History of Russian cursive

Russian handwriting did not begin with the script taught in schools today. It begins with skoropis — literally "rapid writing" — the running chancery hand that clerks used through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for everything a state produces: petitions, land records, court rolls, inventories. It was fast because it had to be, and like every fast hand it paid for speed in legibility. Letters lean, contract, and reach above and below the line. Scribes raised whole letters above the writing line where a modern reader expects none, and abbreviated freely, because the people who would read the document already knew the formulas.

If you are holding something written before the eighteenth century and it looks less like the handwriting on this site than like a hedge, this is why. It is not a worse version of modern Russian cursive. It is a different hand with different habits, and the script that replaced it was built partly to get away from it.

The modern cursive alphabet grew out of that older running script rather than being invented to replace it: it was developed during the 18th century on the base of the earlier Cyrillic tachygraphic writing.^[1] What changed in between was not the pen. It was the type.

In 1708 Peter I introduced the civil script — гражданский шрифт — a type reform for secular printing.^[3] It is the single most consequential thing that ever happened to Russian letterforms, and it happened to printed books first.

What the reform actually did to the alphabet is narrower than it is usually described, and worth stating precisely: Ѧ was replaced with Я, several letters (Ѯ, Ѱ, Ѡ) were effectively eliminated, and all diacritics and accents apart from й were removed from secular usage.^[4] The Church kept its own typography; everything printed for the state and for readers took on the new one.

The handwriting followed. Russian cursive became the handwritten counterpart of so-called "civil" (or Petrine) printed script of books^[2] — which is the fact that explains why the script on this site looks the way it does. It is a hand shaped to match a typeface that was itself shaped to sit beside European printing.

And it is where the trouble starts for anyone reading a Russian document with Latin-alphabet instincts. A hand pulled toward Western letterforms inherits their shapes without their sound values. Lowercase т is written as a Latin *m*. Lowercase д is written as a Latin *g*. Lowercase и is a *u*, and п is an *n*. None of these are coincidences of bad handwriting; they are what the letters are, correctly formed. The letter pages on this site exist mostly to work through the six that catch people out.

The orthographic reform of 1917–18 is the most useful single fact in this whole page, because it gives you a way to date an undated document in about two seconds.

The reform removed four letters by folding each into a letter that sounded the same, conflating the letter ѣ with е, ѳ with ф, and і and ѵ with и.^[5] It also disposed of the silent letter that ended a large fraction of all Russian words: the archaic mute yer became obsolete, including the ъ (the "hard sign") in final position following consonants.^[6]

That second change is the one you can see from across a room. Before the reform, a great many words ended in a letter that was never pronounced. After it, none did. So: find a word-final ъ, or find a single ѣ, and the document is pre-reform. Either one is sufficient; you do not need to read a word of it.

The transition has an edge, and the decree is explicit about where it falls. In December 1917 the People's Commissariat of Education directed that "All state and government institutions and schools without exception should carry out the transition to the new orthography without delay. From 1 January 1918, all government and state publications, both periodical and non-periodical are to be printed in the new style."^[7] Official printing turns over on a date; private handwriting does not. People who learned to write before 1918 went on writing ѣ and the final ъ for years, in letters, in diaries, in emigration for the rest of their lives. So the trick dates the writer's schooling as reliably as it dates the document — which, for a family letter, is often the more interesting fact.

The last thing that shaped Russian cursive is not a decree. It is a classroom.

In Russian schools, most children are taught from first grade how to write in this script.^[8] A hand taught from a single prescribed model to everyone, at the same age, produces a remarkable uniformity — and that uniformity is the quiet reason a stranger's letter from 1963 is often easier to read than a relative's shopping list. You are not learning one person's handwriting. You are learning a model that millions of people were taught, and then learning how far a particular hand drifts from it.

This is also the practical case for working letter by letter rather than word by word. Once you can identify the taught form of т, и, ш, л, д and р — the six that collapse into each other when a hand is moving — most of a document opens up at once, because the rest of the alphabet carries far less ambiguity.

What a family document adds on top of the taught model is the part no reference can give you: a particular person's slant, spacing and speed, their abbreviations, and the names and places they had no reason to write clearly because they were writing to someone who already knew them.