Cyrillic for All

[Harold F. Schiffman]

New York Times, December 13, 2002, World Briefing: Europe

    RUSSIA: CYRILLIC FOR ALL

President Vladimir V. Putin signed a law to make Cyrillic the mandatory
alphabet of Russian and the various languages of Russia's many ethnic
republics.  Under the law, other alphabets can be used only if approved
under special federal law. The written languages in republics like
Chechnya and Tatarstan, for example, have varied over history between
Arabic, Latin and Cyrillic script. Tatarstan, which has pressed for
autonomy from Moscow, has recently begun to switch back to the Latin
script. Chechnya has used Latin script since it declared independence in
1991, three years before war broke out with Russia.  Sophia Kishkovsky
(NYT)