Fortunately, after the war the international Esperanto movement rec- ognized its moral responsibility to the numerous victims of fascism.[533]On 14 April 1946, Polish Esperantists raised their green flag of hope in the stony desert that was once Warsaw to mark the spot where the home of Zamenhof had stood (Fig. 4.2).
The gesture symbolized their invincible enthusiasm for Esperanto. But it was not enough simply to continue along the road of idealism, how- ever honorable such a course may have been in the face of fascist attack. The 'naive internationalism of Zamenhof's time is over', 1 91 declared UEA's journal at the end of 1946. Indeed, the 'internal idea' in its tradi- tional, somewhat unclear form, and with its tendency to exaggerate the role of Esperanto, was unsuited to the period of postwar reconstruction.
Understanding this reality, the leaders of the neutral movement, led by the Yugoslav Ivo Lapenna, did not attempt to formulate a new ideology for Esperantism, but instead declared the Esperanto movement loyal to values valid not only for Esperantists but more widely recognized, namely the values of human rights.
When, in the middle of 1947 UEA was re-established as the represen- tative organization of the international Esperanto movement, it added to its constitution a paragraph declaring that 'respect for human rights is an essential condition for its work'.[534] In so doing, UEA emphasized that its neutrality regarding politics, race and religion extended only as far as respect for fundamental human rights and only when the development of peace and international cooperation was not threatened. Thus, UEA redefined the principle of neutrality—in a way different from the timo- rous, passive neutrality practiced in the earlier hurricane of persecution.
Esperanto survived the fascist era, proving its viability in the face of pressure and persecution by ruthless enemies. Thus, in the sense that the movement both learned its lesson through its own mistakes and moved on to a more realistic judgment of the external world, it would be right to say that Esperanto triumphed over fascism.
Part III
'Language of Petty Bourgeois and Cosmopolitans'
5
Finding a Place for Esperanto in the Soviet Union
Post-revolutionary Hopes
In the previous section we saw how the Esperanto movement suffered under the attacks of conservative and fascist regimes. We will now turn to a second variety of persecution. This variety came from a regime that considered itself the vanguard of worldwide socialism. Exploring the details and causes of the suppression of Esperanto in the Soviet Union is incomparably more difficult than analyzing the persecutions under Hitler because for many years we had no access to archival material generated by the authorities responsible for the suppression. Until 1988, the topic went unmentioned in the Soviet Union, and so researchers had to be con- tent with the limited documentation available to them—documentation so limited that it was difficult indeed to gain a clear understanding of the fortunes of the Esperanto movement.
From the beginning, the Russian Esperantists were a numerous— and extremely progressive—element among the enthusiasts for the International Language. The American historian Richard Stites charac- terized their movement as 'emphatically middle-class and respectable—
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 159
U. Lins, Dangerous Language — Esperanto under Hitler and Stalin, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54917-4_5
cosmopolitan and urban, but also patriotic'.[535] The vast majority of them undoubtedly welcomed the political changes of 1917, if only because of the disappearance of the barriers of censorship and police interference that characterized the old regime.
The text of a 1919 poster perhaps best illustrates the hopes of these Esperantists in a post-Tsarist Russia. It was published by 'Esperanto House' in Moscow, a former mansion,[536] which the government, with- out charge, put at the disposal of local and national Esperanto organiza- tions.[537] The poster compares the historical significance of the Communist Manifesto of 1848 with that of Zamenhof's language project of 1887. The call of the former, 'Workers of the world, unite!' was answered by the October Revolution; now the time had come for a liberated proletariat to tackle, with comparable energy, the task of realizing the idea contained in the latter—adopting Esperanto as the worldwide instrument of com- munication for the proletariat.[538]
Many Russian Esperantists were fired with enthusiasm at the prospect of helping to liberate their oppressed comrades in the West through the medium of the language of the worldwide proletariat, Esperanto.[539] This spontaneous desire to put Esperanto at the service of world revolution accorded with the atmosphere of the first years of Soviet rule. It is no acci- dent that a rapid increase in the numbers of Esperanto groups occurred in the same period as the so-called proletarian cultural movement was also expanding, namely between 1917 and 1921. According to the inspi- ration behind that movement, Aleksandr Bogdanov,[540] the worldwide pro- letariat could come together not only through political and economic activity but also through cultural collaboration. With emotions border- ing on exultation, the followers of 'Proletkult' proclaimed the proletariat the conveyor of a new culture, radically different from the earlier, bour- geois culture. This soon-to-be created proletarian culture was destined to become the general culture of all people after the destruction of class divisions in society.
The radical plea for a new culture for all humankind sounded attrac- tive to Esperantists as well. Likewise, within the proletarian cultural movement there was considerable support for embracing Esperanto. In February 1919, one of the theorists of 'Proletkult', Platon Kerzhentsev, in an article on 'International revolution and proletarian culture', argued that, to facilitate cultural exchange among the workers of various coun- tries, thought had to be given to a (proletarian) international language.[541]Bogdanov also devoted a 1919 lecture to the topic 'Proletarian culture and the international language', in which, however, he saw English as providing the core of such a language.[542] An All-Russian Congress of Art unanimously voted in favor of Esperanto.[543]
Such hopes were not without substance. In 1918-19 Esperanto groups existed in around 100 locations in Russia.[544] Early in 1920, the Polish and German press published a release containing an extract from a Soviet Russian magazine announcing the compulsory introduction of Esperanto in schools in accordance with the decision of a government commission.[545]The French writer Romain Rolland, winner of the Nobel Prize for litera- ture in 1915, called this apparent decision 'a historic event',[546] and sev- eral national Communist Party congresses, influenced by the news from
Soviet Russia, approved resolutions in support of Esperanto.[547] The decree seemed to put workers of all countries under a kind of obligation to learn Esperanto. But, from the beginning, doubts were raised about the verac- ity of the report, and in May 1920 the People's Commissar for Education Anatolii Lunacharsky denied that such a decision had been made.[548]