the economics of c => k and the like

One of the aims of the great Russian spelling reform of 1917 was apparently to make War and Peace shorter, thus saving paper. It is strange then that socialists in the rest of the world ended up trading c for k, which actually uses more ink.
If the reform was implemented partly by getting revolutionary sailors to seize forbidden letters from Petrograd printshops, what were the penalties for trying to hang on to dodgy characters, and were they more severe for some letters than for others? Did any bourgeois typemonkeys decide that they might as well be hung for a capital Yat’ as for a small izhitsa? (Where can I find a glossary of early Communist insults?)

Trevor @ 25 January 2004 9:50 PM

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