SUMMARY:

The article reconstructs the history of Tatar alphabet books throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, to see how they helped the Soviets in “learning to speak Bolshevik” (Stephen Kotkin). As it turned out from the analysis of Alifbas, very different scenarios of Tatarness employed in various periods were equally Soviet, whether reflecting the policy of promotion of national culture in the 1920s, the standardized Sovietization of the 1930s, or the marginalization of Tatarness (as backward and rustic) in the 1950s. All these scenarios equally aimed at developing the Tatar culture – at least teaching children to read and write in their native language. Thus, it makes sense to speak of the multiple “languages” of Bolshevism, just as there were different successive versions of the Tatar nation and even the Tatar language, which had changed its alphabet twice in the course of just over a decade.