In the second decade of the twentieth century two historical events occurred that were quite incommensurable, but which exerted a decisive influence on the development of the study of language in Russia and then the USSR. The first was the February and October Revolutions of 1917 and the social changes that followed in their wake, and the second was the paradigm shift in linguistics, traditionally connected with the publication of Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale (1916), which also first became known in Russia in 1917.

Of course paradigm shifts do not occur all at once. New ideas of one type or another were announced before Saussure, and in Russia many ideas appeared significantly earlier, with the conceptions of Mikolaj Kruszewski and Jan Baudouin de Courtenay proving especially important. Yet in Russia, as in other European countries, the nineteenth-century linguistic paradigm, based on the recognition of historical linguistics is the only scientific method, and the comparative-historical method as the only rigorous method, continued to dominate the discipline until 1917, and in many respects even longer. One example will suffice. In Russia today, and in the USSR before that, courses in contemporary Russian language maintain a leading place in the training of student philologists, who specialize in Russian. Yet Petr S. Kuznetsov recalled that when on completing his postgraduate studies in 1930, he had to teach a course on the contemporary Russian language, he did not know what to do at first.