Abstract
How was the persecution of the Soviet Esperantists in the years 1937–38 carried out? In mid-1930 their leader Ernest Drezen expressed the conviction that soon the Soviet Esperantist Union (SEU) would reach a decisive turning point: ‘We expect in the near future a principled and more general solution … which will finally give us a basis for rapid progress.’ Early in 1937 a ‘decision in principle’ about SEU was indeed made, but it was the opposite of what Drezen foresaw, and it became known to the Esperantists only when they were arrested. In the Lubianka basement they heard the verdict: ‘You are an active member of an international espionage organization.’
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Notes
- 1.
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, trans. Thomas P. Whitney, New York: Harper & Row, 1973, vol. 1, p. 59; also mentioned is the fact that Stalin persecuted the Esperantists at the same time as Hitler. Elsewhere (vol. 2, p. 88), Solzhenitsyn cites an official source according to which Esperantists belonged to the (forced) workforce for construction of the Stalin White Sea/Baltic Sea Canal in 1933.
- 2.
From 1917 to 1922 the secret police were called Cheka, later GPU and OGPU. As of 1934 the office of the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs (NKVD) was responsible for state security.
- 3.
Conquest (2008), p. 257. On Esperantists as a category in the Great Purge, see also John Arch Getty & Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1999, p. 481. Generally on the organization of the mass repression see Paul Hagenloh, Stalin’s Police: Public Order and Mass Repression in the USSR, 1926–1941, Washington, DC: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
- 4.
Alex Weissberg, Conspiracy of Silence, London: Hamilton, 1952, p. 504. Listed are 16 categories in all.
- 5.
Lithuanian Bulletin (New York) 7 (1949), 7/12: 18. After the fall of the Soviet Union the order of Guzevičius was published in Lietuvos gyventojų genocidas, vol. 1: 1939–1941, Vilnius, 1992, pp. xxvii–xxviii; for this information (25 September 2003) the author thanks Vytautas Šilas. Earlier, the order appeared in Lietuvių archyvas. Bolševizmo metai (Kaunas), vol. 1, 1942, pp. 19–21.
- 6.
Neeme Ruus was an active member of SAT.
- 7.
La Espero 28 (1940): 99. Hilda Dresen translated poems of Barbarus into Esperanto (1931). He committed suicide in 1946, probably fearing arrest.
- 8.
Heroldo de Esperanto, wartime issue, no. 1 (1 December 1940), p. 4.
- 9.
La Espero 29 (1941): 26. According to the Latvian Esperantist Teodors Arbergs, in his country in 1941 the Esperanto groups ‘were liquidated along with other private societies’: La Pacdefendanto, 1955, 48 (Dec.): 5. The Lithuanian Esperanto Association lost its registration at the end of June 1940.
- 10.
Rein Kapper, ‘Memoroj kaj impresoj de estona rifuĝinto’, Malgranda Revuo 2 (1944), 4: 12.
- 11.
A. Zigmunde, ‘Forpasis duonjarcento…’, Latvia Esperantisto, 1991, 12 (Aug.): 4–5. Indra perished on 8 December 1942 in Solikamsk, in the Urals.
- 12.
Esperanto 48 (1955): 12. Giedra died of starvation in 1942 on the Arctic Sea. Among the Lithuanian Esperantists who survived many years of captivity was the teacher Eduard Levinskas, popularizer of the ideas of Tolstoy in Lithuania, who in 1945 was exiled to Tajikistan with his whole family and was allowed to return home only in 1955, and the anthropologist Antanas Poška (Paškevičius), who was arrested in 1945 in part because of his activities as an Esperantist. He was able to return to Vilnius only in the summer of 1959 (Vytautas Šilas, ‘Kavaliro de la verda stelo’, Litova Stelo 13 [2003], 3: 3). A well-known Estonian Esperantist, forced to remain in Siberia for ten years with his family, was the teacher Henrik Seppik. Ludmila Jevsejeva was able to return to her homeland in 1957 (see Nikolao Stepanov, ‘Ludmila Jevsejeva, esperantistino kaj poetino’, Sennacieca Revuo, 1994, 122: 29–31).
- 13.
Vytautas Kalasauskas, ‘Renaskiĝo de Esperanto en Litovio‘, Litova Stelo 7 (1997), 1: 22.
- 14.
Roy A. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, New York: Knopf, 1972, p. 352.
- 15.
Personal communication from Kurisu Kei, 4 August 1971.
- 16.
