UNIFICATION OF UDMURT WRITING: TO THE HISTORY OF THE ISSUE
The article provides information on the set of documents on the history of the Udmurt script’s unification, stored in the Archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences, dated 1931-1932: letters from the Deputy Chairman of the All-Udmurt Committee of the New Alphabet M. Kayukin and the managing director of the Udmurt State Publishing House G. A. Ivanov to the Central Committee of the New Alphabet of the RSFSR; letter from G. Kazakov “For the fastest reform of the Udmurt alphabet” and others. The documents make it possible to establish that no steps were taken in Udmurtia towards a real transition to the Latin script: mainly work in this direction was expressed in discussions on the newspapers’ and magazines’ pages, as well as in a cautious attitude to this issue on the part of the regional leadership. One of the main reasons for the lack of real steps towards the transition to the new alphabet was the need to retrain literate citizens of Udmurtia. In addition, typewriters with the new alphabet were available only in prototypes, shorthand in new languages was not created, the telegraph network in the country was built to use the Cyrillic alphabet. As a result, by the mid-1930-es the transition of the Udmurt script to the Latin alphabet was still not implemented. By that time the state policy in relation to the scripts of national minorities had changed - the transition to the Cyrillic alphabet began. The graphic system of Udmurt writing remained unchanged, which contributed to the preservation of the identity of the Udmurt people.