Quote Originally Posted by pisces
Quote Originally Posted by Barmaley
Weird. You learn something new everyday. Why did they do that, though, in the first place -- what's wrong with ъ -- and why wouldn't they toss ь at the same time? Incidentally, I know people in english transliteration DO use the apostrophe sometimes as a ъ/ь; I just never would have thought that they'd consider adopting that.
I have searched the Internet and found that that was a side effect of 1918 spelling reform, as part of which the use of "ъ" at the end of the word was abolished. Communist viewed the reform as a way to further separate from the monarchic past of Russia. But some publishers refused to follow the reform (which was indeed quite abrupt) and continued to use "ъ" at the end of the word. Of course communists were very annoyed by that. So they just forcibly removed all type blocks for "ъ" from publishers. After that they could no longer use "ъ" even where it was not prohibited by the reform.
By the way, the similar thing happened to one of Microsoft Office fonts which used to contain swastika symbols. Microsoft was forced to remove the symbols and they made a patch which does that. Everything is suitable for political fight, even fonts!

Didn't they also just try to replace the hard sign with a soft sign? Like Вьежают.

I read somewhere that in the 50s or some time some academics tried to get rid of obsolete soft signs and soft consonants after Ж Ш еtc.

e.g. changing знаешь ---> знаеш