SUMMARY:

This article attempts to ascertain what the Russian Imperial government was attempting to achieve by replacing the Latin script traditional in Lithuanian writing with the Russian one. This study allows at least two views of the replacement of the script to be conditionally distinguished in the Imperial bureaucracy. The differences between the models of the perception of the introduction of Cyrillic in the Lithuanian language were not grandiose. Even the noted Slavophile Aleksander Hilferding, who had proposed supporting Lithuanian national development as a counterbalance to the Poles, considered the Prussian policy, as a consequence of which the Lithuanians were assimilated, a good example. In this case, both of the conditionally distinguished groups of Russian officials and their supporters were not in much doubt that the Russian language and civilization would be predominant in this region in the future. But differences did nevertheless exist. The image emerged that the initiators of the introduction of the Cyrillic script, or at least the greater part of them, especially Nikolai Miliutin, Aleksander Hilferding, and the Lithuanian intelligentsia, understood this measure as a way to protect the Lithuanians from Polonization and as an opportunity to nurture their authentic culture by moving the Lithuanians from the orbit of Polish civilization to the Russian one. Meanwhile some of those implementing the replacement of the traditional Lithuanian script with Cyrillic perceived it as one of the tools for at least the partial assimilation of this ethnic group. (This attitude was the most clearly represented by the Vilnius Educational District Inspector for Kaunas Province, Nikolai Novikov.)