For SAT's Soviet members, the schism was a painful experience. Their cooperation with SAT was too active, its utility as a means of contact with worker Esperantists outside the Soviet Union too evident, for the breakdown of unity not to leave a deep wound. The SAT members in the Soviet Union were in effect torn from their comfortable home; for them the non-arrival of Sennaciulo meant goodbye to a journal to which they had often contributed, through which they communicated their wishes for correspondents, and which kept them supplied with reading matter of a kind no longer to be found in the Soviet press.
The separation of SAT and SEU not only destroyed many years of cooperation but also shook the internal workings of the Soviet Esperanto movement. This was apparent from the time the blockage of SAT's money became known. Shocking and upsetting as it was to the Soviet members, it was not accepted without resistance. SAT's Soviet mem- bers did not want to believe that workers' money in the Soviet Union would be blocked from flowing to a workers' association abroad, and they were furious because SAT, which had always assisted the Soviet Union and which, because of that support, had often been called by its class enemies 'a covert communist enterprise', should now suffer such undeserved treatment.^5 Insistent requests were addressed to the SEU Central Committee calling on it to restore the transfer of subscription payments to SAT because the well-being of the local Esperanto move- ment was seriously hindered by the absence of Sennaciulo, the journal 'so read and enjoyed by everyone'.[729] In Sennaciulo letters appeared from Soviet members complaining (anonymously) about the 'inertia' of the SEU Central Committee concerning the transfer of funds.s[730] After the imposition of censorship made it impossible even to take advantage of gift subscriptions, many people composed bitter letters to SAT, in which blame for the situation was often assigned to the Central Committee in Moscow. Lanti, after initial hesitation, made extensive use of these let- ters in defending himself against the communist attacks. Letters from Soviet members appeared in Sennaciulo declaring support for SAT's lead- ership and at the same time expressing strong disapproval of the Central Committee, particularly Drezen.[731]
There is no proof that the blocking of payments was due to action by Drezen. He himself called it 'a monstrous lie' and officially complained to the Control Commission of SAT, citing 'compromise of personality' on the part of the leadership.[732] Nonetheless, the SAT leadership focused its counterattacks largely on Drezen. It denied that it had a hostile attitude to the Soviet Union and even posed as its most fervent defender, while Drezen was characterized as 'a conspirator and pseudo-communist' who had denounced SAT to the Soviet authorities 'to hide his bourgeois back- ground, his Esperantist neutralism, and to seem orthodox'.[733] This was a much sharper attack than the lines on Drezen that the Hungarian poet Kalman Kalocsay published at about this time, which began as follows:
Drezen, la ruga-verda car'
Rigore regas en la SEU,
Postulas, oni lin obeu
En ciu pens' kaj ciu far'.[734]
[Drezen, Tsar both green and red,
Rules strictly in the S.E.U.,
Insists that they obey him, too,
In all that's thought and done and said.]
Lanti tried to outflank Drezen on the left and to appeal to the solidar- ity of the Soviet SAT members. The SAT congress in Stuttgart (1932) accordingly sent the Soviet members 'brotherly greetings over the heads of the current Central Committee of SEU'.) [735] SAT's leadership could hardly be surprised that Drezen and the Central Committee for their part campaigned against it.[736] Drezen, already on the defensive following the attacks by a senior state functionary to which we have already alluded, was inevitably further intimidated by the public appeal to the Soviet SAT members that they free themselves from a leader described as a clandes- tine enemy of the Soviet Union. This controversy was bound to collide with the political pressure directed at SAT from within the country—not to mention the fact that Lanti's theses on sennaciismo in effect forced SEU to line up against SAT. SEU had been damaged by the discovery that Soviet SAT members had written letters in support of the SAT leader- ship in Paris. That SEU would not yield and that the attacks from Paris would not shake Drezen's position is clear from the following statement in its minutes: 'The SEU Central Committee calls on local organizations of SEU and SAT to stamp out the agents of the reformist wing who have penetrated the ranks of the Soviet Esperanto movement.'[737]
References to 'traitors' among the Soviet Esperantists showed that SEU intended to silence everyone who maintained contact with the SAT headquarters in Paris. One person who quickly went silent was Maksim Kriukov in Irkutsk, a party member as of 1904, who in 1907 met Zamenhof[738] and, in frequent contributions to Sennaciulo, emphasized the revolutionary character of sennaciismo.[739] The members were urged to identify and unmask the disciples of Lanti in their midst. With pedantic precision the names of the SEU members whose position in the conflict seemed unclear were duly listed. Thus, of the group in Kokhma it was noted that it was teaching Esperanto to hundreds of people 'neutrally', without giving them 'living tasks' through correspondence. As an illustra- tion of the 'complete decadence' reigning there, the words of one student of Esperanto were noted:
Why should I write about my life to foreign comrades if I am just an office- worker, i.e. a pariah, an outlaw, if my children do not learn in a school, if I receive almost nothing from a factory, if I do not relax after work but toil in the forest or stand in line outside shops, etc.?
These 'disgusting words' were attributed to the influence of Lanti. The result was that the Ivanovo Regional Committee 'decided to carry out a personal purge of all city Esperantists' in Kokhma.[740]
Although the journal La Socialisto in Austria conjectured in 1931 that intelligent Esperantists in the Soviet Union were retiring from the organization 'to silently protest against intellectual endogamy',[741] the official statistics of SEU showed an increase in membership: at the end of 1930 there were 5116 members in 686 locations, and a year later there were 5740 in 884 locations.[742] Noted as a great success was the fact that Komsomolskaia pravda at about that time published a page of letters received in Esperanto from various parts of the world. And in 1931 the Moscow Regional Council of Trade Unions approved a resolution that encouraged the organization of Esperanto circles in factories, pointing out that Esperanto 'can and must be a preparatory step to the study of foreign languages'.[743]
On the other hand, not infrequently local newspapers refused mate- rial, declaring, for example, that all foreign Esperantists were social democrats.[744] To serve the press effectively, SEU put still greater emphasis on the necessity of collective correspondence. There was an increase in appeals 'to focus the entire correspondence on technical help for indus- trialization and for the collectivization of agriculture'.[745] In such appeals, made in 1930, the year in which occurred, among other events, the mass deportation of 'kulaks', we note the effect that the Five-Year Plan, forcing the entire Soviet Union into a massive industrializing effort, inevitably had also on the Esperantists. They could not stand aside while Stalin declared in February 1931, in words to be noted by every Soviet citizen: 'We are 50—100 years behind the leading countries. We have to cover this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they crush us.'[746] SEU was aware that new tasks would be assigned to it by the acceleration in the building of socialism—that it 'must be more closely linked with production, with the masses'.[747] In practice this meant that the use of Esperanto should have significance less to stimulate the world revolutionary fervor of the workers of the world than to bring acclaim and support to the industrial- ization of the Soviet Union.