On January 1, 1918, the victorious proletariat introduced a new spelling and made it compulsory. The Bolsheviks, however, did not come up with anything new, but only reproduced a similar order of the Provisional Government. However, if the Provisional Government proceeded from the fact that for a long time the old and new rules would coexist, the Bolsheviks decided to carry out the reform in fact in one day. Violence has proven to be an effective way of enacting new spelling rules. So, in the eyes of descendants, the reform is associated with the Bolsheviks and is still called Bolshevik.
Illiterate people
In Russia they love to educate the people. It never occurred to the educated classes to doubt that they had the knowledge that everyone needs. What energetic kulturtragers did not teach the peasants! Some called the peasants to the ax, others taught them to love the faith, the king and the fatherland, the third introduced newfangled methods of plowing the land, the fourth forced them to brush their teeth in the morning, the fifth … Well, in general, you get the idea. It is easy to guess that each educator considered his work the most important and a little despised everyone else.
However, there was one area on which everyone was unanimous - teaching the peasants to read and write. That being able to read and write is a blessing and a necessary skill, radicals converged with conservatives. The last quarter of the 19th century was marked by public education. The number of schools increased rapidly and it was bearing fruit. According to the census of 1897, 51% of Russian residents aged 10-19 were literate, while among 50-59-year-olds - 20.1%. The difference is more than twice!
Thanks to the activities of various educators, by the end of the 19th century, the number of literate people in Russia increased significantly.
At the same time, the mass teaching of peasants to read and write showed an amazing thing. A few years after leaving school, even the most successful graduates began to write differently from the way they were taught. Almost all teachers complained about the inability or unwillingness of the peasants to write as it should be, but at the same time it did not occur to anyone to look for some kind of system in the semi-literate peasant texts. But such a system undoubtedly existed.
When linguist Vasily Bogoroditsky tried to find out why former excellent students write so monstrously, he came to the conclusion that ignorance was not the cause of many mistakes. The peasants quite deliberately tried to minimize the use of the letters "yat" and "i decimal". “One literate,” Bogoroditsky recalled, did not write the letter “ѣ” at all, but meanwhile he pronounced it while reading printed books. To see if he was familiar with the handwriting of this letter, I wrote it down and asked if he knew the letter; it turned out that he knew. Then I was curious to find out why he did not write this sign. Our literate replied that he writes simply, without this letter, and many write so, but this letter is used in printed books. He also spoke about the letter "i", which also did not appear in his spellings."
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Not only did the peasants write differently, but their initial training could be very different from what we are used to. The fact is that, in parallel with school education, up to the beginning of the 20th century, the archaic way of teaching literacy according to the Church Slavonic primer, the Book of Hours and the Psalter was preserved. People who learned in this way could, for example, read and sing in church, but it was difficult for them to read Pushkin or Tolstoy.
Children who mastered reading and writing in the Book of Hours and the Psalter had a very peculiar idea of the rules of Russian spelling.
These people were addressed special entertaining literature, which is usually called popular prints. The language of popular print was very different from the language of classical literature. On the one hand, the popular print had many features typical of church books, on the other hand, the letters "yat" and "i decimal" were almost never used here. The peasants considered this spelling to be correct, and the creators of popular prints tried to match the tastes and ideas of their readers. Even in popular prints reproducing newspaper notes (the peasants loved to read about court life), the newspaper text was translated into a popular print spelling.
The spelling of peasant letters was markedly different from the standard Russian one. The hermit Agafya Lykova writes in the same way in the 21st century. Photo: Alexander Kolbasov / TASS
The peasants wrote as the authors of the popular prints wrote. No one could overcome this, and such a strange spelling persisted for a very long time. This is exactly how our contemporary Agafya Lykova writes her letters, a hermit from a family of Old Believers who are not popovtsy, who has mastered literacy from church books.
"Yat" on guard of the old order
The teachers were sorry for the effort they spent on teaching the peasants to write literate. It was bitter to see how, a few years after leaving school, former students forgot about the letter "yat" and other school wisdom. It seemed that the easiest way would be to simplify the spelling itself. After all, if the rules are simple and natural, then the peasants themselves will not notice how they begin to follow them. Of course, the hope that simplifying spelling would make everyone literate was utopian, but it was close to everyone who dreamed of breaking down social and class barriers.
