Background The cyrillization program cannot be separated from the changing views of the Soviet Union's
leadership under
Joseph Stalin in the mid-1930s. In the same period, the practice of
korenizatsiya (indigenization) was officially discontinued; instead, the Soviet government began to emphasize the cultural and linguistic advantages of
Russian as a "progressive language" With this, it was hoped that Soviet people could become
Homo Sovieticus who was loyal to the leadership of the Communist Party. On the contrary, indigenous culture was now seen as "
bourgeois nationalism" which was inconsistent with the spirit of "
proletarian internationalism". Also, the Latin alphabet previously used in many languages was now considered a "bourgeois script" that supported oppression, so that people who used it were "difficult to develop together". With the transition to Cyrillic, it was hoped that non-Russian people could learn Russian more easily. Soviet
Turcologists, such as
Nikolai Baskakov, stated that learning Cyrillic script was a great tool to speed up the
assimilation of non-Russians into
Russian culture. The situation was facilitated by the
Great Purge, which helped those who supported the cyrillization project to eliminate those who had been considered pro-latinization. The tight control of the Stalinist regime in the late 1930s meant that discussion of the transition was almost non-existent. and in the
Turkmen language, the process began with a letter of support from group of teachers in the city of
Baýramaly. The project continued into the 1950s, with a number of new languages being cyrillicized, such as
Kurdish (1946) and
Dungan (1953). The process of cyrillicization also affected Soviet
satellite states in the early 1940s, such as
Mongolia and
Tuva, in their respective official languages (
Mongolian and
Tuvan). However, there were a number of languages that did not implement it, such as
Estonian,
Latvian,
Lithuanian,
Finnish,
Georgian,
Karelian,
Armenian, and
Yiddish. The
Abkhaz and
Ossetian languages were a special case: these two languages were not cyrillized, but were initially converted to
Georgian scripts; only in the 1950s did Abkhaz and Ossetian begin to use Cyrillic.{{Cite book|editor-last=Jones|editor-first=Stephen F.|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=RRXdAAAAQBAJ&q=cyrillicized In general, the process of converting to Cyrillic script in many languages tended to be hasty. For example, in
Kyrgyz,
Bashkir, and
Uzbek, just a short time after the new orthography of these languages was officially adopted, local parliaments passed decrees changing the writing system from Latin to Cyrillic. This led to many new Cyrillic-based alphabets being implemented with little regard for the specific features of each language. According to Turcologist Baskakov, the Latin scripts previously used actually corresponded more to the phonetic aspects of the Turkic languages than Cyrillic.{{Cite book|editor-last=Ro'i|editor-first=Yaacov ==Features==