SAT Dismembered
SAT was aware that traditions of nationhood still had considerable sur- vival power even in the workers' movement, but at least SAT members, united by a common language, should never be infected by nationalist tendencies: they should serve instead as models for the solidarity of the worldwide proletariat. This sense of solidarity, SAT members felt, should be defended not only against narrow national loyalties but also against the parties and their competing claims to best represent the proletariat. In practice it was not possible to avoid involvement in the work of parties and unions, not least because SAT members needed to spread the word about Esperanto in such circles. The leaders of SAT, particularly Lanti, were equally concerned that party disputes not intrude on the Association and that, within SAT—which they saw as primarily a cultural and educational organization—harmony among the various political factions should pre- vail. As the addition to the constitution, accepted in Goteborg stipulated, SAT's goal was that the widening of mental horizons made possible by the international language Esperanto should counterbalance the dogmatism generated in the mind of the proletarian by party guidelines.
The fact that SAT itself did not take a specific position on the best revolutionary strategy nor was too precise in its definition of the con- tent of sennacieca thought undoubtedly helped maintain the coexistence of the members of the various parties, even though there was no lack of occasions for controversy brought on by the articles published in Sennaciulo and Sennacieca Revuo, which one or another party member could find offensive. However, in the late 1920s the areas of friction grew.
Among western non-communist SAT members the willingness to shield the Soviet Union from all forms of criticism declined, particularly when in the individual countries the relations between communists and social democrats grew more contentious. It was only a matter of time before SAT's balancing act would be disrupted.
SAT members, for example the social democrats, firmly embedded in a particular party, nonetheless worked harder than ever to prevent SAT from getting drawn into the growing antagonism of communists and socialists. Those who had earlier often complained about communist dominance in SAT, but who for the sake of unity had avoided polem- ics, now paid particular attention to the question of whether SAT would retain its independence. For them it was particularly important that developments in SAT not impede their work at home, particularly in their national social democratic party.
The social democrats were not alone. Those who had no party to fall back on or who did not need to consider their national situation were equally concerned to preserve SAT's unity. But these members felt that it was important to give SAT a more independent character that would allow the Association to resist getting drawn into party disputes. Lanti, particularly, was among them.
Sooner or later, SEU had to recognize the 'sovietization' of the commu- nist movement and try to modify its cooperation with SAT. After Leipzig, Franz Jonas called on the socialist SAT members to be prudent, pointing out that the insulting expression 'social fascism', used by the commu- nists, covered at least half of the membership of SAT.[705] Shortly thereafter, in November, the bulletin Kunligilo began publication, as the organ of the 'International Communist Esperantist Interest Group' (Internacia Komunisma Esperantista Frakcio). Kunligilo openly raised the question of whether 'class conscious' Esperantists could any longer remain in 'a politically amorphous association like SAT'. Might they not have to leave if the 'mistaken opportunistic philosophizing' of its leaders continued?[706]
Particularly troubling to SAT were developments in the Workers' Esperanto Association for the German-language Regions (GLEA), after SEU the largest national organization collaborating with SAT. Although a majority of its membership consisted of non-communists, the GLEA's board was, as early as 1924, primarily communist. In its annual meet- ing of April 1930 in Essen, a majority of the delegates voted to join the 'Workers' Culture Circle', which was a clearly communist organization.
For SAT, GLEA's abandonment of its party-independent character was a major blow. An even larger and unexpected blow came a couple of months after the events in Essen. The SAT administration informed its membership that the Soviet Commissar for Finance had forbidden further transfer of money from SAT's accounts in Moscow, which had reached the sum of 15,000 German marks, and that therefore, at least for the moment, no further payments for purchases or subscriptions could be accepted from the Soviet Union.)2 SAT was threatened with bank- ruptcy by the middle of the year.
Demidiuk explained that because of the foreign boycott of Soviet goods[707] the state was obliged to limit the scheduled export of money and that this decision was not applied to SAT alone. He also promised that SEU, to the extent that it could, would do everything possible to offset the debt.[708] But, despite this conciliatory effort, tension in the relations between SAT and SEU moved to a climax. A significant role was played by the feelings of the members. Outside the Soviet Union the financial issue dispelled any remaining illusions about the natural alliance of the proletarian state and 'the cultural and cooperative organization of prole- tarian Esperantists', while despair set in among Soviet SAT members at the prospect that, from now on, the only reading material available to them would be Esperanto-language brochures on the building of social- ism, published by SEU and translated from Russian.
Early in 1930 SAT held its Tenth Congress, in London. For the first time in seven years no Soviet delegates attended; no explanation for their absence was provided to the congress organizing committee. Instead, in the first working meeting of the congress the arrival of a telegram from Moscow was suddenly announced. The text of this telegram did not declare, as many people anticipated, that the money problem had been solved, but crudely accused the leaders of the Association of creat- ing division in its ranks.[709] The mood abruptly changed. Lucien Laurat, the Austrian-French former member of the SEU Central Committee, launched a counter-offensive, declaring his suspicion that 'certain Soviet comrades' had exploited the money transfer problem to 'squeeze out' of SAT a guarantee that Sennaciulo would continue to report favorably on the Soviet Union.[710] When it became known that SEU had invited the next congress to Moscow, but had set an implicit condition that first the current leadership of SAT had to be removed from office, Lanti and his friends adopted the interpretation that the money transfer issue had served SEU as a welcome occasion to weaken SAT's financial base and blackmail it into suppressing the spread of 'anti-Soviet' tendencies.
Even as Demidiuk and possibly also Drezen were trying to fix the money problem, SEU was made painfully aware of the delicate implications that its entire cooperation with SAT carried with it on the home front. The warning came from one of the most authoritative politicians in the Soviet Union. In June 1930, Komunist, the journal of the Communist Party of Ukraine, published, under the title 'Esperantization or Ukrainization' the text of a speech by Mykola Skrypnyk (in Russian, Nikolai Skrypnik), the Ukrainian People's Commissar for Education.[711] In his speech, Skrypnyk addressed progress and obstacles in the dissemination of the Ukrainian language in Ukraine—a process aimed at overcoming the centuries-long legacy of Russification. Concerning the obstacles, Skrypnyk devoted extensive attention to the theory of sennaciismos whose adepts he had found, much to his surprise, even among young communists. His stance was disapproving. The fact that in a few schools Esperanto was taught and was presented as an alternative to Ukrainization, served him as an example of what he saw as a tendency to move immediately to the idea of a unifying language and—in the name of internationalism—to underestimate the significance of national languages and cultures in the era of socialist con- struction. This was to ignore, said Skrypnyk, the existence of the mother tongue of millions of working people and hence also the practical task of raising their cultural level through a language spoken by the masses. Those who argued for the compulsory introduction of Esperanto in the schools, he claimed, had the petty bourgeois desire to escape Ukrainization; if a new school subject was needed, then training for trades should be intro- duced, not Esperanto. If the Esperantists advocated a separate interna- tional, sennacieca culture, in opposition to the national culture of the masses, their theory should be resisted, because it was neither proletarian nor communist nor international, but reactionary and false.