Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Cyrillic script was developed by disciples of the Byzantine brothers Cyril and Methodius during the 9th century at the Preslav Literary School under the reign of Tsar Simeon I the Great. The earliest datable Cyrillic inscriptions found in the area of Preslav and at nearby Patleina Monastery date back to 921.
Peter the Great mandated a heavy reform of the Cyrillic script in 1708 after returning from his Grand Embassy in Western Europe. He introduced the Civil script which bore a closer resemblance to the Latin alphabet, abolished archaic letters, and introduced new letterforms designed by the Tsar himself while establishing the distinction between upper and lower case.
Around 250 million people across Eurasia use the Cyrillic script as their official national language, with Russia alone accounting for roughly half of that total. This writing system serves as the designated national script for Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian, and Iranic-speaking countries including Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Ukrainian, Abkhaz, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Mongolian, Tajik, and Turkmen.
Cyrillic letters including national and historical alphabets were encoded across several blocks in Unicode version 5.1 released on the 4th of April 2008. This version significantly improved support for the early Cyrillic alphabet, Abkhaz, Aleut, Chuvash, Kurdish, and Moksha.
Several currency signs derived directly from Cyrillic letters including the Ukrainian hryvnia sign from the cursive minuscule letter He, the Russian ruble sign from the majuscule letter R, the Kyrgyzstani som sign from the majuscule letter S, and the Kazakhstani tenge sign from the letter T. The Mongolian tögrög sign also traces its origins to the letter T, transforming the script into a symbol of national identity and economic sovereignty.