Alphabet with marks of Peter the Great presented on portal of Presidential Library

In 2025, the 315th anniversary of the approval of the new civil alphabet will be celebrated, which was established by Peter the Great on February 9 (January 29 in the old style), 1710. The Cyrillic alphabet reform by Peter the Great was completed in Russia, but the Russian Orthodox Church continued to use the Church Slavonic alphabet.

On the Presidential Library's portal, a rare edition of the Alphabet of Civil Morality (1710) is available, which includes the marks of Peter I. At the bottom of the first page, the inscription is written: Given on the summer day of 1710, on the 29th of January.

Yakov Grot, a Russian philologist and linguist, wrote in his work Philological Research: Controversial Issues of Russian Spelling from Peter the Great to Present (1876) about Peter I's marks and gives an example of how the famous American philologist Whitney, in his lectures on language, talks about alphabets borrowed from Greek, and "calls ours the most clumsy and asymmetrical.".

The change in the alphabet, which took place in Russia under the orders of Peter the Great, had significant and far-reaching effects. The emperor immediately introduced the civil press into literature, but the development of the Russian secular alphabet occurred gradually. Peter saw the beautiful printing of European books and desired to have something similar in Russian editions. He commissioned the creation of a sample civil alphabet and sent it to Amsterdam to have a new typeface cast, which was then brought to Moscow in 1708. Regardless, one thing is certain: since 1708, books have been published in Russia using this typeface. The new alphabet was eventually established by the Russian Assembly established at the Academy, which communicated its decision to the management of the print house through two notes from librarians Ivan Taubert and Johann Schumacher.

The transformation of the church alphabet into a civil writing system was limited to simplifying and smoothing the shapes of the letters, bringing them closer in appearance to Latin letters. This made the alphabet more pleasing to the eye and easier to write in cursives.

Nikolai Zasyadko, the author of the book On the Russian Alphabet (1871), reflected on the diversity of opinions about the alphabet among people who read and write. He noted that some people were so attached to the current alphabet that they did not even consider the possibility of finding errors in it or eliminating them, and were willing to return to the old, obsolete Slavic letters. On the other hand, others were ready to frivolously replace their alphabet with any other.

After Peter's reform, the number of letters in the Russian alphabet was reduced to 38 and their spelling was simplified. Forces (a complex system of stress diacritics) and titles, a superscript mark that allowed letters to be omitted, were eliminated.

In addition, the use of capital letters, punctuation marks, and Arabic numerals has been streamlined. The first book published in a new civilian font, Geometria Slavenski Land Survey, was printed in March 1708.

Later, the Russian alphabet continued to evolve towards simplification. On January 5, 1918 (old style), the modern Russian alphabet was introduced based on the decree On the introduction of a new spelling by the People's Commissariat of Education of the RSFSR.

To learn more about the history of the Russian language and its development, visit the section in the collection Russian Language. For more information about the new alphabet introduced by Peter the Great, visit the On this Day section of the Presidential Library.