As we have seen, even in the Party Congress Stalin found it difficult to explain to the delegates the dialectical relationship between the flowering of nations in the current Soviet Union and their unification in the worldwide Communist system of the future. The confusion grew even greater because of the evident contradictions in the process supposedly characterizing the 'flowering of nations'. In his formula 'national in form, socialist in content', Stalin had already alluded to the fact that national cultures would not fully develop without some kind of limits: the national element reaches its limit at the point where it begins to threaten the priority of socialism. However, the careful distinction between 'national form' and 'socialist content' began to lose its coherence if the contours were blurred, that is, if the 'socialist content' became cluttered with national symbols. And that was precisely what happened as of the end of 1931: the 'socialist content' required of all the peoples of the Soviet Union was increasingly filled with symbols char- acteristically Russian. This aspect requires our attention.
The position of the Russian language is a topic that the available writings of Soviet Esperantists almost never mention. This is all the more remark- able because they advanced ideas on the relationship between the principle of linguistic equality and the need for supranational communication that seemed to call for addressing the role of Russian. Instead, the discussion turned almost exclusively on the relationship between all national languages on the one hand and Esperanto on the other. For example, from Stalin's assertion that national languages would merge on the basis of their com- mon socialist content, Drezen concluded that a final confluence without influence on national languages by an 'international auxiliary language' was unimaginable, because that auxiliary language, that is Esperanto, respond- ing to the current need for international communication, was already based on the national languages, formed unity with them 'on the basis of the lexical material of modern international science and technology' and in this way led them to merge.[872] Earlier, Drezen even declared that the 'tendencies to appropriation of supranational socialist content' contained in Esperanto, 'a language used particularly by the most progressive social strata', were 'even clearer and more striking than in the national languages'.[873] Neither Drezen nor Spiridovich pointed out that in the non-Russian languages of the Soviet Union scientific and technical terminology was mostly borrowed from Russian.
Such an omission is surprising because the facts are entirely clear. As George P. Springer emphasizes, Esperanto was never officially consid- ered as an acceptable means of communication within the Soviet Union, although an objective view could perfectly well have left such a possi- bility open, for example given the well-known opposition of Lenin to privileging the Russian language.[874] On the contrary, the aim of the Party was that the many ethnicities of the Soviet Union should use Russian to understand one another and for their part they should feel ever stronger pressure to learn that language. Left to Esperanto was only the role of serving as a link (and a channel of propaganda) to other countries.
Another question is whether the Soviet Esperantists could always dis- tinguish between the two spheres of communication—within and out- side the Soviet Union. There are some indications that Esperantists of non-Russian nationality tended to regard Esperanto as in some measure a counterweight to the domination of the Russian language, while on the other hand among Russian (and some foreign) Esperantists there was a tendency to consider the spread of Russian within the Soviet Union as a step toward the worldwide process of 'denationalization' advanced by Esperanto.[875] The latter ideas seemed to lose viability after Skrypnyk's public warning against the 'Esperantization' of Ukraine,[876] and if, also in 1930, Stalin condemned the supporters of a 'single, common language' in the Soviet Union (because 'they are, in essence, striving to restore the privileges of the formerly predominant language, namely the Great Russian language'[877]), this provided momentary stimulus for those who wished to publicize Esperanto as a kind of guarantee for the equal flower- ing of the nations of the Soviet Union.
But, at about the same time, one incident revealed how risky it was to launch a discussion of Esperanto in connection with the language prob- lem internal to the Soviet Union. Shortly before the Party Congress, the Ukrainian Esperantist Sergei Sinitsky asked several writers in his home- land for their opinion of Esperanto. Among the published responses, particularly interesting is that of the popular poet Volodymyr Sosiura[878]:
I am amazed that Esperanto is not taught in our schools. That would speed up, in parallel with the organization of small groups among the masses, preparations for the substitution of the Russian language by Esperanto as the state language of the USSR. It would help us to fight faster and more successfully against the so-called local nationalisms by dissolving them. It would put the Russian language in the same place as the languages of the other republics, and the Great-Russian chauvinism along cultural lines would become a local nationalism. Esperanto—a language created on the basis of knowledge of the development of languages—helps us to move through the huge ocean of languages towards the world culture with open eyes. In my opinion, it is necessary, finally, to introduce Esperanto into the practical life of our republics as a language that will become the state lan- guage of the USSR and afterwards of the whole world.[879]
Sosiuras heretical claims were published in SEU's theoretical journal— however, with an editorial note that pointed out 'his quite erroneous, anti-Marxist viewpoint'. Sosiura was faulted for opposing the national forms of language and forgetting the principal matter, namely socialist content. To counter nationalisms—the editors warned—'we must remove their class roots, but not their languages; in our country no single state language is privileged: the languages of all peoples of the Soviet Union are equal to one another'. Sosiuras proposal to introduce Esperanto as a state language should accordingly be considered 'an unnecessary and harmful fantasy, a "leftist-radical" quasi-advance'.[880]
We could readily label Sosiura's proposals as a 'purely Zamenhofian program'.[881] In essence, they resemble concepts valid in the Esperanto movement long before the founding of the Soviet Union; the so-called Declaration on Esperantism accepted by the First Congress in Boulogne- sur-Mer in 1905 included, among other things, the goal that Esperanto 'could serve as a reconciling language of public institutions in those coun- tries where different nations fight among themselves over languageV [882]That for the Esperantists the proposals of Sosiura did not seem unortho- dox, and that such clearly unrealistic ideas found support among SEU members, is evident from the reaction of the interviewer Sinitsky to the editors' criticism of Sosiura. It is simply not true—wrote Sinitsky—that Sosiura proposed 'eliminating the national language forms through the Esperanto language'. On the contrary, Esperanto should have its place next to the national languages—as 'a state language of the USSR, an aux- iliary language, a second language after the national mother tongue' and must 'push the Russian language out of its current privileged position', so that the principle of Lenin would be observed. Because 'to overlook and deny', as the editors were doing, 'that the Russian language through its privileged position offends against the Leninist principle of "no privilege for any nation, for any language" seems clearly anti-Leninist'.[883]