Reforms of Russian orthography
Over the time, there were a number changes in Russian spelling. They were mostly related with elimination of letters of the Cyrillic alphabet rendered obsolete by changes in phonetics.When Peter I introduced his "civil script" in 1708, spelling was simplified as well.
The most recent reform of the Russian spelling was carried out shortly after the Russian revolution. The Russian orthography was simplified by replacing the obsolete letter yat with letter 'e' and eliminating the archaic usage of the 'yer' letter (hard sign) at the ends of words.
The story of the letter yat and its elimination from the Russian alphabet makes for an interesting footnote in Russian cultural history.
That it was retained without discussion in the Petrine reform of the Russian alphabet of 1708 indicates that it then still marked a distinct sound. By the second half of the eighteenth century, however, the polymath Lomonosov (c. 1765) noted that the sound of ѣ was scarcely distinguishable from that of the letter e, and a century later (1878) the philologist Grot stated flatly in his standard Russkoe pravopisanie (Русское правописаніе, Russian orthography) that in the common language there was no difference whatever between their pronunciations. It is sometimes claimed that in certain regional rustic dialects, a degree of aural distinction is retained even today in syllables once denoted with ѣ.
Calls for the elimination of yat from the Russian spelling began with Trediakovsky in the eighteenth century. It is said that Nicholas I (rgn. 1825-1855) considered issuing a decree to that effect, but, when told the letter was useful for distuinguishing the illiterate from the literate, abandoned the project, possibly from personal shame. A proposal for spelling reform from the Russian Academy of Science in 1911 included, among other matters, the systematic elimination of the yat, but was declined at the highest level, and the letter remained for the time being the nightmare of Russian schoolchildren, who had to memorize very long nonsense verses made up of words with ѣ (like Бѣдный блѣдный бѣлый бѣсъ / Убѣжалъ съ обѣдомъ въ лѣсъ ...)
The spelling reform was finally promulgated by the Provisional Government in the summer of 1917. It appears not to have been taken seriously under the prevailing conditions, and two further decrees by the Soviet government in December 1917 and in 1918 were required. Orthography thus became an issue of politics, and the letter yat, a primary symbol. EmigrÃÂé Russians by and large adhered to the old spelling until after the Second World War; long and impassioned essays were written in its defence, as by Ilyin in c. 1952. Even in Soviet Russia, it is said that some printing shops continued to use the eliminated letters until their blocks of type were forcibly removed; certainly, the Academy of Sciences published its annals in the old orthography until approximately 1924, and the Russian Orthodox Church, when printing its calendar for 1922, for the first time in the new orthography, included a note that it was doing so as a condition of receiving a license for impression. To the builders of the new regime, conversely, the new spelling visibly denoted the shining world of the future, and marked on paper the break with the old. The large-scale campaign for literacy in the early years of the Soviet government was, of course, conducted in accordance with the new norms.
After the collapse of the Soviet government in 1991, as a tendency to return to interrupted roots became apparent in Russia, the old spelling became fairly common in brand names and the like. Calls for the reintroduction of the old spelling were heard, though not taken seriously, as supporters of the yat described it as "that most Russian of letters", and the "white swan" of Russian spelling. Nonetheless, almost no one knew its proper usage, which had become somewhat debased, relative to the ancient Old Slavonic norms, even prior to its elimination.
In objective terms, the elimination of the yat, together with the other spelling reforms, decisively broke the influence of Church Slavonic on the living literary language. It can be argued as well that the morphological-compositional nature of Russian spelling was somewhat damaged, since a number of inflexions and common words had previously been distinguished by е/ѣ (For example: ѣсть/есть to eat/(there) is; лѣчу/лечу I heal/I fly; синѣе/синее bluer/blue (n.); вѣдѣніе/веденіе knowledge/leadership). On the other hand, the modern spelling is, unequivocally, greatly simpler than the old one. The choice in the matter, insofar as it can be made today, is one of psychology. The presence of ѣ in a printed text noticeably alters its apperception. It is significant, therefore, that to many Russians today, texts in the old spelling are, simply put, difficult to read.