Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia

Abstract

Trotsky and the Left Opposition, and the launching of the Stalinist dictatorship. Those local historians seeking to provide an objective and accurate telling of the events of 1917 were quickly displaced by political hacks more interested in advancing their own careers. Those who persisted in their efforts to produce something akin to scholarly historical accounts of 1917 were ignored or vanquished. Ultimately, the original purpose of Istpart was superseded by more pressing concerns and the entire enterprise was abandoned. Holmes’s story of the Istpart abandonment serves as an illustrative microcosm of the fate of Soviet historians more generally. Serving the political and ideological mandates of the regime was soon de rigueur; the craft of objective historians be damned. Holmes’s adroit mining of the archival evidence provides compelling support for his conclusion that: