The Esperantists outside the Soviet Union, although requested to abandon 'harmful individualism',s 5 adapted only with difficulty to the new production-oriented style of correspondence. In truth they were not particularly inspired by directives requiring that they write primarily about the Soviet Union, for example the taking up of collections 'to buy tractors for Soviet villages'[748], and not provide much information of the traditional kind, that is, information on the living conditions in their country. Furthermore, it is doubtful whether such pro-Soviet material, if delivered and printed, would do much to vary the monotony of Soviet newspapers and thus draw attention to the source language, namely Esperanto. In any event, if SEU, in accordance with a party directive, asked for help from abroad to improve its technical capabilities, it was evidently unaware of the extent to which such a request not only taxed the goodwill but also ignored the competence of the worker-correspon- dents in other countries.
In April 1931 the Communist Party Central Committee decreed a reorganization of the worker and peasant correspondents' movement in the Soviet Union. The movement was instructed to dedicate its let- ter writing exclusively to profession-specific problems and was placed under the guidance of Pravda. Thus, the party sought to eliminate defini- tively the risk that spontaneous, unregulated activity might occur at the base—a situation irreconcilable with the idea of bureaucratic centralism. Because editorial teams were increasingly dispensing with the help of 'special correspondents' in their workplaces and preferred to use profes- sional journalists, a steady decline in the importance of the correspon- dence movement set in.
Given that the Soviet network of worker and peasant correspondents was already in the hands of an oversight organization, the international correspondence movement, particularly that part of the movement using Esperanto, could hardly be expected to function any better. Indeed it would be likely to work less well because of its remoteness from current production needs. SEU's admonitions rose to a new level. The unfortunate Esperantists who announced their search for correspondents in Heroldo de Esperanto and whose letters of thanks for gift subscriptions appeared in that neutral journal saw their letters reproduced in pillorying articles in the SEU journal, where they were attacked as seekers after 'bourgeois charity' who profited from 'false philanthropy'.[749] During the SEU con- gress, Roman Nikolsky declared that Esperantists who 'in corresponding with other countries, occupy themselves with pretty postcards' betray the aims of the movement: 'Such apolitical activity should be banished from international correspondence.'[750]
The consequence of such dire warnings, namely the increasingly ste- reotyped nature of correspondence coming from the Soviet Union, had already been noted abroad. In Vienna in mid-1931 La Socialisto observed: 'It seems that the whole Esperanto correspondence effort is growing dis- agreeable to some people, so they are trying to find ways around the direct exchange of letters from worker to worker.'[751] The latest example of this trend, cited by the journal, was the fact that letters from the Soviet Union were beginning to be accompanied, or even substituted, by printed leaf- lets with the title La vero pri Sovetio. Niaj respondoj al alilandaj laboristoj (The Truth about the Soviet Union. Our Replies to Workers Abroad). In 1931 SEU published at least 15 of these leaflets in print runs of between 7000 and 10,000 copies.[752] They contained replies to such questions as the following:
Is it true that workers in the Soviet Union are hungry?
We do not understand. You, Soviet comrades, always write about the successes of socialist construction, but at the same time you warn about various 'shortcomings'.
Why does Comrade Litvinov, in Geneva, talk about disarmament when at the same time the Soviet government is increasing the Red Army's battle readiness?
Why was Trotsky expelled from the Communist Party and exiled from the Soviet Union?
Do all workers in the Soviet Union enjoy a seven-hour workday?
What does it mean that the Soviet Union will this year [i.e., 1931] complete construction of the foundations of a socialist economy? Does that mean that there will be socialism in your country as of next year?
The leaflets were intended to make it easier for SEU members who might lack adequate political education to provide appropriate responses to their foreign correspondents. The fact that the questions coming from abroad were frequently similar and that therefore it was economical to reply to them with printed leaflets might be one explanation for SEU's providing this service, but a more likely explanation is that questions from abroad were often problematic and therefore required polished responses. That the difficulties arose from the problematic nature of the questions and that leaflets were no longer sufficient to overcome them is apparent from a report given by a local SEU group early in 1931: in Tuapse, on the Black Sea, the SEU cell required of all its members who were corresponding abroad to attend a political school run by the Party. Furthermore, it was in regular consultative contact with the cul- tural propaganda department of the local party committee. The goal of the instruction and consultation was to learn how to avoid political errors in international correspondence and to raise the 'quality' of the letters, given the experience that 'foreign comrades ask questions that not all communists can reply to'.[753]
How annoying such questions could be was illustrated by an example in the SEU journal. It quoted from a letter by a French admirer of the Soviet Union who asked his correspondent to clarify for him the clearly improbable assertions found in a French Catholic periodical to the effect that 'In Russia [...] you see in the countryside large bands of miserable children. They have been abandoned and live as best they can. Many die of hunger.'[754]
Hardly surprisingly, the correspondence rapidly dried up. The GLEA group in Munich remarked that their Soviet correspondents grew silent after receiving their first letters. In response to its announcement that it was interested in corresponding, the group received about 40 letters from the Soviet Union, but when the German comrades wrote back, their let- ters were apparently so embarrassing that of the 40 only 4 or 5 replied.[755]This uncommunicativeness on the part of the Soviet Esperantists was particularly annoying to those unreservedly committed to the Soviet Union, as was evident in the reactions of the German communists Otto Bassler and Walter Kampfrad, who were among the first of the opposi- tion group to be expelled from SAT. Bassler reported that complaints 'about the dysfunction of the correspondence' between Germany and the Soviet Union were widespread. And if letters did come, their content was disillusioning:
And what for the most part do we find to read in these letters? 'We are the Fatherland of the world proletariat, we carry out a five-year plan in four years, we build socialism, here or there we are building this or that big fac- tory, in which this number or that number of workers are working, and so on.' After that comes the postal address in Esperanto or in Russian or Ukrainian—and that's generally everything.