Why Did Bolsheviks Allow Armenians and Georgians to Retain Their Alphabets Despite Latinizing and Cyrillicizing the Others?

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 4 – Moscow’s insistence that all the non-Russian republic languages in the Russian Federation be written in Cyrillic-based scripts and its anger at efforts by many now independent former Soviet republics that have shifted from a Russian-based alphabet to a Latin script-based one not surprisingly has attracted attention to exceptions, including in the past.

            In Soviet times, remarkably it seems to many, five republics – Armenia, Georgia, and the three occupied Baltic ones – were allowed to retain their national languages.  Few see the Baltic cases as exceptional given that they were occupied only at the end of World War II, but the Armenian and Georgian ones are clearly outliers.

           

            As a result, even now, many in Russia ask “why did the Bolsheviks although them to keep their national alphabets despite insisting on the Latinization or Cyrillicization of all the others?”  The Zen.Yandex portal offers a list of explanations for why that happened (zen.yandex.ru/media/centralasia/pochemu-v-sssr-razreshili-armianam-i-gruzinam-ostavit-svoi-alfavit-a-azerbaidjancev-i-jitelei-srednei-azii-pereveli-na-kirillicu-ddd4bbf36288d3517dbeccb).

            “A very important but far from the only reason” for this was that “the Armenians and Georgians had become part of the Russian Empire at the start of the 18^th century” and thus had been much more “strongly included” in the life of that state. In addition, Armenians and Georgians like Stalin and Mikoyan were prominent in the Bolshevik party.

            Changing the alphabets of these two nations would have risked offending them.  But perhaps a more profound reason is that the Armenian and Georgian alphabets had a long history: they arose in the early medieval period and had already produced enormous literatures. Changing the alphabets would have cut people off from this rich history.

            The situation with regard to the other Caucasian and Central Asian peoples was different. Most had used Arabic and their literatures were less national than “international” as a result, and few of them had a functioning educational system or even high rates of literacy in their respective national tongues.

            The Soviet authorities not only wanted to promote literacy and believed that a Latin or Cyrillic script would make that easier but they wanted to cut off these peoples from the Arab or Persian worlds and to form Soviet nations that would be integrated into the USSR rather than into anything else. Zen.Yandex says.

            But despite these goals, “in the 1920s,” it says, “the Soviets continued to use the Arabic alphabet for instruction of the Turkic peoples. Later, they rejected this out of economic considerations and because Arabic was not so well adapted to the Turkic language,” at least in the view of Soviet scholars.

            Initially, the Bolsheviks wanted all the national languages of the USSR to go over to Latin, including Russian. But there was strong resistance to doing so with Russian. For the others, except Armenian and Georgian, there was far less – and Moscow first Latinized and then Cyrillicized their national alphabets.

            According to the Russian outlet, the Bolsheviks should not be accused of trying to “impose Russian culture on all of them.” In fact, it says, “they wanted to create new people and to ensure that each person could read and write. The only means of achieving this became the shift to Cyrillic.” 

            Not all non-Russians agreed then or would do so now, and this discussion is likely to prompt at least some of them to ask why, if the Bolsheviks were prepared to make some exceptions, should they not seek exceptions from the Putin regime.