In fact, the spread of Esperanto in the Soviet Union, as we have noted, was continuing apace. The language served as a favored means of facilitating contacts with the outside world, and, conversely, the Esperantists used their 'naive cosmopolitanism' more and more to raise the prestige of the Soviet Union among their fellow linguists abroad. Official suspicion declined as Esperanto revealed itself as an effective means of enlivening the officially promoted idea of international work- ers' correspondence. For several years SEU could also benefit from the fact that the Party allowed a certain freedom of action in cultural mat- ters and felt it neither necessary nor convenient to keep checking on whether the various forms of artistic and literary activity conformed to doctrine.
This was still so in the first years of Stalin's reign; SEU's period of pros- perity in fact began after the death of Lenin. Changes in Soviet policy pri- orities—from hope for revolution in other countries to domestic socialist construction—at first did not hinder the work of the Esperanto move- ment. To the contrary, even in the problematic theoretical field a shift of priorities took place that seemed more advantageous for the Esperantists. It was brought on by a theoretical initiative of Stalin.
Toward a Marxist Linguistics
In 1925 Stalin (who in the same year proclaimed his theory of 'build- ing socialism in a single country') pronounced on the question of how the flowering of national cultures and languages, systematically pro- moted in the Soviet Union, would contribute to the Communist goal of a united general human culture. He denied that there was any con- tradiction between the program of national development and the final goal of communism, constructing the famous formula: 'Proletarian in content, national in form—that is the general human culture to which socialism approaches.' As he saw it, the Party's concern for 'proletarian content' would be guarantee enough of the path to an apparently uni- versal, though in fact all-Soviet, community. Regarding the final goal of communism as described by earlier theorists, Stalin was unenthusiastic:
Some people (Kautsky, for instance) talk of the creation of a single univer- sal language and the dying away of all other languages in the period of socialism. I have little faith in this theory of a single, all-embracing lan- guage. Experience, at any rate, speaks against rather than for such a theory. Until now what was happened has been that the socialist revolution has not diminished but rather increased; for, by stirring up the lowest sections of humanity and pushing them on to the political arena, it awakes to new life a number of hitherto unknown or little-known nationalities.[817]
Stalin had for the first time authoritatively dealt with a topic that was understandably of great interest to the Soviet Esperantists. He had rejected the idea of a universal language, but done so in an encourag- ing context. Namely, he had distanced himself from Kautsky, who envi- sioned the universalization of one or several major national languages, and pronounced the formation of a worldwide language congruent with the disappearance of all other languages, which was precisely not the goal of supporters of a world auxiliary language. So it was not difficult for the Soviet Esperantists to praise Stalin for his disapproval of all assimilation- ist rejection of languages.[818]
At around the same time the question of a world language was addressed by a Soviet linguist who was to become more and more important in coming years: Nikolai Marr. In professional circles, Marr was known, as of 1908, for his so-called Japhetic theory of language. He asserted that the Caucasian languages, along with Sumerian and Basque, consti- tuted the Japhetic language family and that the Indo-European languages came about as a result of the transformation of these Japhetic languages. More generally, Marr described an evolutionary process beginning with a mass of interrelated dialects and leading to ever-larger language units. He considered language as part of the superstructure overlaying the eco- nomic basis of society. He denied the existence of national languages and insisted that from the beginning language was class-determined.
Marr increasingly presented himself as an avant-garde campaigner against 'bourgeois Indo-European comparative linguistics'. Originally, his theory hardly contained any elements that could be considered Marxist, but as of around 1926 he cultivated the view that, because his ideas were aimed at revolutionizing linguistics, they at least conformed with Marxism. Because the notion of a stepwise evolution of languages and their dependence on the economy included the belief that social revolutions also transform languages, it was not surprising that he also addressed the question of the final goal of language development—more precisely the question of the linguistic result of the worldwide establish- ment of socialism. Marr was convinced that the evolutionary process would culminate in monolingualism.[819]
Marr was not thinking about any of the existing languages: 'Individual languages, regardless of their imperialist dispersal, will never become this future unified language.' The masses, Marr wrote, will themselves have the capability of speeding up the process of linguistic unification by interven- ing in the existing languages or even independently creating the 'perfect universal language of humankind'. This point of view—affirming artifi- cial intervention in languages—seemed close to that of the Esperantists. However, Marr, as if dampening their expectations, added that, first, sci- ence must be in a position to guide the masses and direct their efforts at linguistic unity along the right paths. At best, he considered Esperanto an indication that the trend to a world language was rooted in the masses: 'Life will certainly not stand still, and there will appear various surrogates similar to Esperanto, Ido, etc.'[820]
Marr's ideas on a future universal language captured the attention of Soviet Esperantists even more than Stalin's initiative. Their fundamental argument in reaction to Marr was: 'We don't claim [_] "scientificality" in our language; we are concerned only that our language should serve our needs, that our language should be used by the masses, because precisely through such use the creative processes of the future world language will come about, because precisely through the language use of the masses the inevitable historical process will be advanced.'[821]
This point of view was characteristic of the Esperantists essentially from the time of Zamenhof. In response to those scholars who regarded Esperanto as needing reform or who denied its viability, they emphasized the priority of successfully testing the language in practice; the more users Esperanto acquired, the faster the theoretical requirements of linguists would be disproved. This was a wise tactic, followed also by SEU when, perceiving the difficulties of justifying Esperanto on a Marxist basis, it gave priority to strengthening its own organization and demonstrated the practical value of the language.
As long as Esperanto was for the most part ignored by scholars of lin- guistics[822] and as long as the Party did not express lack of ideological con- fidence, this tactic seemed to promise success. Skeptics like Lunacharsky, the People's Commissar for Education, confessed in 1926 that 'the facts spoke for Esperanto'.[823] When Marr's theories pushed the problem of a future world language into public discussion, SEU asked itself whether it should match what was meanwhile its significant organizational strength in practice with parallel achievements on the theoretical side.
As of 1926, theoretical interest grew. In that year, the state publishing house produced a collection of articles on Esperanto edited by Drezen.[824]In October 1926 SEU launched a journal whose contributions dealt chiefly with theoretical questions on the international language.[825] Its first issue included a remarkably combative article by the Belarusian journalist and university lecturer Efim Spiridovich,[826] who later published a series of articles on the theory of language development. On this topic, which was his main interest, Spiridovich rejected the possibility that languages will 'naturally' achieve unity under the influence of economic develop- ment. Increased internationalization of economics, culture and thought was indeed occurring, and the number of international terms was grow- ing. But a significant contradiction remained: the 'archaic structure' of national languages was incapable of fully reflecting the international char- acter of modern thought. To solve this contradiction a linguistic revolu- tion would be necessary, involving 'conscious intervention of reason'.[827]The contradiction was most evident in the Soviet Union. There, in har- mony with the declarations of Lenin, the languages of formerly oppressed peoples were developing into literary languages, while on the other hand there was a growing need for a unifying language. Without alluding to the possibility of an alternative, for example Russian, Spiridovich asserted that this contradiction could be overcome with an 'auxiliary international language'. It would be the language of the 'transitional era', during which the nations would come together and at the same time prepare the way for the era of communism, of the 'confluence of nations', when a fully artificial universal language would arise.[828]