Rivoluzione e alfabeti: l’Unione Sovietica alla ricerca di una nuova linguistica

This paper features some (socio)linguistic aspects related to the change of orientation that came out after the Bolshevik takeover. The new Soviet nationality policy, set in a context of radical social, political, and cultural transformations, focused on language and identity issues, with reference to alphabetic issues and applied linguistics, to comply with the need to fight illiteracy and bring to the masses the Leninist word. The obsessive search for new paths and paradigms had as inevitable consequence some even dramatic distortions, which however do not reduce the extraordinary importance and multiplicity of the original approaches that characterized those tumultuous years of research for new and innovative epistemological paths.