2969: When the USSR Tried to Latinize Writing Feb 6, 2025

The USSR, and indeed the Russian Federation, was a ruthless regime that sought to Russify the many peoples under its control. This is why many languages that were originally written in a variant of the Arabic script were transitioned to the Cyrillic alphabet, including the respectively unrelated Uzbek and Tajik. It may be surprising to know then that there were official Latinization efforts in the Soviet Union in the 1930’s, not only in these regions but in all parts of the Soviet Union. Many places under Soviet control already had practiced this, such as in parts of central Europe and in the Baltic states, but the reason to Latinize was for these stated reasons:

• To reduce illiteracy rates (which was effective, though not strictly because of the alphabet)

• To modernize, culturally

• To more easily communicate socialism globally

• To secularize the Muslim population and distance them from the Persian/Arab world

The efforts were later dropped by the 1940’s in favor of Cyrillic, though most scripts already in use, like Georgian, Armenian, and Latin (in places like Poland and Czechoslovakia), were maintained, except for Arabic-based scripts and Mongolian which were Cyrillicized. Languages like Kazakh and Uzbek only began to be officially switched to the Latin alphabet after the fall of the Soviet Union.