Eyewitness: Moscow fears over Cyrillic script switch

Tatarstan, a semi-autonomous republic of the Russian Federation, is preparing to switch the script used for the Tatar language from Cyrillic to the Turkish variant of the Latin alphabet. Next month, more than half its schools will begin to introduce the Latin script.

The Turkic-speaking former Soviet republics of Central Asia resolved, on becoming independent, to reintroduce the Latin script as soon as practicable. In 1999, Tatarstan adopted a similar resolution.

This caused a flurry in Russia. Philologists from Moscow reported back, from Kazan the Tatar capital, the likely negative educational and psychological effects of the switch. The Russian supreme court ruled that the Tatarstan parliament could not authorise the change because its electoral law is incompatible with federal legislation.

Dominic Lieven, professor of Russian government at the London School of Economics, said the capture of Kazan was Russia's "first conquest of a completely alien polity: non-Slav, non-Orthodox. It was the first step towards empire. It would hurt to lose Kazan."

Neil Melvin, senior lecturer at Leeds University's institute of political and international studies, sees the alphabet issue as part of a struggle throughout the Russian Federation over "identity politics".

This, he said, "hinges on the bigger question of whether Russia is going to be a civic nation embracing different cultures, ethnicities and languages, or whether it is going to be much more dominated by the ethnic Russian concept of history and Russian identity".

Dr Melvin said that even within the Tatar ministry of education, opinions were "factionalised" into "those who want to support Latinisation, those who just want the Tatar language encouraged whether in Latin or Cyrillic script, and others who think the government should encourage Russian, or possibly English, since those are the languages of the future".

But he added: "The Russian Parliament has always been a home for radical nationalists who see the hand of Turkey all over the place. Turkey is in Nato and for them it is all part of western, anti-orthodox policy."