Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 17 – Russian
reaction to the decisions of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to move away from the
Cyrillic-based scripts Moscow imposed on them to Latin-based scripts that will
help them integrate into the broader Turkic and international worlds has been
hysterical to say the least.
Many commentators are denouncing
these measures as an attack on the Russian world and a threat to Moscow’s
influence over the former Soviet space, and they often profess to see in such
ideas the efforts of Turkey and Western intelligence services to weaken Moscow
in every possible way.
But as usual in such circumstances,
these commentators don’t know their history: It was Moscow that promoted the
original shift by Turkic peoples, including those in Turkey itself, to the
Latin script (from Persido-Arabic ones) in the 1920s and 1930s. And within the Bolshevik leadership at that
time, there were even plans worked out for shifting Russian in the same way.
In recalling that reality, a Moscow
portal, Newsland.com, has sparked reactions by many who either don’t want to
remember such plans or who are pleased that Stalin killed them, not only ending
talk of replacing Cyrillic with Latin script for Russian but also doing away
with the Latin scripts the Soviet authorities had imposed on various peoples
Turkic and non-Turkic alike (newsland.com/community/4489/content/kak-bolsheviki-gotovili-perevesti-russkii-alfavit-na-latinitsu/5785523).
In
presenting documents from the late 1920s and early 1930s about this, the portal
observes that “in the last several days, agitation has arisen over the
transition to the Latin script of the Kazakh and Kyrgyz alphabets. But by the
same, in the 1930s, serious consideration was given to shifting the Russian
writing system to the Latin alphabet.”
In
November 1929, the RSFSR Peoples Commissariat of Enlightenment created within
its commission on orthography a special sub-commission for work on the issue of
“Latinization of the Russian alphabet.”
That group was informed by the ideas of Nikolay Yakovlev, a prominent
linguist, and his ten theses resemble arguments now being made in Central Asia:
1. “Any
system is not only a technique of writing but a bearer of an ideology – an
alphabet reflects in itself the ideology of the society and class which created
it.”
2. “The
Russian civic alphabet in its history is an alphabet of autocratic oppression,
missionary propaganda, and Great Russian national chauvinism” especially as
applied to national minorities.
3. “Even
after its partial reform in 1917, the Russian alphabet continues to be the
alphabet of the national-bourgeois Great Russian ideology.”
4. “The
Latin alphabet at present in fact has already grown into an international
alphabet” and thus can serve as “one of the slogans of the cultural
revolution.”
5. “The
Latinization of the Russian alphabet is a problem of the cultural construction
of the USSR” and represents the introduction of “an alphabet of socialist
society.”
6. “The
present-day Russian alphabet like other national ones (Jewish, Georgian,
Armenia and so on) makes linguistic and cultural communication among the
nationalities within the Union” and also between them and the international
community.
7. “The
Russian alphabet is at present not only a form of writing which is
ideologically alient to socialist construction but represents the chief
obstacle to the task of Latinization both of other national alphabets … and on
those constructed on the basis of Cyrillic – Belarusian, Ukrainian, Eastern
Finnic and so on.”
8. “Not
only the graphic form of the Russian alphabet but also Russian orthography as a
whole, even after the reforms retains the shortcomings of the pre-revolutionary
class writing system.”
9. “The
Latin script to a greater degree than Russian civic script corresponds to the
level of contemporary publishing technology and the physiology of reading and
writing.” Shifting to it will thus bring many benefits, including not least of
all a savings of 10 to 15 percent in publishing.
10.
“Technical and economic difficulties
in the introduction of the Latin script thus should not be exaggerated.”
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