In theUSSR,cyrillisation orcyrillization (Russian:Кириллиза́ция,romanized: kirillizatsiya) was a campaign from the late 1930s to the 1950s to replace officialwriting systems based onLatin script (such asYanalif or theUnified Northern Alphabet), which had been introduced during the previouslatinization program, with new alphabets based onCyrillic.
The cyrillization program cannot be separated from the changing views of the Soviet Union'sleadership underJoseph Stalin in the mid-1930s.[1] When the leader began to rule in absolute terms, he was worried about the appearance of parties that could become his enemies, especially from outside, such asTurkey (which borders theAzerbaijan SSR). The country had "brothers" in the form ofTurkic nations in the Soviet Union (such asTurkmens andAzeris). Not to mention that a number of anti-Soviet emigrants who settled there, for example theMusavat Party from Azerbaijan, had been writing inTurkish (which hadLatin letters since 1928) which the Soviets felt was not much different from theAzeri language in the Soviet Union (which had also beenusing the Latin alphabet since the early 1920s).[2][3]
In the same period, the practice ofkorenizatsiya (indigenization) was officially discontinued;[1][4] instead, the Soviet government began to emphasize the cultural and linguistic advantages ofRussian as a "progressive language"[2] and the "official language of the revolution", whereas all socialist countries needed to use only Russian because it was a "complete language". In the ideological discourse of theCommunist Party it was stated that because various languages and cultures were currently developing well and peacefully, it was time for these cultures to unite into one nation, namely the Soviet nation which used one language, Russian (Japhetic theory).[5] With this, it was hoped that Soviet people could becomeHomo Sovieticus who was loyal to the leadership of the Communist Party.[6] On the contrary, indigenous culture was now seen as "bourgeois nationalism" which was inconsistent with the spirit of "proletarian internationalism". Also, the Latin alphabet previously used in many languages was now considered a "bourgeois script" that supported oppression, so that people who used it were "difficult to develop together".[5][4]
In fact, the concerns of Soviet policymakers about the "separation" of peoples who used languages written in the Latin script from those who used Cyrillic had been a debate since the 1920s. For example, in 1929,Semyon Dimanstein, a Soviet official in the nationalities policy, criticized theLatinization policy as a means of "separating the Turkic peoples from Russia".[3]
Related to this was the use of two languages (namely Russian and other languages) which used different ways of writing. It was felt that the use of Latin scripts, which had been encouraged since the 1920s, prevented non-Russian peoples from learning the Russian language. As according to a statement submitted by one of the following sections of the CPSU:
[Students]... now have to get acquainted with two completely different writing systems at the same time in a relatively short period, often confusing the letters of one script with the letters of another (script).[7]
With the transition to Cyrillic, it was hoped that non-Russian people could learn Russian more easily. SovietTurcologists, such asNikolai Baskakov, stated that learning Cyrillic script was a great tool to speed up theassimilation of non-Russians intoRussian culture.[3] Another argument also stated that the transition to Cyrillic was not a "submission" of non-Russian culture into Russian culture, but rather "the most rational way" to develop the culture of a region, and a form of friendship withRussian people, as well as a sign of internationalist unity for the entire Soviet population.[5]
Another factor was the existence of a number of languages that had previously used Cyrillic scripts, such asChuvash,Mari andMordovian, for which the transition to the Latin script was actually ineffective due to the large amount of literature previously written in Cyrillic. Economic factors also had an effect, where printing using two scripts (Cyrillic and Latin) was considered inefficient.[1]
Although many consider the transition from Latin to Cyrillic to be more due to political factors, in the campaign towards cyrillization, Soviet sources argued that linguistic factors were also important in supporting the process. For example, there was an argument that said that the Cyrillic script was better at describing every sound than the Latin script;[5] some said that the Cyrillic script was easier to learn; and another argument stated that the Latin script was not suitable for the languages to be cyrillicized.[8]
Cyrillization of many languages began in 1936–1937, and continued until the 1950s. In general, this process was preceded by campaigns andpropaganda inSoviet media. For example, it was claimed that in nations that had been writing their language using the Latin script, there was an "enthusiasm" to change their writing system into Cyrillic.[5][3] Various statements were issued to destroy the image of Latin script;[4] for example, in the Azerbaijan SSR, it was said that people who wrote in the Latin script or its promoters were carriers of the spirit ofPan-Turkism, orenemies of the people,[3] while inTurkmen SSR and theMoldavian ASSR, those who rejected the change to the Cyrillic script were claimed to be "enemies of the people, bourgeois-nationalists, and pro-Trotskyist-Bukharinist agents".[9][10]
The situation was facilitated by theGreat Purge, which helped those who supported the cyrillization project to eliminate those who had been considered pro-latinization. The tight control of the Stalinist regime in the late 1930s meant that discussion of the transition was almost non-existent.[3] However, in every official decision regarding the transition from Latin to Cyrillic, the Soviet government often claimed there was a "direct request of the Soviet people"[1] in the process – for example, during the transition in theTatar language, the Soviets claimed it was supported by "workers,intelligentsia and Tatarkolkhozniks",[11] and in theTurkmen language, the process began with a letter of support from group of teachers in the city ofBaýramaly.[9]
