What About the Workers? Conclusion
Seldom has a political party had a more unsuitable name than the one known to posterity as the Bolsheviks. Although the name means "The Majority Party," the leaders of that party could never tolerate any minority opposition, no matter how small. And the history of the Russian Communist Party, as it became known, is characterized by brutality and betrayal. Within the USSR, political opponents of the ruling communist party were destroyed by the thousand, if not by the million. All debate, dissension or expression of alternative ideas was ruthlessly suppressed. (For more information see: http://metalab.unc.edu/expo/soviet.exhib... )
In countries outside of the Soviet Union, communist infiltrators made strenuous efforts to infiltrate, take over and even destroy any kind of organization that showed the slightest inclination to support socialist ideas. The organization for Esperanto workers founded by Lanti was no exception and the attack on Lanti's ideology and personal leadership began the year after SAT was founded and was led by a formidable opponent: Ernest Drezen.
Ernest Drezen was not simply a Soviet puppet, infiltrated into the Esperanto movement for political purposes only. And although he was, in my opinion, one of the least attractive personalities associated with the Esperanto movement, he must take his proper place in our story.
A Latvian by birth, Drezen was educated in Russia and between 1915 and 1917 was a junior officer in the Army. After the October Revolution, he continued his military career in the Red Army, joined the Communist Party and became an important official. He was also an expert Esperantist with a large personal library of Esperanto material, and when Lanti first encountered him in 1922 he was the President of the main Esperanto association of the USSR (the Sovetrespublikara Esperantista Unio, or SEU). In later years, Drezen's expertise was enough to win him a place in the Esperanto Academy but he was never popular, and one of his fellow Akademianoj, the great Hungarian Esperantist Kaloman Kalocsay, described him satirically as follows:
Drezen, la rug^a-verda car'
Rigore regas en la SEU,
postulas oni lin obeu
en c^iu pens' kaj c^iu far'.
Drezen the red-green Czar,
Strictly rules in the SEU,
and demands that you obey him,
In all you think and all you do.
In Lanti, however, Drezen had met his match and after a nine-year struggle conceded defeat. IN 1930, although 45 members of the SEU enrolled for the SAT conference that year in London, not one of them put in an appearance. And the next year, all of the remaining Russian Esperantists - i.e., those members of the SEU who had not already been liquidated for their deviationist tendencies - left SAT en masse. In this way, SAT lost all support from the Soviet Union and the SEU was purged of all individuals who did not follow slavishly the party line, as interpreted through the mouth of its autocratic president, Ernest Drezen.
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