Script Reforms in Central Asia and the Soviet Union
The Arabic language and alphabet spread through central Asia with Islam during the ninth and tenth centuries, replacing various Turkic scripts used in the region. The use of the Arabic script for Turkic languages facilitated interaction with Arabic and Persian cultures, and that orientation had not changed, in spite of extensive use of the Russian language by officials, following the Russian conquest of central Asia in the 19th century. A strong Latinization movement swept the Soviet Union after the 1917 revolution. First in the Yakutt Soviet Socialist Republic (1919) and later in Azerbaijan (1923) and areas inhabited by Turkic-speaking Muslims in the southern and central regions of the Soviet Union, the Latin alphabet became official, either replacing the Arabic alphabet or being applied to formerly unwritten languages. The elimination of the Arabic script and the adoption of the Latin alphabet in the 1920s and 1930s served the aim of separating the Turkic-speaking peoples of the USSR from their Muslim roots, and the creation of a sense of national unity among them. The Latin alphabet was adopted for thirty six languages, and was considered a substitute for the Cyrillic alphabet in the rest of the Soviet Union. The picture changed, however, with Stalin and the Great Purges of the late 1930's, What was formerly perceived as national unity, became a threat to Russification. Latinization efforts were terminated and declared treacherous and counterrevolutionary, because they seemed to facilitate the flow of information and ideas from the West and encourage separatist national tendencies. Between 1934 and 1939, all national minorities using the Latin alphabet were forced to switch to the Cyrillic alphabet. The only languages which retained their non-Cyrillic script were Georgian, Armenian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Karolin, and Yiddish, languages which maintained a vigorous literary tradition. The forced shift to the Cyrillic script led to adoption of Russian words and to openness to the Russian culture among minorities. Russification of the Turkic languages was accelerated during the post-war years, reflecting the policy of tighter control over minorities maintained by the Stalin regime. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the 1990's, the Arabic and Latin alphabets re-emerged in many of the independent republics. In Azerbeijan, for example, the parliament officially adopted a modified Latin script for the Azeri language in 1991.
Below are three Azeri stamps: The first (left) from 1919, in Arabic script and French designation; the second (middle) from 1922, with both Arabic and Cyrillic writings; and the third (right) from 1994, with the name Azerbeijan in Latin characters (note the special characters adopted for the language).
  
The 1919 and 1922 stamps are taken from the Seymour Family Collection site.
The 1994 stamp is taken from the Philatelic Mineralogy site.
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