MINELRES: RFE/RL: Russia: Cyrillic-only bill advances
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Fri Jun 21 11:45:43 2002
Original sender: Curtis Budden <[email protected]>
RADIO FREE EUROPE/RADIO LIBERTY, PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC
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RFE/RL Russian Political Weekly
Vol. 2, No. 20, 19 June 2002
A Weekly Review of News and Analysis of Russian Domestic Politics
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STATE DUMA
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...CYRILLIC-ONLY BILL ADVANCES... The State Duma adopted on 5 June in
its first reading a bill establishing the Cyrillic alphabet as the
written basis for state languages in the Russian Federation, ITAR-TASS
reported. The vote was 343 in favor, 15 against, with one abstention,
according to Interfax. One of the authors of the bill was Unity Deputy
Kadyr-Ool Becheldei, who said the bill was designed to take into
account the interests of all of Russia and its citizens and not just
those of separate regions. Fandas Safiullin, a deputy who was elected
from a single-mandate district in Tatarstan, tried to introduce his
own "protest" bill, which would have allowed each region to select its
own alphabet for Russia's various national languages. During the
debate over the bill, Safiullin commented that, "Not one Russian tsar,
including Ivan the Terrible, encroached upon the written languages of
the peoples of Russia." It is generally believed that the bill is
aimed at Tatarstan, which recently introduced a Latin alphabet for its
language. JAC
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