Pronunciation of Some Russian Names and Terms

Just a Few Notes

Russian names. Russian personal names typically consist of first name (Ivan), last name (Tolstoi) and patronymic (Nikolaevich). The patronymic means "son of" (for example, "son of Nikolai" is Nikolaevich) or "daughter of" (for example, "daughter of Ivan" is Ivanovna). That would be, for example, Ivan Nikolaevich Tolstoi.

transliteration. It is quite obvious that the Russian cyrillic alphabet is not the same as the Latin alphabet that we use in the United States. That means that there needs to be some kind of system to write Russian names and words using the Latin alphabet. Such a "system" is called a transliteration system, and there are a few different "systems" that have been developed and used over the years. I use mostly the Library of Congress system, but because there are different ways of transliterating Russian, you will see different spellings of Russian names, for example, Ялта can be either Yalta (most common) or Ialta (not so common); Чайковский can be Tchaikovsky or Chaikovskii. Transliteration also has to be used with other languaes such as Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, etc.

the "Thunder Stone" (Гром-камень, Grom-kamen'). The Thunder Stone is reportedly the largest, single rock ever (and I mean ever) moved by men in the entire history of the world. It serves as the pedestal for the Bronze Horseman monument in St. Petersburg. See the Wikipedia entry on the Bronze Horseman (English or Russian) for more information on the brute force technique (entirely by human labor) used to move the giant piece of granite.

the Mongols. While Western historians typically refer to the Mongols as the invaders of Rus' in the thirteenth century that culminated in the establishment of the Golden Horde in 1240, Russian historians typically referred to the invaders as Tatars. So an American historian might write, "Mongol hordes"; while a Russian historian would write, "Tatar hordes."