V. Aliev, The Victory of the Latin Script. July 1930
Excerpts from a longer article.
Original Source: Revolutsiia i natsionalnosti, No. 7 (1930), pp. 19-28.
“The introduction of the Latin script is a great revolution in the East.”
LENIN
Many peoples of the East, submerged by the fiery current of Islam and subjugated by the Arab conquerors, have experienced, since the sixteenth century, all the ‘charms’ of the Arab culture of Islamism and of the Arab script.
The essentially theocratic teaching of Islam with its fatalism, its injunctions to the faithful to adhere, in every question, to the letter of the Koran, its absolute denial of free will, its acceptance of man’s complete dependence on divine predestination (Kadar in the theological book Laukhul-Makhmz), and the rejection of all innovations (kullubidgatin kharamun) has crippled the human will.
The most powerful instruments for molding the minds of the culturally backward and fanatical masses–the school and press–were a monopoly of home-bred religious leaders, the sheikhs and scholastic mullahs, who had lorded over the minds and property of the masses for a thousand years.
Already in the middle of the nineteenth century it became evident that the Arab script did not correspond to the spirit and the language of the numerous peoples conquered by the Arabs and forcibly converted to Islam. Among the Turkic-Tatar peoples, in particular, the adoption of the Arab script evoked strong protests.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, in Azerbaijan, one of the prominent and most enlightened Turkic writers, Mirza-Fatali Akhundov, made the proposal to replace the Arab script by a new Latinized alphabet on which he had worked for many years. However, under the conditions of pre-revolutionary oppression Akhundov could not achieve tangible results …
Closer to our days, yet still in pre-revolutionary times, this question received much attention from Mahmed-Aga Shakhtakhtinskii, one of the prominent old Azerbaijan publicists who spent his whole fortune on publishing a paper entitled Shark Rus (the Russian East). Back in 1912-13, the prominent Tatar writer Said Ramiev also endeavored in the columns of the paper Idyl (Volga) to popularize the idea of replacing among the Tatar population the Arab alphabet by the Latin script.
As early as 1912 the Albanians had substituted the Latin for the Arab alphabet; the Cherkess and Abkhaz in Turkey, too, had already before the Revolution tried to reform their own written languages in this way … The Caucasian missionary society, which practiced the Russification policy among the mountain peoples of the Caucasus, tried in every way to introduce them to literacy by means of a script based on Russian. The more liberal Moslem clergy, starting with the Shamilian Naib Lechinalau, sought to counteract the Russian missionary alphabet by using a reformed Arab script. Neither met with support among the broad popular masses, and the drafts of the Russian as well as Arab national alphabets remained, in fact, on paper.
It was only the October Revolution which inaugurated the sweeping cultural and economic development of the formerly oppressed nations of the East, and cleared the road leading to the creation of a national literature and national written language for those people who had had none before …
… As early as 1920 in the city of Vladikavkaz, the center of the mountain republic, courses were inaugurated to instruct members of the various nationalities in the new Latinized script. In 1922, by decree of the Board of the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities, a special commission consisting of Comrades Guseinov, Dutei, Djadivev and Umar Aliev was established at the Commissariat for the purpose of devising a national script based on the Latin alphabet. At the same time, in Azerbaijan too, a special commission was set up under the chairmanship of Comrade Agamaly-Ogly and attached to the Azerbaijan Central Executive Committee, for the purpose of Latinizing the script in the Azerbaijan SSR Referring to these measures, the late Nariman Narimanov said there and then: ‘Now I am convinced that the new alphabet will come to life.’
By decree of the Azerbaijan Central Executive Committee of October 20, 1923, which was signed by Comrade Agamaly-Ogly, the new alphabet was recognized on equal terms with the Arab alphabet, and by decree of June 27, 1924, the new alphabet was recognized as the only alphabet in the state and compulsory for general use …
Simultaneously with Azerbaijan, among the mountain peoples of the northern Caucasus, too, the idea of Latinization was inculcated with varying degrees of success.
