Lenin (Ulyanov, as you correctly state) was not a Jew.   I've never heard anyone doubt that Djugashvilli was an authentic name from Gori, in Georgia.   Trotsky's real name was Bronstein.   Not sure how we got on to that, but (Pakled) you're absolutely right about the so-called "Doctors' Plot", which was a blatantly anti-Semitic concoction, invented to justify Nazi-style atrocities against the Jews of the USSR. 

On other points, though, marks to indicate correct pronunciation are no use to people who can't begin to read the script in the first place.   How many 1950s Catholics in Liverpool, New York, Santiago, or - let's be honest - Rome could have made sense of a single line of Latin?   Guides to correct pronunciation are a million miles away from guides to meaning.    Marks indicating meaning are  impossible, other than in the very, very general Chinese  method, or in the extremely specific and impractical  technique of pictograms.

Between the Wars, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk introduced the Latin alphabet to Turkey.   In one sense, this was a reform in the best sense of the word.   In another, it was an act of state control.    Writing Turkish in the Arabic alphabet (as happened under the Ottomans) makes about as much sense as insisting that English be written only with fridge-magnets.   Arabic is an alphabet designed for a single range of sounds.   It works fine, for the intended language, just as the Greek alphabet is great for Greek and Cyrillic is perfect for Bulgarian, or Russian.   The Latin alphabet, though, has proved infinitely more flexible, as English, Welsh, Hungarian, Polish, Swedish and Turkish itself (to name only a few), have abundantly proved.

There is, all the same, a "1984" element to changing the alphabet.   Pre-Ataturk Turkish was full of Arabic and Persian words.   His reforms involved, naturally, a complete re-writing of the Turkish dictionary, in which, it is said (I am in no position to confirm this), all words of Arabic and Persian origin were jettisoned, to the extent that a highly educated Turk today has extreme difficulty reading pre-Ataturk texts.   Dictionary "reform" always carries a hint of "Newspeak" about it.   Turkish is far from unique.   Think of the USSR, where Azerbaijan had the Cyrillic alphabet imposed, at roughly the same time as Turkey was switching to the Latin script.   The USSR insisted that Azerbaijan spoke a language called "Azeri".   Azerbaijan today is hardly a haven of liberty, but it has, at least, acknowledged that "Azeri" is really Turkish, adopting the Latin alphabet, so that they can import dictionaries, rather than doing the "1984" job on them.   (That is still a problem for all those who have grown up with learning to read Turkish in the Cyrillic alphabet, though.)

Final example:  in Taiwan, where Traditional Chinese continues to reign supreme, literacy is as high as anywhere in the world (with the possible exception of Iceland).   Mainland China introduced "Simplied Chinese" a long time ago, but retains far lower levels of literacy.   Do you think "Simplified Chinese" was really introduced to make Chinese easier to read?