During the three pre-revolutionary decades, dozens of books and articles appeared, the authors of which proposed various reform projects. The same long-suffering letter "ѣ" became the symbol of the excess of the Russian spelling system. “Wouldn't it be better,” a group of Kaluga teachers asked, “instead of empty exercises in using the letter“yat,”to engage with students at least stylistic exercises and give them the skill, really useful and necessary, to clearly express their thoughts, since complaints about that those who graduated from the course of the public school cannot sensibly write letters, unfortunately, are quite fair."
There is an old anecdote about the fact that Nicholas I once decided to exclude the letter "yat" from the Russian alphabet, but knowledgeable people explained to the tsar that this letter is very useful because it allows you to distinguish a literate person from an illiterate one.
Indeed, in Russia the ability to write the letter "yat" where necessary played the role of a social barrier that prevented the "cook's children" from entering the university. So the students had a serious motivation to cram the words in which they should write "yat".
The inability to write correctly often deprived the "cook's children" of the opportunity to continue their education. Photo: RIA Novosti.
For this, there were special memorizing rhymes, for example, like this: “Bѣdnybѣlo-sѣrybѣs // Ubѣzhalbѣdnyagavlъs. // Blkoy on lѣsuonbѣgal, // Rѣdkoy with hrѣnom'poѣdal. // And for a bitter syobѣd // Dalobѣt not do bѣd."
Public opinion
In pre-revolutionary Russia, public opinion was of great importance. People united by interests, wrote articles in thick magazines, argued, created and subverted authorities. And of course, we talked about how to equip Russia, fix roads and enlighten the people.
The Pedagogical Society at Novorossiysk University conducted a survey among elementary school teachers and stated that teachers "unanimously sympathize with the simplification of modern Russian spelling." Members of the society argued that schoolchildren hate dictations, that learning too complex spelling takes up a lot of time that could be spent more profitably, that school should first of all teach how to think and express their thoughts. The same ideas were voiced at the 1914 All-Russian Congress on Public Education. And wherever they were not expressed!
Higher education was needed only to show that it is inaccessible to the illiterate.
Complaints about the excessive complexity of Russian spelling could not but lead to the emergence of practitioners who proposed their projects of spelling reform. In 1889, a brochure by Professor LF Voevodsky “An Experience of Simplifying Russian Spelling” appeared, which proposed new spelling rules. There was no place for the letters "yat", "fita" and a solid sign at the end of the word, but the letter "h" was introduced, which conveyed a special version of the sound "g" (as in Ukrainian) in the words "God", "Lord" and "when".
Another reform project was proposed by the teacher A. G. Gerasimov, who published a brochure with the insane title “Gift of the Uncalled Sky. "Horn-itself-whistle", or New songs, new speeches, a new letter. " Gerasimov proposed to introduce a special letter to designate a soft "w" - "g" with a tail, like in "u", instead of "e" to use the letter "?" did not enter into general use ", exclude the letters" i decimal "," yat "and" fita ", write the pronoun" what "as" INTO ", etc.
The most radical of these projects was the spelling project of F. V. Yezersky, the head of the courses for bookkeepers, who invented a universal alphabet. In his alphabet, he combined Cyrillic and Latin letters. Thus, he wanted to create a universal alphabet, accessible not only to Russian peasants, but to all mankind. His spelling experiments were published in the form of a separate brochure, which also included a small anthology containing a number of classic poems typed in a reformed alphabet. It looked like this:
It is clear that such spelling experiments are curiosities, and not something serious. But they indicate that society was waiting for the spelling reform.
Academic science
In 1904, the academic community joined the work on the reform project.
Thanks to the Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov, the Academy of Sciences joined the spelling reform.
This happened thanks to the chief chief of military educational institutions, Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov, who turned to the Academy of Sciences with a request to what extent the classic spelling manual of Jacob Groth - all school teaching was focused on it - is authoritative for scientists. (It can be noted in parentheses that Konstantin Romanov was also the head of the Academy of Sciences, so in administrative terms he turned to himself). To this request, the academy replied that the rules proposed by Groth were not absolute and that other systems of Russian spelling were possible.
Thanks to the request of the Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov, it became clear that the "Russian spelling" by J. K. Groth, which was the focus of all school teaching, is only a private opinion of Groth.
At the pompous meeting, which was chaired by the Grand Duke, it was decided to prepare an official draft reform of spelling. By 1912, a reform project was prepared, which was the basis for all subsequent reforms. But everything was limited to the preparation of the project, and the changes themselves were postponed indefinitely.
