For the Foreign Ministry, Malov studied languages and customs of Turkic peoples living in China (Uyghurs, Salars, Sarts, and Kyrgyz).
He continued working in Leningrad universities, museums, and research, and Oriental and Linguistic institutes of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.
In 1931, Malov initiated a transfer to the Oriental Department “to register and inventory books, newspapers and manuscripts in Arabic, Persian and, mainly, in all Turkic languages”.
In 1933, after the beginning of the Communist government's campaign to switch the writing of the Turkic peoples to Latinised scripts, Malov left the Oriental Department of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.
In his capital 1952 work, The Enisei Script of the Turks: Texts and research, Malov covered texts written in the Enisei runiform script, irrespective of their geographical location (Khakassia, Tuva, Mongolia), and successfully combined a paleographical, historical and sociopolitical approach to classify the alphabets of those monuments.
It was the scientific analysis of Malov and J. Nemeth that allowed A.M. Scherbak to develop his seminal conclusion that “the Turkic runiform script has arisen in Central Asia as transformation of a preceding alphabet, and from there it spread in two opposite directions: to the east and to the west”.