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was simplified in 1918 to be more phonetic, mostly by replacing the letters i, θ and , which did not have a distinct pronunciation. (They can still be seen in the passage of Dostoyevsky that begins this section.) Other languages of the Union that had no writing tradition were given alphabets. In the 1920s, these were based mostly on Latin letters, since this alphabet had been most thoroughly developed by phoneticians. The systems often involved considerable skill by Soviet linguists in fixing a standard form among dialects, balancing considerations of majority usage with mutual intelligibility and ease of acquisition. By and large stability was achieved, creating dozens of new ‘literary languages’ (literaturnïye yazïki). Then the nature of the political power situation began to make itself felt.

The Soviet Union had remained, like imperial Russia before it, steadfastly governed from the centre, since 1918 more specifically from Moscow. The de facto dominance of Russians, therefore—admittedly leavened by much greater social and political mobility—began to take precedence over the theoretical equality of all, especially when it became clear in the 1930s that the Soviet Union was alone in having set up a stable Marxist-oriented regime, now surrounded on all sides by enemies. Now the primacy of Russian began to seem more important, even comforting; and in the 1930s, by choice or force, all the different nationalities (except for the Baltics, Georgian, Armenian and Yiddish) came to declare in favour of switching their orthographies to some variant of the Cyrillic alphabet used for Russian. The strange fact that the boundaries of the socialist world were coincident with those of the old Russian empire was now suffused in quite a different light. As a later apologist put it:

Because [Russian] is the language of the Union’s most developed nation, which has guided the country through its revolutionary transformations and has won itself the love and respect of all other peoples, the Russian language is naturally being transformed into the language of communication and cooperation of all the peoples of the socialist state. This has been produced by… a replacement of previous psychological barriers by bonds of brotherly friendship, mutual trust and mutual help.64 Russian was now in a position to make major strides. Universal education was a reality, and Russian was introduced as a compulsory subject in all schools. Far more than under the tsars, it should have been possible for it to become known and used by everyone throughout the country. Somehow, though, this did not happen. As we have already noted, in 1970 there were still 22.5 per cent who claimed not to have effective command of it. Whether through the survival of traditional communities—especially in central Asia—or the preservation of resentment at Russian dominance—especially in the Baltic—many continued to contrive to live their lives without Russian.

When the Soviet Union was dissolved on 1 January 1992, all its constituent republics, including Ukraine and Belarus, split off as independent states. The prospects for Russian in education, and hence as a long-term lingua franca among the old parts of the empire, were immediately diminished.

But although the use of Russian can no longer be enforced across the extent of the old Union, it has inevitably become an important political token, with different nuances dependent on local history. Among the Baltic states, Latvia and Estonia are setting linguistic exams to force their resident Russians to prove competence in their own languages; these are unnecessary in Lithuania, where the Russian-speaking minority is so much smaller.* The Belarusian government is maintaining Russian as its working language, after a radical shift in policy in 1995, and demeaning its own national language.† Republics with large Russian-speaking minorities inhabiting a single region, notably Moldova and Kazakhstan, have to be highly judicious in balancing the degree to which they can assert their majority language. In Kazakhstan Russian is recognised