In an earlier circular to its organizations, SEU pointed out that the 'increased activities of neutralists' and lapses in the political education of the membership, causing misrepresentation of Soviet life in letters abroad, was directly related to its social structure—that such dangerous tenden- cies were due to the insufficient proportion of workers in SEU. In so stating the matter, SEU touched a nerve, because in fact the membership included many teachers and office employees, and only a few ordinary workers.[672] From this point forward, priority attention was devoted to the recruitment of industrial workers. The Central Committee indicated as a goal its intention to raise the percentage of workers in SEU from 17% to at least 40%. This task was urgent because in the autumn of 1928 the leaders of the official worker-correspondence movement expressed their disinclination to support the broad application of Esperanto. The question was taken up by the journal of the worker and peasant cor- respondents, Raboche-krestianskii korrespondent. in an article written by none other than Lenin's sister, Mariia Ulianova, the managing editor of the journal. She declared that Esperanto, although, thanks to its use, a few positive results in the organization of international contacts had been achieved, did not, because of its insufficient powers of expression and its limited dissemination, have a future, 'despite the paeans of praise of its practitioners'. She suggested that preferably a worker should learn a foreign national language and that there were occasions when 'Esperanto has been used in ways that harmed the Soviet Union'.[673]
This last point was more starkly emphasized by another author in the next issue of the journaclass="underline"
We have facts that confirm that Esperanto is used by enemies of the work- ing class for spreading lies and implausible information about the situation of the workers in the USSR and in capitalist countries. We should further add that in other countries Esperanto is more widespread among the petty bourgeoisie, in circles of office workers, business people and bureaucrats, in those of people who are hostile in their orientation to all things revolution- ary. It is superfluous to explain how such people use their free access, thanks to Esperanto, to links with the workers of the Soviet Union. Attention to this matter is long overdue.[674]
This warning about the misuse of Esperanto was published four months after the SEU Central Committee itself, in a letter to Sennaciulo, had confessed that 'neutral Esperantists' had been spreading 'lying informa- tion' abroad about the political situation in the Soviet Union. It came right before a conference of the Worker and Peasant Correspondents in Moscow (28 November-7 December 1928), whose agenda included the use of Esperanto. A draft resolution contained the assertion that the Esperanto movement was petty bourgeois. After discussion, in which many defenders of Esperanto spoke out, the sentence was struck out and replaced by a recommendation to use Esperanto in parallel with national languages for correspondence.[675]
The fact that the leaders of the worker-correspondence movement themselves opposed Esperanto undoubtedly unsettled SEU's activi- ties. The leaders continued to reproach the Esperantists for their over- confidence and criticized the fact that 'particularly in the provinces' the newspapers published an over-abundance of letters translated from Esperanto or printed contributions that were unnecessary, lacking in seri- ousness, nai've or simply dangerous—for example the letter of a German Esperantist who complained that the socialist and communist parties sometimes fought against one another more than they fought against the bourgeoisie.[676] An additional criticism of the Esperantists was the asser- tion that workers' Esperanto periodicals were full of personal announce- ments by stamp collectors and even people looking for wives.[677]
Throughout 1929 Mezhdunarodnyi iazyk. SEU's monthly theoreti- cal organ, devoted extensive space to efforts to refute such accusations, particularly the idea that Soviet letter writers were corresponding with the petty bourgeoisie in other countries. Agreeing that the Esperanto movement in other countries had its petty-bourgeois residue, it pointed out that, almost without exception, the correspondence belonged to the working class.i [678] To prove the point, it quoted from letters expressing foreign friends' burning curiosity about the achievements of the Soviet Union, their enthusiastic support for the struggle against kulaks and right-wing deviants and their confession that, though sometimes made hesitant by the misrepresentations of class enemies, they re-established their revolutionary equilibrium thanks to the convincing explanations of their Soviet correspondents.[679]
This leads us to a key question. To what extent were Esperantists in other countries, on whose collaboration success ultimately depended, willing to participate in this new form of collective correspondence? Were they willing to follow the path dictated to SEU by the circumstances prevailing in the Soviet Union?
In January 1929, Ida Lisichnik, one of the most active organizers of letter writing in the SEU, directed an appeal to the Sennaciulo reader- ship. She encouraged SAT members to increase their awareness of the 'social significance' of correspondence and to actively pursue connec- tions with fellow professionals, places of work, party cells, editorial teams and so on, in the various countries. She pointed out that in her city, Sebastopol, the young communists 'were extremely eager' to correspond, but that Sennaciulo did not provide them with enough addresses of part- ners matching their age and professions.[680] A month later, Barthelmess replied to Ida Lisichnik's appeal. In principle he supported it, but he named two serious obstacles which 'effectively prevented an immediate solution'. One was the imbalance of numbers between correspondence requests from the Soviet Union and replies from the rest of the world. The other obstacle preventing the expansion of letter-writing connections had its origins in Soviet particularities:
We have often noted that Soviet letter-writers are content to address slogans and dry, schematic analysis of organizational topics to their foreign com- rades. Young Soviet comrades should consider that the spiritual condition of many young comrades in other countries has been formed in surroundings totally foreign to the Soviet world and that, if they are to establish intimate contact with them, they must begin not with descriptions of organizing or party work, but by telling them about individual and collective living condi- tions in the workplace, in clubs, and in the family.[681]
Such admonitions had up to this point been unnecessary or unexpressed. They were based on current conditions which in the moment of publica- tion were in a sense already anachronistic. Barthelmess probably did not realize that, in supporting collective correspondence and calling for fewer slogans, he was advocating two things that were directly opposed to one another. The invitation to Soviet Esperantists to include in their letters descriptions of their private lives and expressions of personal feelings was undoubtedly addressed to people whose way of thinking was essentially no different from that of people living in the rest of the world. But the new form of collective correspondence was directly aimed at suppressing the incalculable risks of individuality. A primary requirement of such cor- respondence from abroad was that it harmonize with the editorial policies of the Soviet press and demonstrate the utility of Esperanto as a source of welcome information. By the same token, the flow of letters abroad should faithfully report the achievements of the building of socialism. Thus, SEU in 1929 began to prescribe to its members directly what they should write to other countries—namely 'the sense and significance of the five-year program of "Great Tasks" and the uninterrupted five-day work week and other great moments in the life of the Soviet Union'.[682]But these were precisely the kinds of topics of which many non-Soviet members of SAT had had enough; and even if they were still willing to correspond with the Soviet Union, they were less and less able to deliver the kinds of content deemed suitable for publication in Soviet newspa- pers, factory bulletins and wall newspapers.