Russian passports have used four different ways to spell names in Latin letters
A Russian traveller could have held passports spelling the same surname in several different ways. Soviet documents used French-style spelling, a new English-leaning scheme arrived in 1997, a national standard took over in 2010, and in 2013 the rules switched again to an international aviation system that writes one letter as ie.
Turning Cyrillic into Latin letters sounds simple, yet dozens of competing systems exist and none has truly won. In everyday practice people often transliterate however they like. The oldest serious method, the scholarly system used by linguists since the nineteenth century, borrows from the Czech alphabet and its accented letters, and it became the basis for later Soviet and international standards.
Different institutions went their own way. The Soviet Union issued its first official standard on 16 October 1935. American and British geographers adopted a jointly developed scheme in the 1940s, designed so English speakers could read and pronounce names without special characters, which is why newspapers write yo and drop apostrophes. North American libraries and, since 1975, the British Library use a Library of Congress system that in its strict form needs diacritics and tie marks joining pairs of letters. The United Nations recommended yet another scheme for map names in 1987.
The most rigorous option is ISO 9 from 1995, adopted by Russia and its neighbours as a national standard. It maps every Cyrillic character to exactly one Latin character, using diacritics where needed, so text can be converted back without ambiguity in any language written in Cyrillic.
Passports show how unsettled the issue is. When the 2010 rules changed spellings, citizens who wanted to keep the version in their old passports had to apply to a migration office in advance. The 2013 aviation-based system restored ts for one letter while introducing ie for the hard sign. Meanwhile, a far bolder idea never happened: in 1929 and 1930, during a Soviet drive to put many languages of the USSR into Latin script, a special commission studied replacing Cyrillic for Russian altogether.
Source: Romanization of Russian
