Latinisation in the Soviet Union

[1] They concluded the Latin alphabet was the right tool to do so and, after seizing power during the Russian Revolution of 1917, they made plans to realise these ideals.

[1] Although progress was slow at first, in 1926, the Turkic-majority republics of the Soviet Union adopted the Latin script, giving a major boost to reformers in neighbouring Turkey.

[1] By 1933, it was estimated that among some language groups that had shifted from an Arabic-based script to Latin, literacy rates rose from 2% to 60%.

On 8 August 1929, the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR issued the decree "On the New Latinised Alphabet of the Peoples of the Arabic Written Language of the USSR" the transition to the Latin alphabet was given an official status for all Turko-Tatar languages in the Soviet Union.

In 1929, the People's Commissariat of the RSFSR formed a committee to develop the question of the latinisation of the Russian alphabet, the All-Union Committee for the New Alphabet [ru] (Russian: ВЦК НА, VTsK NA), led by Professor N. F. Yakovlev [ru] and with the participation of linguists, bibliographers, printers, and engineers.

However, on 25 January 1930, General Secretary Joseph Stalin ordered to halt the development of the question of the latinisation of the Cyrillic alphabet for Russian.