In the 1920s and early 1930s, the Soviet regime engaged in a policy of replacing preexisting scripts with the Latin alphabet. By the mid-1930s, nearly 50 of the USSR's 72 written languages were Latinised, and preliminary work was underway to convert Russian and Ukrainian themselves from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet. But the decision was reversed and any further work abandoned.
What difference would it have made if the conversion had been carried through?