Marr's hypotheses were used as a rationale in the campaign during the 1920–30s in the Soviet Union of introduction of Latin alphabets for smaller ethnicities of the country.

[7] After graduating Marr taught at the university beginning in 1891, becoming dean of the Oriental faculty in 1911 and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1912.

In 1924, he went even further and proclaimed that all the languages of the world descended from a single proto-language which had consisted of four "diffused exclamations": sal, ber, yon, rosh.

In 1950 Marr's theories were criticized in a discussion in Pravda, culminating in a June 20, 1950 article by Stalin, "Marxism and Problems of Linguistics".

[13] After that point Marr's theories were largely abandoned by Soviet linguists, and an emphasis on Russian language research was promoted instead.