The first language whose writing was changed from Latin to Cyrillic wasKabardian in 1935–1936,[1] which was followed bylanguages in the North in 1936. Later, the cyrillicization project was applied to almost all languages whose writing had previously been latinized, for exampleKazakh,Bashkir, andTatar;[4] by 1941, 60 of the Soviet Union's 67 written languages had been cyrillicized.[12] The project continued into the 1950s, with a number of new languages being cyrillicized, such asKurdish (1946) andDungan (1953). The process of cyrillicization also affected Sovietsatellite states in the early 1940s, such asMongolia andTuva, in their respective official languages (Mongolian andTuvan). However, there were a number of languages that did not implement it, such asEstonian,Latvian,Lithuanian,Finnish,Georgian,Karelian,Armenian, andYiddish.[1][13]
TheAbkhaz andOssetian languages were a special case: these two languages were not cyrillized, but were initially converted toGeorgian scripts; only in the 1950s did Abkhaz and Ossetian begin to use Cyrillic.[14] Some languages which still did not have written forms during the peak of the latinization campaign, such asGagauz, were later also given Cyrillic-based alphabets.[15]
In general, the process of converting to Cyrillic script in many languages tended to be hasty. For example, inKyrgyz,Bashkir, andUzbek, just a short time after the new orthography of these languages was officially adopted, local parliaments passed decrees changing the writing system from Latin to Cyrillic. This led to many new Cyrillic-based alphabets being implemented with little regard for the specific features of each language. According to Turcologist Baskakov, the Latin scripts previously used actually corresponded more to the phonetic aspects of the Turkic languages than Cyrillic.[16]: 137 Development of thelinguistic aspects of the newly cyrillicized languages was then complicated by events such asWorld War II and the effects of the Great Purge which eliminated the existing local elites. For example, the publication of the Tatar-Russian dictionary using the Cyrillic alphabet was only possible afterde-Stalinization in the mid-1950s.[17]: 122
Initially, in almost all projects of new Cyrillic alphabets, it was decided to use only the 33 letters of the Russian alphabet, with the addition ofapostrophes,digraphs,trigraphs andtetragraphs for non-Russian languages.[18][19] However, such an arrangement turned out to be very inconvenient and did not reflect the phonetic richness of many languages. As a result, additional letters were introduced in a number of alphabets (Tatar,Kazakh,Yakut, etc.). In the 1940s-1950s, in some languages (e.g.Altaic), digraphs were also replaced with additional letters.
While Soviet propaganda claimed that the switch to Cyrillic was better for the affected languages,[8]: 33 in many cases the new Cyrillic alphabets were not well adapted to the languages. For example, in theEvenk language there arephonemes that do not exist in Russian, but the letters were still written using the existing Russian scripts, without creating new letters.[1] It is also noted that in a number of languages there wereorthographic changes that were subsequently made or proposed, such as in Tatar.
As previously mentioned, cyrillization cannot be separated from theRussification process.[1] In general, this process is accompanied by efforts to absorb words from the Russian language on a large scale into non-Russian languages.[5]
Examples are in manyTurkic languages. By one estimate, initially only about 25-40 words from Russian were absorbed, but by the late 1960s, there were thousands of Russian words absorbed, many of them words in common use. In contrast,korenizatsiya was characterized by efforts to purify local languages from foreign influences (in Turkic languages, by changingArabic andPersianloanwords). During this period there were also attempts to replace words borrowed from Persian and Arabic with words borrowed from Russian; for exampleşura was replaced bysovet andcumhuriyet byrespublika.[2][3][20] Furthermore, the spelling of these new words was in accordance with the Russian language;[1] for example, the russian wordсовет, which is pronounced[sɐˈvʲet] with apalatalized V, was spelledsovet in Azeri based on the Russian spelling, while in Turkish, which was unaffected by Soviet cyrillization rules, the spellingsovyet, which reflects the palatalized V of the original, was adopted.
Russification also led to diminished use of and teaching in local languages, with Russian being the main language spoken in many areas of life, while the local language was spoken only in the village or at home. Some non-Russian children grew up only being able to speak Russian.[5][8] The process also resulted in many ethnic groups not being able to read their historical records of the past, which were written in different scripts.[3]
The cyrillicization process was also characterized by "artificial" efforts to separate and differentiate languages; for example, in theMoldovan ASSR, Soviet language planners replaced theRomanian Latin alphabet with a newCyrillic alphabet derived from Russian, andexaggerated Moldovan regionalisms in vocabulary, to create the impression of aMoldovan language distinct from Romanian.Pseudo-historical arguments were also included in the discussion of the history of the Turkic languages, such as the argument that these languages were very different from those spoken outside the Soviet Union, or that the Azeri language was related to theNorth Caucasian languages inDagestan. The result was that manyTurkic peoples appeared increasingly distinct from their ethnic relatives, such as (Soviet) Azeris fromIranian Azeris and TurkishTurks.[2][3]
After thecollapse of the Soviet Union, severalpost-Soviet countries began to reintroduce the Latin alphabet for their national languages (e.g.Turkmen,Uzbek, and Azeri). One of the reasons for re-adopting the Latin alphabet was to reverse the process of Russification associated with the Soviet cyrillization attempts.
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