Russian cursive is what almost every handwritten Russian document of the last three hundred years is written in — and it is not the alphabet taught in textbooks. Several letters look nothing like their printed forms, four were abolished outright in 1918, and six are routinely mistaken for Latin letters they merely resemble.
- 33 letters, 4 abolished in 1918
- Six letters read as Latin letters they are not
- Unchanged in everyday use since Peter I's 1708 reform
Русская скоропись
Letters
All 37, one page each
Practice
Printable sheets, A4 and US Letter
Generator
Type Cyrillic, get cursive
History
1708 — present
Read
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Why it looks like that
Peter I's civil-script reform of 1708 cut the Cyrillic letterforms down toward the shapes used today, and the 1918 orthographic reform removed ѣ, і, ѳ and ѵ from the alphabet entirely. A document written before 1918 therefore uses letters that no modern reader has been taught, which is the single most common reason a family letter becomes unreadable within two generations.
The letters that cause the trouble
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