Languages of the Soviet Union

There was no explicit plan to enable non-Russians to learn Russian, and there was no possibility for other ethnic groups to develop their own culture and language.

In this period, some individual efforts developed written forms for some of these languages, but they had limited effect and they were focused on missionary activities.

However, the Soviet Union faced the problem of unifying the country, and for that reason, Russian was selected as the common language to facilitate communication between members of different ethnic groups.

[2] In 1975, Brezhnev said "under developed socialism, when the economies in our country have melted together in a coherent economic complex; when there is a new historical concept—the Soviet people—it is an objective growth in the Russian language's role as the language of international communications when one builds Communism, in the education of the new man!

New or modified writing systems were adopted for over half of the languages spoken in the territory during the early Post-revolutionary years.

As part of this policy, in 1918 Russian orthography was simplified removing orthographic distinctions without phonetic counterpart.

Other languages that received their writing systems during the 1920s and early 1930s kept using them, such as Nanai, Nivkh, Koryak, Chuckchi, Khanty, and Mansi.

In line with their de jure status in a federal state, they had a small formal role at the Union level (being e.g. present in the Coat of arms of the USSR and its banknotes) and as the main language of its republic.

Strongly promoted use of Cyrillic in many republics however, combined with lack of contact, led to the separate development of the literary languages.

[citation needed] Some smaller languages with very dwindling small communities, like Livonian, were neglected, and weren't present either in education or in publishing.