The Cyrillic alphabet

In Leo Tolstoy's reading primer of 1872, many words end in the letter ъ, the "hard sign," which was not pronounced there. The book also uses ѣ (yat) and і (dotted i), two letters that Russian no longer has. Stories from Tolstoy's Reading Primer keeps this old spelling.

The alphabet is named for Constantine, a Greek scholar from Thessalonica who took the name Cyril shortly before he died. In 863 Prince Rastislav of Moravia asked the Byzantine emperor for a teacher who could preach to the Slavs in their own language. According to the Life of Constantine, Constantine composed an alphabet before he set out with his brother Methodius. Most scholars think his alphabet was not Cyrillic but an earlier one now called Glagolitic. Cyrillic took its letters mainly from the Greek capitals of the time, and its letters for Slavic sounds Greek lacked can be traced to Glagolitic ones. Many scholars link it with Bulgaria under Symeon (ruled 893–927), after Methodius's students were driven out of Moravia. The linguist Paul Cubberley thinks those students made it in the 890s, finding Greek capitals more fitting for church books. One suggestion ties the change to a church council at Preslav in 893. The oldest dated Cyrillic inscriptions, from 921 and 931 in Bulgaria and 943 in what is now Romania, survive only in pieces. A few scholars have argued that Cyrillic came first, and the arguments on both sides are still debated.

Cyrillic was in wide use in Rus', the lands around Kyiv and Novgorod, by the eleventh century. The Ostromir Gospels, written in 1056–1057 by a deacon named Grigorij for a governor of Novgorod, are the oldest dated East Slavic book. In 1708–1710 Peter the Great brought in a "civil alphabet" for secular books. It dropped some old letters and gave the rest shapes closer to Latin type. Church books kept the old forms.

Spelling remained hard. Russians had long pronounced ѣ and е alike, so schoolchildren learned rhymes to remember which words took ѣ. In 1904 the Imperial Academy of Sciences set up a commission on spelling. Its proposals were carried out from December 1917, after the revolution. The reform dropped ѣ, і and ѳ, and ended the hard sign at the end of words. Some Russians abroad kept the final hard sign to show their opposition to Soviet rule. Russian today has 33 letters.