ABSTRACT
Although the languages of the Muslim peoples of the USSR are now written in the Cyrillic script, the alphabets used for them are all different: the symbols often have different values and within the alphabets they are arranged in a different order. To avoid excessive confusion, a standard transliteration of the Russian Cyrillic alphabet has been used here, but it should be noted that this does not always faithfully convey the pronunciation in a particular language. Furthermore, it has not always been possible to be strictly consistent, or rather, it was felt that in some cases consistency would be more misleading than inconsistency. This was particularly the case where a name was already well known in another form of transliteration, e.g. Majidkhan is used in some contexts instead of Madzhidkhan, Yusuf instead of Jusuf. Where a place-name has an established English form, that is used instead of a transliterated form, e.g. Kazan instead of Kazan'.