While scientists and officials were pondering the bright future of Russian spelling and the tragic fate of the letter "yat", in public opinion, the future reform became a sign of democracy and progress. If you are a progressist, then you simply have to stand up for cremation of corpses, women's equality, parliamentarism and reformed spelling. And if you are a guardian, then you perfectly understand that all these dubious innovations were invented by the enemies of Russia.
Parliamentarism and spelling
After the February Revolution, they started talking about reform at the state level. In the spring of 1917, a special commission was formed to draft a long-awaited reform. The document prepared by this commission differed only slightly from the draft that was drawn up in 1912 at the initiative of the Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov.
It was envisaged to exclude the letters "yat", "fita", "i decimal" from the alphabet, and the letter "ep" ("b") was retained only as a separating character. That is, now it was necessary to write "bread", and not "hlѣb", "Ferapont", and not "Gerapont", "development", and not "development".
Instead of the ending “-ago”, adjectives should write “-go”, that is, instead of “great” it was suggested to write “great”. In addition, the spellings of some nominal endings were unified, as a result of which, instead of “one, one, one”, one should write “one, one, one”, and the genitive pronoun “her” was changed to “her”.
The Provisional Government proceeded from the fact that spelling reform is not a quick process and no coercion is needed here. In late spring - early summer 1917, the Ministry of Public Education announced that schoolchildren would now be taught according to new rules. At the same time, no one was going to prohibit the pre-reform spelling.
The two spelling systems were supposed to coexist peacefully. Those who are accustomed to the old rules might not have moved to the new ones. The reform was mandatory only for first graders, while high school students could write as they had been taught before. At the same time, first-graders were told about the existence of "yat" and "fita" so that they would not have problems reading books published before the reform.
However, in practice, everything did not look so idyllic. A mass school is an inertial institution, and it does not change voluntarily. Educators are not used to obeying such soft decrees. In addition, they did not have textbooks: by September, primers and textbooks corresponding to the new rules had not been published. So, apart from enthusiasts, who are always in the minority, the teachers were passive and the school year began in the same way.
“The advice and suggestions of the ministry regarding the implementation of the reform,” complained one of the teachers, “devoid of the character of a categorical order, to which the secondary school teacher was so accustomed for many years, were taken only for information, and not for execution by the faithful defenders of groography, as well as those who is organically afraid of any innovations in his immediate business."
When the reform acquired the status of a state event, political accusations began to be brought against it. In the journalism of those years, you can read that the removal of letters from the alphabet was a step provoked by the country's military opponents, and that the Minister of Public Education Alexander Manuilov simply followed the lead of the enemies of Russia, who thus destroy the national identity of the Russian people.
“In the history of our literacy,” wrote Nikolai Troitsky, a teacher of the Tula seminary, “from the German conception, a special sect appeared, according to the parent -“Manuilovism”, and according to the dogma -“beggars”… They stubbornly press this dogma of theirs into the thought of students of all Russian schools as if the heads of the students are the same as the signs on the shops of our fellow citizens, foreigners … How long is this oppression of the Russian alphabet and speech? Who knows, maybe it will disappear as soon as the ministerial portfolio was unexpectedly quickly withdrawn from the hands of “comrade” Manuilov."
Like many other reforms initiated by the Provisional Government, the spelling reform stalled, and there was less and less hope for its successful completion.
It will be considered a concession to the counter-revolution, and the appropriate conclusions will be drawn from this …
It may seem strange that the Bolsheviks took up Russian spelling only a couple of months after coming to power. They seemed to have more important things to do. At the end of 1917, no one was confident that the people's commissars would hold out for long. Everything was falling apart, everything was bursting at the seams. And here is some kind of letter "yat"! However, the Bolshevik leaders thought differently.
In one of his articles, A. V. Lunacharsky told how and why the decision was made to simplify spelling. During one of his conversations with Lunacharsky, Lenin spoke about the need for the Bolsheviks to carry out a series of spectacular and noticeable reforms. The party that came to power needed to demonstrate that it was not only fighting for power, but also carrying out long-awaited transformations.
"If we do not now introduce the necessary reforms," Lenin said to Lunacharsky, "it will be very bad, because in this, as in the introduction, for example, of the metric system and the Gregorian calendar, we must immediately recognize the abolition of various remnants of antiquity."
Lenin and Lunacharsky believed that the spelling reform initiated by the Provisional Government could be passed off as a Bolshevik project. Photo: RIA Novosti.
