Script Reforms in Early Soviet Ethnic Policy

Abstract

The article deals with the activities if the Soviet leadership in the field of reforming the alphabets of the “national” languages as an integral part of ethnic policy in the USSR in the nineteen twenties and thirties. The conclusion made is that the alphabetic Latinization, which reached its peak in the early thirties, was connected with the social aspect of the ethnic policy. Creation of the new alphabets was to serve the objectives of socialist construction, international education and overcoming “remnants of the past”. The latter was concerned in particular with the use of Arabic script for the alphabets of the peoples of the Caucasus, the Volga region and Central Asia, who traditionally practiced Islam. In the twenties and early thirties, activities on transfering national alphabets, previously based on either the Arabic or Cyrillic scripts or even hieroglyphic writing, were in progress. New alphabets were also modelled on the Latin script. In total in the early thirties, 66 alphabets were Latinized, and Latinization of several more was continuing. There were projects to Latinize even the very Russian alphabet but they were not implemented. Curtailing the process of Latinization and the opposite trend of substituting the Latin script with the Cyrillic one started in the mid-thirties was concerned with the revision of the general points of the Soviet ethnic policy, first of all, with the abandonment of the main principles of indigenization. One can see here also a reflection of a partial rehabilitation of the historic role of the Russian culture and promotion of the Russian nation to the position of “the first among the equal ones” among the peoples of the USSR.