ESPERANTO AND LANGUAGES OF INTERNATIONALISM IN REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA, By Ayse Dietrich^*, Published by Bloomsbury, Written by Brigid O’Keeffe, Year of Publishing: 2021. Subject Area: Esperanto, Language Politics, Book Type: History, Sociolinguistics. Total Number of Pages: 252. ISBN: 978-13501-6065-1, hardback, $115.00.

O’Keeffe states that her book is about Esperanto, a useful prism through which the essence of global language politics and the construction of socialist internationalism during the Russian Revolution is examined.

The book is comprised of an introduction and five chapters. In the Introduction the author states that the purpose of her book is to analyze Esperanto, which was a constructed language borrowed from other languages, in Revolutionary Russia. It covers the period from the Great Reforms in late imperial Russia to the purges of he late Stalinist Russia. O’Keeffe discusses the emergence of Esperanto that was offered by Ludwig Lejzer Zamenhof in 1887, a program designed to revolutionize Russia and to unite all the people in the world by a shared international auxiliary language and the essence.

In Chapter one, the author highlights the purpose of Zamenhof’s Esperanto as a tool to eradicate ethnic, religious and linguistic chauvinism. She also shows the parallelism between Hillelism and Esperanto, whose essential basis was to create a global moral community of new, emancipated people and unite them, despite their differences, through a new language.

Chapter two sheds light on the efforts of the ordinary Russian Esperantists who tried to start a global Esperanto movement and create a distinctive culture of Esperantism. The author discusses the grassroot internationalism of the intellectuals in late imperial period just before World War I.

In Chapter three, the author discusses the Bolsheviks’ developing approaches to language diversity as an element of their efforts to incite a global revolution. This chapter also provides information on why the Bolsheviks changed their prospects for socialist internationalism to building socialism in Russia after the failure of German October of 1923.

Chapter four talks about the activities of the Union of Soviet Esperantists to promote Soviet achievements abroad. However, while advocates of Esperanto regarded the language as being above borders, the Soviets, on the other hand, were engaged in defending very definite ideological linguistic and national borders.

In Chapter five, the author examines the struggle of the Esperantists during Stalin’s five-year plans, the Soviet attempts to promote foreign language learning for international communication, the effects of the Stalinist xenophobia that increased with the Nazi threat during the 1930s which resulted in treating Esperanto as a language of espionage and treason, and, finally, the death of Esperanto.

Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia is the first work to examine the history of and changing attitudes towards Esperanto in Soviet Russia through the use of archival records. This well-written investigation of a little-known topic is of particular interest to sociolinguists and researchers examing the areas of transnational networks and internationalism.