Lunacharsky argued that, in fact, Lenin wanted the Russian writing system to be switched to the Latin alphabet in the future, but did not dare to do so immediately. But the project of the Provisional Government, behind which stood many years of academic work, could well be passed off as your own. As Lenin said, The pace of reform was truly Bolshevik. The decree of the People's Commissariat of Education, prohibiting printing anything according to the old spelling, was published on December 30, and came into force on January 1. That is, during the last day of the year, it was necessary to change the sets of fonts in all the printing houses of the country (instead of the withdrawn " and "i" it was necessary to make additional letters "e" and "i", which were no longer enough), retrain the typographers, proofreaders and etc. It is easy to guess that no one was in a hurry to carry out this senseless decree.
Until the fall of 1918, nothing changed, and then the repressions began. In October, a resolution of the Supreme Council of the National Economy (Supreme Council of the National Economy) appeared "On the removal from circulation of common letters of the Russian alphabet in connection with the introduction of a new spelling." This document demanded the removal of the letters excluded from the use of letters from the typesetting offices of all printing houses and forbade the letters "yat" and "fit" to be included in the production of sets of typographic fonts. Preservation of the disgraced letters threatened the owners of printing houses with serious reprisals. And the people began to retrain.
“The revolution,” Lunacharsky recalled about this resolution, “does not like to joke and has the always necessary iron hand, which is capable of forcing those who hesitate to submit to decisions made by the center. Volodarsky turned out to be such an iron hand: it was he who issued the decree on publishing houses in St. Petersburg at that time, it was he who gathered the majority of the people responsible for the printing house and, with a very calm face and his decisive voice, told them: “The appearance of any texts printed according to the old spelling, will be considered a concession to the counter-revolution, and the appropriate conclusions will be drawn from this.” They knew Volodarsky. He was just one of those representatives of the revolution who do not like to joke, and therefore, to my amazement and many others, from that day - in St. Petersburg, at least - not a single edition was published in the old spelling."
The repressions that the resolution of the Supreme Council of the National Economy promised to everyone who dared to publish books in the old spelling was the new one that the Bolsheviks did for Russian writing. The state machine and punitive bodies implemented the project of the Provisional Government and passed it off as their own. The letters from the printing offices disappeared (sometimes hard signs were also removed, therefore in some publications of the first post-revolutionary years, an apostrophe is used instead of a dividing solid sign). Even ideological conservatives had to come to terms.
The church calendar for 1919, which was printed just at the end of 1918, contains the following notice: “The Orthodox calendar is typed in a new spelling. This is what the Press Department demanded; only under this condition are they allowed to print the calendar."
Love for the old spelling has long been perceived as a demonstration of disloyalty. Indicative in this respect was the fate of Academician DS Likhachev, who was sent to Solovki for making a comic report on the advantages of the old spelling in a friendly association "Space Academy of Sciences".
Step to the right, step to the left - firing squad
In 1920, a campaign to eradicate illiteracy began, as a result of which, according to the 1939 census, the literacy rate in the USSR approached 90%. The new generation of literate students was already learning the Soviet alphabet, of course, the new spelling. Moreover, not only the spelling was new, but also the attitude towards it.
The workers and peasants, who did not know literacy before the revolution, already studied according to the new rules.
If the old Russian spelling allowed for significant variability, then in Soviet times the attitude to the rules became much more rigid.
The official rules of Russian spelling and punctuation, published in 1956, were approved not only by the USSR Academy of Sciences, but also by two ministries.
Thus, they acquired the force of a normative document, a law.
Spelling rules in Russia have never had such a high status. So it turned out that fighters with mandatory rules and preachers of simplicity launched a reform that ultimately turned spelling rules into a normative document.
As a result of the Bolshevik campaign to eradicate illiteracy, the new spelling quickly supplanted both pre-reform and peasant ones.
The old spelling lasted the longest in the publications of the Russian diaspora. The emigration saw its mission in preserving Russian culture, which was being destroyed by the barbaric Bolsheviks. Therefore, the transition to "Soviet" spelling rules seemed impossible. However, in the last quarter of the 20th century, a new spelling came to emigre editions. This was due to the emergence of new emigrants who went through the Soviet school. Now, according to the old spelling, only a tiny fraction of publications from the Russian diaspora are published.
ALEXANDER PLETNEVA, ALEXANDER KRAVETSKY