E. Drezen, ‘La vojoj de SEU – organizo kaj evoluo’, Bulteno de CK SEU 9 (1929/30): 117–22.
- 17.
‘5-a Kongreso de Sovetrespublikara Esperantista Unio’, Bulteno de CK SEU 10 (1931): 135. On this occasion Drezen mentioned the negative effect of the opinions of Bukharin, Krupskaia and Ulianova, who ‘hindered us from winning over the press’.
- 18.
‘Pli da atento al membrovarbado’, Bulteno de CK SEU 12 (1933): 17–18 (quotation p. 17).
- 19.
A. Lozovsky (Solomon Abramovich Dridzo) was a high-ranking official in the Red Trade Union International and, from 1929 to 1946, deputy minister for foreign affairs. Arrested in 1949 for ‘Jewish nationalism’, he was the principal figure among those accused in the trial against the Jewish Antifascist Committee in 1952; he was executed along with several others. Dmitrii Zakharovich Manuilsky, among other functions a member of the presidency of Comintern 1924–43, was one of the few old-time Bolsheviks to survive the Purges. On the contact of Drezen and Muravkin with Manuilsky see Fayet (2008), pp. 9, 20.
- 20.
Sur Posteno (international edition) 3 (1935): 184–5. SEU’s report formed part of the ‘organizational report of the IPE Center’ presented to the congress by A. Respe, IPE general secretary.
- 21.
They were Herbert Muravkin and Vladimir Varankin.
- 22.
Homo (Muravkin), ‘Henri Barbusse mortis’, Sur Posteno Klasbatala, 1936: 2. Barbusse was, in absentia, Honorary President of the IPE congress in Antwerp.
- 23.
‘Pri nuna stato de SEU-movado’, Informilo. Interna organo de la IPE-centro, 1935, 3 (Dec.): 14.
- 24.
Fayet (2008), p. 22.
- 25.
Cited in Kuznecov (1991), p. 28; cf. Fayet, p. 23.
- 26.
Shumilov, former Red Army commandant, was arrested on 20 February 1938. He survived some 18 years of hard labor. Following his death in 1972, an obituary referred to his protracted suffering in these terms: ‘During his entire life he remained faithful to the international language and to proletarian internationalism through all the storms and blizzards of our unsettled times.’ See N. Sulje, ‘Veterano forpasis’, Paco 20 (1973), 1: 12.
- 27.
Note that Drezen resigned right after the first extensive Moscow trial, namely, that of Zinoviev, Kamenev and others (19–24 August 1936).
- 28.
See this volume, p. 13, note 37.
- 29.
Kuznecov (1991), p. 29. On 18 May 1937 the remaining committee members discussed publication of the leaflet ‘What the Trotskyist Saboteurs Said to the Workers’.
- 30.
Lev Kopelev, Khranit’ vechno (To Preserve Forever), Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1975, p. 278.
- 31.
Jansen & Petrov (2002), p. 38.
- 32.
The party secretary of the Foreign Language Institute told Kopelev one day: ‘You don’t need to visit the Esperantists anymore. Their leaders are arrested as enemies of the people and the entire shop is closed.’ (Personal communication from Kopelev, 15 April 1984.) The SEU office was probably closed on 21 February 1938, following the arrest of the last staff member, the bookkeeper Aleksandr Samoilenko (shot on 4 October 1938, the same day as Nekrasov and Nikolsky). More than 50 years later, Russian Esperantists learned from the office of the military prosecutor of the USSR that the court investigators of the NKVD imputed to the SEU board the organization of a ‘Trotskyite-Esperantist spy center’ (Nikolaj Zubkov, ‘La restarigo’, Moskvaj Novaĵoj, provnumero, April, 1989: 13–14, quotation p. 13). In the tribunal records for 1937–38 there were frequent references to a ‘counterrevolutionary fascist-Trotskyite group of Esperantists’.
References
Conquest, R. (2008). The great terror: A reassessment. Oxford\New York: Oxford University Press.
Fayet, J.-F. (2008). Eine internationale Sprache für die Weltrevolution? Die Komintern und die Esperanto-Frage. Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung, 9–23.
Jansen, M., & Petrov, N. (2002). Stalin’s loyal executioner: People’s Commissar Nikolai Ezhov. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press.
Kuznecov, S. N. (1991). Drezen, lia verko, lia epoko, In Drezen (1991), pp. 3–40.
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Lins, U. (2017). Esperantists in the Great Purge. In: Dangerous Language — Esperanto and the Decline of Stalinism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-352-00020-7_2
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