After World War I, the Turkic countries started to use the Latin alphabet, led by Kemal Atatürk of Turkey. Because of this, from 1927 to 1939, Kazakhstan, then part of the Soviet Union, changed from the Arabic to the Latin alphabet. But Stalin made a law in 1940 that all the countries that were part of the Soviet Union had to use Cyrillic, in order to bring Kazakhstan and the rest of the countries in Central Asia in line with the Russian style.