New orthography officially introduced in Russia

The issue on introduction of a new orthography in Russia was discussed and prepared long before the reform was carried out. “The preliminary report” of the Orthography subcommission under the Emperor Academy of Science presided by A.A. Shahmatov was issued back in 1904 though no unity of views regarding the problem was not achieved. In 1912 appeared the reform’s project and on May 11 (24) 1917 it was officially announced in “The decrees of the conference regarding the issue of the Russian orthography simplification”. After that appeared a series of circulars on introduction in schools from the new school year the reformed orthography. However the real steps in this direction were made after the October revolution.

On December 23, 1917 (January 5, 1918) was published and took effect the decree of the Peoples’ Commissariat of education of the RSFSR signed by A.V. Lunacharsky “On introduction of a new orthography”. All the state and government editions were ordered from January 1 (14) 1918 “to publish in accordance with the new orthography” and schools had to implement the appropriate changes into the teaching of orthography.

However the Decree issued by the Peoples’ Commissariat of education was taken as a recommendation one and not obligatory for institutions, organizations and enterprises of other agencies. Thus on October 10, 1918 the Council of the Peoples’ Commissars of the RSFSR under the decree “On introduction of a new orthography” extended the application of the document’s provisions for “all the state editions, periodicals (newspapers and journals) and unperiodical ones (scientific works, collections, etc.), all documents and papers”.

In accordance with the reform from the alphabet was excluded the letters “yat”, “tetha” and “I denary”. Instead of them henceforth had to be used respectively E, F, I. The decree said nothing about the rare letter izhitza that went out of use before 1917, but after the reform it also disappeared from the alphabet. The hard sign (Ъ) was omitted at the end of the words and the parts of complex words but remained as a disjunctive sign. A series of changes were made in regard of the prefixes ending with the letters z/s as well as some endings.

The reform of 1918 decreased the number of orthography rules that were not reflected in pronunciation and led to some economy in writing and typesetting excluding Ъ at the words’ endings and excluded from the Russian alphabet the pairs of completely homophonic graphemes (yat and E, tetha and Ф, И and I). However the majority of the Russian linguists rejected this reform. Some of them believed it impoverished the language, other thought it was not enough radical. The society also resisted the reform. The first steps toward the realization of orthography changes in practice were made after the revolution and this fact resulted a critical attitude toward it from the side of political opponents of Bolshevism. That is why the innovations were not applied to the majority of editions published in the territories controlled by the White Guardist and later in emigration.

During the last decades the issue on the Russian language orthography standards once again became urgent first of all due to the revival of the orthodox culture for which the pre-revolutionary orthography has a sacral meaning.

Lit.: Григорьева Т. М. Старая орфография в новое время // Русский язык. 2001. № 17; Ильин И. А. О русском правописании // Ильин И. А. Наши задачи. Т. 2. Парижъ, 1956; Карпычева Е. В. Развитие законодательного регулирования делопроизводства в РСФСР (1917–1918 гг.) // «Чёрные дыры» в Российском Законодательстве. 2006. № 1.

Based on the Presidential Library’s materials:

Russian language: [digital collection];

Peter the Great approved the new alphabet // On this day. 9 February 1710.