The system of transliteration employed in this book is a simplification of the system developed by the US Library of Congress. The first difference is the dropping of both the diacritical mark and the so-called soft i. Secondly, the yoh sound is rendered here as ë. By and large I have kept to the Russian versions of Russian proper names, but some sound too exotic in English. Aleksandr Ulyanov, for example, therefore appears as Alexander Ulyanov. The Julian calendar was maintained in Russia until January 1918, when Lenin’s government introduced the Gregorian version. Unless otherwise indicated, the dates mentioned in this book correspond to the particular calendar in official use at the time.