Letters from simple, barely educated workers often have much more effect than the discourse of high politics because they are more 'alive'.[642]
Similarly, the editors of Sennaciulo called on their correspondents
[...] not to write politically colored articles, not to produce poor imitations of the professionals, but to talk in simple terms about your life, your pro- fession, the customs of your region; in this way our magazine will acquire a special character, a certain originality.[643]
When a magazine for Ukrainian working women expressed a wish to receive regular information about living conditions abroad, its Esperantist collaborators laid out for non-Soviet SAT members the topics that should be covered in letters destined for publication:
in what conditions women work in factory working-places; how they are paid (differences between men's and women's wages); how many hours they work; dangers in the workplace and accidents (injuries at work); whether the company's premises have special clothing if the work is dirty or damag- ing to clothes; whether female workers receive paid free time (time off) and for how long; is insurance available as part of employment (which a female worker can receive if sick, or in the final months of pregnancy and right after giving birth, or if injured; who, how, how long and how much gets paid in such non-working periods). Write about the exploitation of wom- en's (and particularly girls') work; write about successes in the revolution- ary women's movement and also the struggle against the petty bourgeois women's 'emancipation' movement; about cultural work among women workers; how working women, including working wives, participate in cooperative work; how workers' cooperatives facilitate the lives of women workers (establishment of cafeterias, day care, kindergartens, help for preg- nant women, etc.); unemployment among females [...] Send us a torrent of letters!! Get your friends to write! Make the letters simple, but full of facts![644]
Preference went, according to several appeals, to letters whose topics were close to the everyday experience of working people. Because articles on living conditions in various countries made up a large part of the con- tents of Sennaciulo and were evidently particularly liked by its readers, we can assume that even without special appeals most SAT members would be disinclined to engage in 'the discourse of high politics', believing that it would be more interesting and more in line with their competence if they wrote about everyday affairs.
At the end of the 1920s, the Esperanto movement in the Soviet Union was prospering. The letter-writing relations between Soviet and foreign Esperantists reached impressive numbers. In eight months the Esperantists of Sebastopol received 500 letters from 20 countries,[645] their colleagues in Kurgan in 17 months received 696 letters from 23 countries and themselves dispatched 938 pieces of correspondence.[646] In Irkutsk, where the young communists' committee recommended that its branches learn foreign languages for the purpose of international education and mentioned primarily Esperanto, foreign correspondence amounted to around 500 items a year.[647] A growing readiness on the part of editors to publish material received through such correspondence was apparent. Such material appeared regularly in 10% of Soviet periodicals.[648] In 29 Moscow periodicals a total of 82 letters, translated from Esperanto, were published[649], and in Kurgan, of 481 letters received in a single year, 86 appeared in newspapers or wall newspapers.[650] Of material on other coun- tries that appeared in 1928-29 in the Leningrad district of Volodarsky, 95% had their origins in Esperanto.1 25 The SEU periodicals regularly reported on local experiences in letter-writing activity, giving advice to SEU members about 'how by skillful use of Esperanto correspondence you can penetrate the indifference and even the opposition of all editorial staff regarding Esperanto'.[651] Editors who preferred to use national lan- guages for correspondence were criticized for wasting money by spending large sums on translators instead of using the services of Esperanto.i [652]The Esperantists also argued that their material was more authentic than that received from abroad by way of 'mediating authorities'.[653]
I t was largely due to the tireless use of Esperanto in international letter-writing work that SEU encountered more often than not a positive attitude to its work among organizations and people of influence. Early in 1928, for example, the press department of the Communist Party of Belarus noted with approval the successful activity of Esperanto corre- spondents in Minsk.[654] In that year, Soviet workers were officially urged to learn foreign languages in order to have more intimate contact with foreigners; SEU reacted to this advice by arguing that Esperanto was the most easily learned language and that it also helped in the acquisition of the national languages of other countries.i 30 These efforts brought results. The Eighth Komsomol Congress in May 1928 accepted a resolu- tion stating that Esperanto organizations 'must be used for international contact',[655] although the secretary of the All-Union Komsomol, Lazar Shatskin, counseled against learning Esperanto. His position was bal- anced, however, by the warm support of Ukrainian functionaries, who recommended that young communists pay attention to 'this vast vol- unteer movement, which came into being spontaneously, without any pressure from above'.[656] A representative of the district party committee of Vladivostok in March 1929 described as 'unhealthy' the fact that a local school was corresponding in English with a bourgeois school in the USA and recommended that 'Our schoolchildren must correspond with the children of the proletariats of other countries, and Esperanto can help with that.'[657]
In August 1929, the Central Committee of the Ukraine Komsomol, having earlier recognized the service of young communist Esperantists in the field of international correspondence, praised the 'total suitability' of Esperanto particularly for the reciprocal understanding of young workers in the various countries. It strongly recommended that its readers learn and use the language.[658] Around the same time, a well-known economist and public figure, Iurii Larin, linked the present usefulness of Esperanto with the need for international communication in the period after world revolution:
Our workers cannot master several foreign languages all at once. But it is
necessary that we have the ability to communicate with comrades in other
countries, and understand them. To be sure, those who are now entering
school will be adults by the time of the victory of the proletarian revolution
in the rest of Europe, when travel abroad (and the arrival of foreigners in our midst) will be common and widespread. But if it is difficult to master all languages, it is accordingly easy to master the single language Esperanto [...]. Right now, one can travel through the principal countries of Europe and interact with workers there with a knowledge of Esperanto alone. [...] If the teaching of the Esperanto language were introduced in our secondary schools, that would accelerate further acquaintance with the language and with foreign workers.[659]
In a book written following a journey through the Soviet Union, the British journalist and writer, Emile Joseph Dillon, reported that 16,000 Esperantists could be found there, and that in schools where non-Russian languages were taught, Esperanto occupied fourth place after English, German and French. Dillon noted with surprise the extent of Esperanto correspondence by factory workers and members of the Red Army.[660]