Note on Translation and Transliteration

The interviews described in this book were conducted in Russian. All translations are the author's own.

A standard simplified American Library Association Library of Congress (ALA-LC) system has been used to transliterate Russian words from the Cyrillic alphabet (the standard phonetic system for writing Russian). Certain names, place names, or other proper nouns appear as commonly spelled in English (including those originating in another language, for example, Finnish). For those unfamiliar with the ALA-LC system, it may be useful to note that symbols denote two Cyrillic letters that have no English equivalent. The soft sign [denoted by a single apostrophe] renders the consonant it follows soft, and the hard sign [appearing in transliteration as a double apostrophe] reinforces that the consonant it follows should be pronounced hard. The difference between hard and soft consonants in Russian may be hard to discern for those new to the language, but this difference is significant to Russian speakers and in some cases is essential to differentiate otherwise similar words; readers unfamiliar with Russian may ignore these notations, which will appear to most non-Russian-speaking readers like an oddly placed apostrophe. Additionally, Russian has more vowels than English; every transliteration system addresses this issue somewhat differently, and ALA-LC offers a consistent solution that is quite distinct from the typical Anglophone pronunciation of the same letters. Readers interested in pronunciation are encouraged to learn more about the Russian alphabet and to study the ALA-LC transliteration table. By way of authorly confession, I will also share that I’m absolutely horrendous at remembering transliteration rules, and any correctly transliterated spellings in this text are thanks to others who have helped me to fix them.