Cyrillisation in the Soviet Union
In the USSR, cyrillisation or cyrillization (Russian: Кириллиза́ция, romanized: kirillizatsiya) was a campaign from the late 1930s to the 1950s to replace official writing systems based on Latin script (such as Yanalif or the Unified Northern Alphabet), which had been introduced during the previous latinization program, with new alphabets based on Cyrillic.
[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 as Turkey (which borders the Azerbaijan SSR).
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.
Soviet Turcologists, such as Nikolai Baskakov, stated that learning Cyrillic script was a great tool to speed up the assimilation of non-Russians into Russian culture.
[9][10] The situation was facilitated by the Great Purge, which helped those who wanted the cyrillization project to eliminate of those who had been considered pro-latinization.
However, there are a number of languages that did not implement it, such as Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Finnish, Georgian, Karelian, Armenian and Yiddish.
For example, in Kyrgyz, Bashkir and Uzbek, 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.
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 the linguistic aspects of the newly cyrillicized languages was then complicated by events such as World War II and the effects of the Great Purge which eliminated the existing local elites.
[3] The cyrillicization process is also characterized by "artificial" efforts to separate and differentiate languages; for example, in Moldova, a Romanian-speaking country that formed part of Romania prior to its conquest by the USSR in World War II, Soviet language planners replaced the Romanian Latin alphabet with a new Cyrillic alphabet derived from Russian, and exaggerated Moldovan regionalisms in vocabulary, to create the impression of a Moldovan language distinct from Romanian.
One of the reasons for re-adopting the Latin script was to reverse the process of Russification that had arisen with the Soviet cyrillization attempts.