Finally, in 1926, the Resolution of the First All-Union Turkological Congress, which met in Baku, noted:
‘ … the tremendous positive significance of the adoption of the new Turkic-Latin alphabet by Azerbaijan and provinces and republics of the USSR (Yakutiia and the Ingush, Karachaev-Cherkess, Kabardinian, Balkar and Ossetian Autonomous Provinces). Recognizing and warmly welcoming the immense positive achievement of the above Provinces and Republics of the USSR in introducing the new Turkic-Latin alphabet, the Congress recommends to all Turkic-Tatar nations to study the experience and method of Azerbaijan and the other Provinces and Republics in order to decide about its applicability in their own midst …
… The practical application of the new Latinized alphabet, and its substitution for the Arabic alphabet in all the National Republics and Provinces of the Soviet Union-from the Caucasus, Azerbaijan, Tataria, the Crimea, Central Asia to the Altai and Buryat-Mongolia and so on-has provoked a class struggle so sharp and embittered that the acuteness and scope of this ideological clash probably exceeded that accompanying any other social reform in the Soviet East … The resistance of the Azerbaijan Arabists to the Latinization of the alphabet was backed in every way by the Mussavatists in their mouthpiece Eni-Kavkazia, published in Constantinople.
The same resistance to Latinization emanated also from the homebred sheikhs, murids and mullahs in Daghestan and among the mountain peoples of the North Caucasus. The latter, led by Sheikh Ali Mitaev and using hired bandit elements, met literally with daggers drawn the first copies of the Soviet alphabets in the new script which appeared in the mountain villages. The hunger strike proclaimed by the Chechen mullahs in protest against Latinization was a characteristic token of this opposition.
The same resistance was put up by the movement of Ibrahim-Valiev in the Crimea-which sabotaged in every way, and tried to discredit, the idea of Latinization.
The counter-revolutionary Sultan-Galiev movement and the chauvinist Tatar national-bourgeois intelligentsia were headed by Alimdjan Sharaf in Constantinople whose pamphlets against the Latin alphabet resisted in every way the introduction of the new alphabet in Tataria. At that time, Kazan was about the center of Arabism. The Tatar Arabists, in their desperate struggle against the new alphabet, went so far as to demand, in the famous ‘Petition of the 82’ to the Central Executive of the party, that the Arab alphabet should be recognized as the official one in Tataria.
For the chauvinist national-bourgeois intelligentsia in Kazakhstan, struggling against the new and for the Arab alphabet, Bairursunov, from the platform of the first All-Union Turkological Congress, proclaimed a near Cadet program on the development of national culture.
It is equally important to note the part played by the national right-wing opportunist elements who, under all kinds of plausible pretexts, stood out against the idea of Latinization and sabotaged its practical application. We find the same picture of the class struggles also in Central Asia, where a counter-revolutionary group led by the Munavar-Kariev movement–i.e. representatives of the Milli-Isteklal group-also endeavored to wreck the introduction of the new alphabet by every means.
The revolutionary significance of the new alphabet extends far beyond the confines of the Soviet Union. The movement for Latinization in India and in Arabia is persecuted as a Bolshevik epidemic by the ‘cultured’ colonizers of the East …
… To-day the new alphabet embraces the following peoples, speaking:
Turkic-Tatar languages: (1) Azerbaijani, (2) Crimea-Tatars, (3) Nagais, (4) Kalmyks, (5) Turkmens, (6) Uzbeks, (7) Kirghiz, (8) Kazakhs, (9) Bashkirs, (10) Tatars, (11) Yakuts, (12) Oirots, (13) Khakass, (14) Shors, (15) Uigurs, (16) Karakalpaks, (17) Karachais, (18) Balkars.
Mongol languages: (19) Buryat-Mongols, (20) Kalmyks,
Japhetic languages: (21) Avars, (22) Dargins, (23) Laksis, (24) Lezgins, (25) Chechens, (26) Ingush, (27) Kabardinians, (28) Adygeis (Kiakhs), (29) Abkhaz, (30) Lazi.
Iranian languages: (31) Ossetians, (32) Tadziks, (33) Bukhara-Jews, (34) Kurds, (35) Mountain-Jews (Tats), (36) Talyshs.
Far-Eastern languages: (37) Dungans (Chinese).
A characteristic indication of the ease with which the new alphabet is assimilated by, and diffused among, the broad masses is the fact that, within a few years in most of the Republics and Provinces where the new alphabet has been adopted, the percentage of literacy in the new alphabet has exceeded many times the literacy in the old Arabic alphabet. The latter moreover embraced primarily the well-to-do bourgeois and kulak elements, the clergy and so forth, whereas the literacy in the new alphabet expands mainly among the proletariat and working peasantry.
Approximately four million people have already learned to read and write in the new alphabet. Meanwhile there has been a considerable expansion in the publication of the periodical and non-periodical press.
At the present time, more than a hundred papers and journals are published in the new alphabet, and a hundred million sheets of printed books have been issued in more than 40 languages of the Soviet peoples.
Source: Rudolf Schlesinger, ed., Changing Attitudes in Soviet Russia; the nationalities problem and Soviet administration (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1956).