Letter Writing
Given that the possibility of direct contact or face-to-face conversation with foreign Esperantists was always extremely limited, no other practical use of Esperanto was more important than correspondence. Correspondence, opening as it did a doorway to the outside world, satisfied personal aspira- tions and at the same time, given the goodwill of the authorities for the idea of international workers' correspondence generally, helped raise the prestige and the organizational strength of SEU as a whole.
The aspirations of many Soviet Esperantists were apparent in the large number of requests for correspondents that appeared in almost every issue of Sennaciulo. The feelings stirred by this awareness of links with the whole world through the medium of Esperanto were well described by the Germanist Lev Kopelev,[634] who in 1926, as a schoolboy in Kiev, began studying the language. Describing his teacher and the enthusiasm that he ignited among young people, Kopelev writes:
The newspapers offered only the same boring telegraphed stories from abroad, while the magazines, with their dark grey photographs, gave only dull reflections of far-off foreign life.
By contrast, Kopelev alludes to
the personal letters from distant lands, only recently received, addressed to this man right in front of us, our teacher. From an old satchel he took postcards and envelopes, so bright they seemed lacquered with rare and wondrous stamps. You could hold them in your hands, sniff them—inhale the air of London, Paris, San Francisco, Tokyo ...
[...] he showed us postcards from Australia, Japan, Spain, Argentina. ... All of them began with the same salutation: 'Kamarado or 'Samideano' (fellow thinker).[635]
A similar description of an enthusiastic Soviet worker is provided by Andrei Platonov in his novel Happy Moscow. His hero, in whose room hung portraits of Lenin, Stalin and Zamenhof, received letters from dif- ferent parts of the world almost every day:
Clerks and factory works, far-off men pinned to the ground by eternal exploitation, had learned Esperanto and so conquered the silence between peoples; drained by hard work, too poor for travel, they communicated with one another through shared thought.
The Soviet correspondent replies to every letter, proudly recounting the steady improvement in life thanks to socialism, and anticipating a time when 'a whole billion of them' [workers] will want to come to the Soviet Union 'and live with us forever, bringing their families—and, as for capi- talism, let it remain empty, unless a revolution sets in there as well'.[636]
What was the content of these exchanges of letters? The sheer num- ber of letters exchanged between Soviet Esperantists and those in other countries makes it more or less impossible to give an overview of the top- ics covered. But the fact that for the most part this correspondence was targeted does allow us to draw some conclusions about favored topics. Because SEU wanted to share the letters received with as large a public as possible, namely by publishing them in the press, the organization both offered its members advice on how to organize their correspondence[637]and also sought to instruct the correspondents in other countries about the kinds of letters they should write to serve as material for Soviet pub- lications. Analysis of the instructions addressed to correspondents abroad about preferred topics reveals primarily two characteristics.
First, correspondents were warned not to fill the letters with trivia. Instead of descriptions of 'the beauties of the homeland or purely bour- geois, local sensations', Soviet readers expected—as the activist Pavel
Kiriushin, of Minsk, put it—letters in which workers should 'freely' recount the various aspects of their lives:
For us and for our readers it will be interesting to know from the letter of a simple worker what kinds of working conditions exist in given places in a given country, and it is important if the description is an eye-witness account. Similarly interesting for us is to read about the political rights of workers, about harassment of the workers' movement, about workers' ide- als, and about the feeling of worldwide brotherhood among working people.[638]
There was no lack of readiness on the part of western comrades to reply to such appeals, because the topics indicated seemed, in this general for- mulation, of common interest to workers in all countries. Many were convinced that the Soviet Union merited their support and so they will- ingly used Esperanto to demonstrate their solidarity. For their part, they hoped, in return, to receive from their Soviet correspondents informa- tion on living conditions in the Soviet Union that could be published in national-language workers' periodicals. With this in mind, the most enthusiastic among them even asked their Soviet friends directly for help in providing authentic information that would correct misrepresenta- tions about their country. For example, soon after the British Evening News asserted, in June 1927, that Soviet workers had to pay personally for the education of their children, Sennaciulo published a brief related article that asked whether 'some Soviet reader would help us rebut these bourgeois lies by replying to the following questions: [.. .]'[639] On another occasion the journal published a translation of an article that appeared in Mŭnchner Zeitung about Siberia, quoting examples from the Siberian press of uncivilized behavior, drunkenness, homelessness and super- stition; the translator, a SAT member from Munich, asked that these assertions be answered so that he could demand a correction from the newspaper.[640]
But it would be incorrect to suppose that these letter-writing contacts between Soviet and foreign Esperantists were stimulated by the fervor of people who believed that bourgeois papers contained only falsehoods about the Soviet Union and that Esperanto opened a privileged route to knowledge of the truth. On the contrary, the correspondence flourished in large part because those SAT members who were less inclined to regard the Soviet Union as a model for the building of socialism found it inter- esting in itself and important for the Esperanto movement. Many began corresponding with Soviet citizens out of natural curiosity about living conditions in their country and the desire to describe their own environ- ment in their letters. They understood that in the Soviet Union there was a great deal of interest in corresponding with other countries, and they were happy to respond to it—also to advance Esperanto. This awareness was sharpened by the warnings published from time to time in Sennaciulo about the threat of imbalance in the dissemination of Esperanto between the Soviet Union and other countries.[641]
This brings us to the second principal characteristic of the correspon- dence. As the warnings about disequilibrium suggest (and to them we could add the constant admonitions that SAT members should be faith- ful and timely correspondents), the desire to keep the letter writing going clearly exceeded any tendency to limit the topics to be covered. Efforts to prescribe the contents of the letters in any case held little promise of suc- cess. Certainly the comrades in other countries did not limit themselves to complaints about their miserable lives under capitalism and, on the other hand, their Soviet correspondents did not confine themselves to long reports of their victories in the building of socialism. The encour- agement of correspondents to cover topics in their letters that could later be of interest also to newspaper readers could not weaken the element of spontaneity, curiosity and personal pleasure. Furthermore, for the intended exploitation of foreign letters in, for example, factory newslet- ters, there was even an initial preference for the specific atmosphere of the personal letter. The coloring of individuality in the letters written by foreigners was popular among readers, as a worker Esperanto correspon- dent in Kremenchug emphasized early in 1927: