.[138]
For a while the leaders of the German Social Democratic Party even prohibited any mention of Esperanto in their party newspapers, particu- larly the official organ Vorwarts, and when in 1914 the Ninth German Esperanto Congress took place in Leipzig, while the local middle- class press reported on it favorably, the Social Democratic Leipziger Volkszeitung ridiculed Esperanto.[139] A Russian worker complained in 1913 that his superiors considered Esperanto 'a superfluous affair' and that they feared that 'the workers will be distracted from their urgent pri- orities'.[140] Likewise, the Dutch socialist Willem van Ravesteijn called the Esperanto movement a 'bourgeois folly' and propaganda for the language among the workers 'a dangerous little game'.[141] But there were examples of an opposite kind. Thus, the Czech social democrats passed a highly favor- able resolution on Esperanto at their tenth congress in 1911.[142] On the occasion of the Eighth World Congress of Esperanto in Krakow in 1912, the local branch of the Polish Social Democratic Party organized a large demonstration of socialists from various countries/6 The Italian anar- chist Errico Malatesta himself learned the language;[143] the Japanese Osugi Sakae in 1907-08 led an Esperanto course in Tokyo for, among others, Chinese students,[144] and his Chinese comrade Liu Shifu, from 1913 until his physical exhaustion in 1915, published the important Chinese- and Esperanto-language journal La Vo^o de la Popolo, which also served as a propaganda tool for Esperanto.49 In truth, the beginnings of Esperanto in China were almost inseparably linked with the revolutionary struggle. Yet the fact remains that before the First World War left-wing elements in general were unable to make the Esperanto movement theirs.[145] Even the German chauvinist press, avidly searching for proof of Esperanto's danger, barely developed the argument that the language, in addition to undermining German culture and business, might be accompanied by the ideologies of class warfare.