In 1708 a new type was introduced in Russia for printing books that were not liturgical, revised in 1710, and the alphabet was never the same again.
The design was the point. The letterforms were redrawn on the model of the Latin types then used in western Europe, with the proportions, the contrast and the roundness of a printed roman face rather than the shapes descended from the half ustav hand. A page set in the new type looks European at a glance, which is exactly what it was meant to do, and it is a piece of state policy carried out in punchcutting.
The repertoire was cut down at the same time. Letters that wrote nothing the language needed were dropped from the new alphabet, among them ksi, psi, omega and the surviving yus letters, and the elaborate apparatus of superscripts, accents and abbreviation marks went with them.
The result was two alphabets in one country. Secular Russian was printed in the civil type with a reduced letter set, and the church went on printing Slavonic in the old type with the full one, and both traditions continue to this day. Every modern Cyrillic alphabet in the world descends in its letterforms from that 1708 type, including those of languages that never had anything to do with Russia.
The reform of 1918 finished a job this one started, and it is worth noticing that the harder of the two was the earlier: cutting new type and reprinting a country's books is a larger undertaking than issuing a decree.