The Scripts of the Former Central Asian Soviet Republics

Although the hegemony of the Russian Empire had long extended over central Asian territory with Turkic and Persian Islamic populations and languages, it wasn't until the Soviet Union took over in the early twentieth century that an interest grew in that region's languages and scripts.  Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Tajik, the languages of the respective republics with similar names, had all been based on the Arabic script since their populations were Muslim.  In order to separate these peoples from their Islamic roots...as well as encourage literacy by having the script more accurately reflect the spoken word, the authorities in the U.S.S.R. around 1928 decreed a change to the Latin script for these languages.  About ten years later, though, another change was enacted when they were all forced to change once more...this time to the Russian Cyrillic script.  The rationale behind this draconian move was to bring the various diverse republics together closer to Russia.  I remember checking out a book from my public library during the seventies...it was The Languages of the World by Kenneth Katzner...and seeing  the samples Katzner provided of these languages presented in their then-official Cyrillic script.  Since I was then just beginning to learn Russian and its Cyrillic writing system, I found these languages, whose vocabulary and grammars were alien to Russian, very intriguing...

After the Soviet breakup in 1991, the various former republics each went their own way regarding how to write in their own language.  Tajikistan, the one Persian, non-Turkic former republic from central Asia, briefly considered re-adopting Iran's Arabic script but instead decided to remain with the Cyrillic.  Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan likewise stayed with their Soviet-era writing system. But after independence, motivated partially to separate themselves from their dominated past and partially to make their languages easier to learn and read by the rest of the world, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan went back to using the Latin script.  I can understand them changing back over to Latin, but I can also see the advantage in sticking with Cyrillic writing in order to keep continuity with the past.  After all, these countries, which have undergone script changes every few years, must have large collections of books and material written in scripts few can now read, with sections of their histories linguistically cut off...that must seriously interfere with a nation's development.  However, maybe in our digital age that won't be as much of a problem as it might have been before.  The question, though, is which books and material written in obsolete scripts get to be published in the current one, and which are left in obscurity...and who gets to decide?