Ernest Drezen was the leader of the Soviet Esperantist Union.
16 Facts About Ernest Drezen
1.
2.
Ernest Drezen was born in Latvia in 1892 to a sailor's family.
3.
Ernest Drezen attended secondary school in Kronstadt before attending the Peter the Great St Petersburg Polytechnic University.
4.
Ernest Drezen attended a military engineering school during World War I and became an officer in a Tsarist battalion responsible for electrical engineering.
5.
Ernest Drezen then went to work in the Soviet government as the "deputy charge d'affaires in the Central Executive Committee of Soviets".
6.
Ernest Drezen attended the Third All-Russian Esperantist Congress in 1921, during which the Soviet Esperantist Union was founded.
7.
Ernest Drezen was responsible for outlining the principles of the organization, and he was elected its president.
8.
Ernest Drezen was a member of the Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda, though he was critical of their methods and ultimately expelled as part of the opposition in 1931.
9.
Ernest Drezen shifted his focus from Marxism almost entirely to Esperanto following a loosening of ideological standards in the early 1930s.
10.
Ernest Drezen was relieved from his position as president of the SEU in 1936.
11.
Ernest Drezen was arrested along with other members of the SEU on 17 April 1937 as part of the Great Purge and was executed by gunshot on 27 October 1937.
12.
Ernest Drezen's reputation was rehabilitated by the Soviet Union in 1957, and he was posthumously readmitted to the Communist Party in 1989.
13.
Ernest Drezen described the appeal of Esperanto as "a certain relief from the grey monotony of social life in the Tsarist dictatorship".
14.
Ernest Drezen opposed the inclusion of anarchists and social democrats in the Esperantist community, and he was critical of the Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda for being insufficiently Communist.
15.
Ernest Drezen advocated an internationalist approach and encouraged members of the Soviet Esperantist community to reach out to Esperantist socialists in other countries.
16.
Ernest Drezen believed that Esperanto's status of an international language among the workers must be established before a worldwide socialist movement could be undertaken.