Notes on Transliteration and Translation
The transliteration of Cyrillic characters throughout this document conforms largely to the Library of Congress transliteration schedule for rendering Cyrillic characters into the Roman alphabet. The only departure from the Library's transliteration system in the present document has been the omission of ligatures (a graphic notation consisting of a combination of between two and four letters of the Roman alphabet to indicate particular Russian vowels and consonants), the use of which, while essential for the precision required by the collection of bibliographic data, is unnecessary in performing keyword searching of the present document.
Please note also that the transliteration of Russian proper names may not conform precisely to their equivalent English spellings, a practice dictated largely by an individual's personal preference of the spelling of his/her own name and/or by established usage. For this reason, variant forms of transliterated Russian names are often included between square brackets, and following primary name entries, in order to facilitate searching.
English translations of certain names, organizations, titles, words and phrases have occasionally been added as well – placed between parentheses and preceded by an equal sign (" = "), or simply followed by the word "translation" in parentheses – in those instances where it may provide clarification and/or context for the non-Russian speaker.