 The French Ministry Of Instruction said that acceptance of Esperanto would mean that "French and English would perish and that the literary standard of the world would be debased".Nonetheless, many people see the 1920s as the heyday of the Esperanto movement.In 1941, the Soviet Union started performing mass arrests, deportations, and killings of many Esperantists and their relatives for fear of an anti-nationalistic movement, but it was interrupted by the Nazi invasion.