Note on Transliteration from Russian

Slavic studies and Russian history publications commonly use the Library of Congress (LoC) system of the romanization of Russian. This is the most precise system, which, unlike the older ones, ensures that every Cyrillic letter has a Latin letter equivalent. However, it often leads to an unnecessary complicating of Russian names and contradicts many established spellings (for example, Lissitzky would be spelled Lisitskii). To combine the advantages of both, throughout the book I use the LoC system when citing sources and providing original Russian word spellings, and the old spelling system elsewhere.