Organizationally, SEU noted growth 'to an almost catastrophic degree'. In May 1928 the Central Committee calculated that a second ten thou- sand people 'have been attracted to our circles and groups'. The active members of SEU (subscribers to the journals) at that time numbered 3500. In a mere six months, a total of 35,000 textbooks were sold.1 37 Although these achievements still did not satisfy SEU and although it often reproached its local groups for organizational lapses, public inter- est in Esperanto seemed sufficiently large to look to the future with optimism.
The Growing Class Struggle and the 'Misuse' of Esperanto
Although local newspapers during this period supposedly had a degree of freedom in the choice of what letters to publish, on what topics, this freedom was not as broad as the topics chosen by the letter writers. In other words, not everything that foreigners wrote to their Soviet friends was actually publishable. Lanti himself experienced this problem as early as 1924-25 when he was serving as an Esperantist correspondent for a Siberian newspaper. After about six months he resigned his—paid— position, having received word from the editors 'that my articles are not much to the readers' liking; not because they are not interesting, but because I apparently don't believe that French capitalism is standing on the brink of bankruptcy; and also because I haven't reported sufficiently optimistically about the "progress" of the communist party'.[661]
It is not surprising that Lanti's openness clashed with the editorial cri- teria of a Soviet newspaper. But, more significantly, personal correspon- dence was also not without its problems. Foreign Esperantists, in their letters, often (partly unintentionally) led their readers to understand that the living conditions of workers in capitalist countries were not irremedi- ably worse than those in the Soviet Union. They also, even if they were fully sympathetic with the building of socialism in the Soviet Union, sometimes revealed the phenomenon of revolutionary virginity, namely the attitude of people who naively measured Soviet realities in accordance with their imagination of the character of a successful revolution. For example, one writer, in a letter to his Soviet correspondent, expressed amazement at the information that Soviet trade unions 'had to be con- cerned with making work more productive' rather than fighting for the worker against the factory administration. In response to such letters, SEU in 1926 warned their members to avoid giving inaccurate or impre- cise information about life in the Soviet Union, which 'fosters confusion among workers in other countries'.[662]
In the first three years of the program, SEU only sporadically alluded to negative issues with the correspondence. If problems were mentioned at all, they related to such matters as the 'difficult conditions' under which correspondents in other countries had to work,[663] or the fact that in a few countries Esperantists corresponding with the Soviet Union were harassed.[664] That the presentation of the Soviet Union in these letters began to be a matter of attention emerged for the first time in April 1927 in a discussion in Sennaciuloi in which Demidiuk expressed his fury about earlier published assertions by a certain 'Soviet citizen' con- cerning salaries, taxes, rent and holidays, which, Demidiuk maintained, 'confused the facts to such an extent that it looked like the beginning of systematic misinformation about the Soviet Union'.i [665] The problem was made clearer in a letter published in Sennaciulo in early 1928, in which an Esperantist from Rostov complained that the magazine contained 'abun- dant material about the total success of Soviet workers' economic and cultural life'. The writer entered a plea for reporting about his country that was more in conformity with the reality. He recommended that the Soviet Esperantists 'not remain silent on such topics as unemployment, homelessness [...], the urban housing shortage, the lack of education of country people', because only in this way would the comrades in other countries receive 'a full picture'. The letter ended with the words 'I believe that the truth must come first'.[666]
The correspondence during this period seems to have dealt more and more with the negative sides of Soviet life. Foreign Esperantists displayed in their letters a bothersome curiosity, asking their correspondents what they thought about the struggles within the Soviet Communist Party fol- lowing the expulsion in December 1927 of the opposition figures Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev. The Bavarian SAT member Karl Weber, in a let- ter to his friend Veniamin Zyrianov, approved the expulsion but at the same time expressed disagreement about 'the deadly punishment of exile, because it is a counterrevolutionary, anti-Marxist perpetration'. Weber also asked about the truth of the rumors that the letters sent abroad by Soviet Esperantists 'were for the most part not written by them, but by some Esperanto office', to which they were required to submit correspon- dence received from other countries. He warned that, if such informa- tion proved true, he and his comrades would stop corresponding with Soviet Esperantists, because under such conditions they 'would always be deceived and would never learn the truth about the Soviet Union'.[667]Because the incidence of disagreeable interest on the part of foreign- ers continued to grow, often stimulated by letters from the Soviet Union itself, the SEU Central Committee in June 1928 took an unprecedented step. In a letter addressed to the editors of Sennaciulo the committee stated:
Recently, individual neutral Esperantists still resident in the Soviet Union [...] have spread lying information in their letters abroad about apparent political and economic crises in the Soviet Republics, about alleged cruel treatment of political prisoners [...]. Foreign proletarian Esperantists [...] are clearly confused by such information—with the result that many ques- tions about the truth of such information have been received by SEU orga- nizations and by individual Esperantists in the Soviet Republics.[668]
At the same time the Central Committee sent the SEU organizations a circular, warning them against 'misinformation' emanating from the Soviet Union. The circular confirmed that such difficulties with corre- spondence did not come only from the letters of Soviet 'neutralists'. The numerous questions from abroad about the actions of the opposition had created confusion among the SEU membership: 'Frequently our com- rades, unable to reply to all, often difficult, questions, have been bom- barding the SEU Central Committee with letters asking for advice'.[669]
SEU had already confessed to 'a few sufficiently serious defects' in the correspondence between Soviet and foreign Esperantists. Responsibility for such problems lay above all in the fact that the correspondence was carried out almost exclusively on an individual basis. SEU described the defects as follows:
[... the] circle of use of the letters received is very narrow, and often, apart from the correspondent himself, no one knows about this correspondence. In individual correspondence, misinformation to comrades abroad about life in the Soviet Union is more frequent; individual correspondence is very hard to assess.
To avoid such misinformation, SEU believed it necessary to reorga- nize the correspondence effort completely. It recommended 'that such correspondence should now move to a higher level—to that of collec- tive correspondence'. What would such an arrangement look like? SEU gave the following illustration: a letter from abroad would be publicly discussed in a group, its translation would be posted on a special notice board so that non-Esperantists could also be informed of its content, and finally the response to the foreign correspondent should be the result of a collectively discussed text, initially developed in the Russian language.[670]By the call for 'collective correspondence', it was clear that SEU aimed at greater control. A member of the Central Committee, Roman Nikolsky, urged that 'private individual correspondence be replaced, completely and by all means possible, by collective correspondence by conforming groups (associated with the party, professions, trade unions, etc.) and by correspondence for newspapers'.[671]