Esperanto and Its Rivals: The Struggle for an International Language

Lanti (whose real name was Eugene Adam [1879-1947]) was born in the small town of Nehou, in Lower Normandy, to illiterate parents. He became a cabinet maker and in 1903 settled in Paris, where he worked as an instruc- tor in a vocational school. Raised as a Catholic, he became an atheist and a radical pacifist, with an affinity for the anarchist movement. He learned Es- peranto while serving in World War I in an ambulance unit. In 1920, inspired by the success of the October Revolution, he joined the French Communist Party. Lanti was always a strange bird in the party, however. Although he ad- mired the communists' revolutionary zeal and organizational efficiency, he was never a dogmatic Leninist and always remained close to the anarchists. His three-week visit to the Soviet Union in 1922 only reinforced his skepti- cism toward official communism.

As Lanti saw it, SAT was meant to be the working-class counterpart of bourgeois Esperantists. Indeed, between 1922 and 1924, SAT banned dual membership with non-working class Esperanto organizations, whose official neutrality in working-class issues, according to Lanti, only helped to rein- force global capitalism and camouflage the struggle between the proletari- ans and the bourgeoisie. Even worse, by accepting the existence of nation-states and claiming that Esperanto should not aspire to dislodge national languages, the neutral Esperanto movement was, according to him, reinforcing a sort of false consciousness that perpetuated the fetish of the national community and the exploitation of the working class. Hence, the critical role that Lanti envisioned for Esperanto: it could help dissolve those supposedly natural bonds that united the oppressors and the oppressed, and propel class strug- gle. Lanti's internationalism was more radical than Zamenhofs. Both of them were aware of the creative work of intellectuals and political entrepreneurs to artificially construct nations, but whereas Zamenhof still felt that an ethnic identity was inescapable and even necessary as the basis for an indi- vidual identity and thus for the possibility of moral action, Lanti believed it pernicious and ultimately disposable. Lanti's anti-nationalism can best be perceived as a flattening universalism, whereby the old national and linguis- tic identities had to be replaced by a new, transformative, and universal identity. As he once put it: "The anti-nationalists are against everything nationaclass="underline" against the national languages, cultures, traditions, and customs. For them, Esperanto is the most important language, and their national languages only are auxiliary languages [condemned to] become archaic, dead things, like the ancient Greek and Roman languages and cultures."9

Because of Lanti's radical anti-nationalism, the SAT only accepted indi- vidual membership. At the same time, the new organization was not conceived for revolutionary action, but for instruction and debate. As stated in its bylaws, "Not being a political, but an enlightening, educational and cultural organization, it endeavors to make its members tolerant and broadminded regarding the different political and philosophical schools or systems [of the working-class movement]. By the exchange of facts and ideas and free dis- cussion, it strives to counteract the dogmatization of the teachings instilled by their respective schools."10 But neither such open-mindedness nor their common identity as Esperantists could spare SAT members from the inter- nal fights that punctuated the entire history of the European socialist move- ment in these years, and more particularly between the Bolshevists and their rivals in the international socialist movement.

The leader of the Esperantist Bolshevists was Ernest Drezen (1892-1937). He became a Bolshevist in 1918 and was a high-ranking military officer and political commissar in the Red Army during the Civil War. An engineer by training, and in his capacity as deputy chief of the All-Russian Central Ex- ecutive Committee from 1921 to 1923, he was entrusted with the implemen- tation of Taylorism in the growing state apparatus of the new regime. In Drezens worldview, there was room for Esperanto in a revolutionary, multi- lingual Soviet Union. In 1921, Drezen collected the remnants of the former Russian Esperanto movement and created SEU (Sovetrespublikara Esperan- tista Unio). The relatively less repressive environment that the just-adopted New Economic Policy heralded let Drezen enlist non-communist Esperan- tists. He hoped that this would strengthen the visibility of Esperanto in the Soviet Union. This open-minded strategy, however, put Drezen in a difficult position. As he knew very well, the survival of the movement in the new re- gime did not depend on its numerical strength, but on the difficult and per- ilous task of navigating among the different Bolshevist factions, and the Kremlin's shifting foreign policy. Given the public pronouncements of bour- geois Esperantists, Esperanto could be easily labeled as a counter-revolutionary language, a distraction in the march toward world revolution. As Drezen saw it, the most expedient way to give Esperanto a chance in the Soviet Union was to put SAT at the service of the Bolshevists and the Comintern.

Prompted by the "united front" policy adopted by the Third Congress of the Comintern, Drezen urged Western European communists to join SAT in order to take it over and align it with "the [proper] organizational form of international action [the Comintern] . . . , unmask its confounding idealism, and instill in it a more practical and Communist influence."11