The original archival and interview materials used in this book were predominantly in Russian and to some degree in Mari, a Finno-Ugric language of the Volga-Finnish branch. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. A glossary at the end of the book explains the meaning and origin of Mari and Russian terms.
In contemporary Russia, Mari is written in the same Cyrillic script as Russian, with three additional letters: ÿ (transliteration: ü), pronounced like French u or German ü; ö (transliteration: ö), pronounced like French eu or German ö; and 
(transliteration: ng), pronounced roughly like ng in the English “sing.” To avoid discrepancies between transliterations of Russian and Mari, I modified the Library of Congress system in the text, using j (pronounced like the y in the English “yes”) to transliterate the letter й (i-kratkoe) and to indicate the beginning of soft vowels: jazyk, jumo. The standard Library of Congress spelling is used in the bibliography to enable readers to locate references in North American library catalogs.
Like English, Russian and Mari orthography requires capitalization only for proper names, leaving open its optional use in nouns and adjectives to indicate respect. Whether or not to capitalize the names of divinities, religious denominations, or sacred scriptures is a matter of ideological preference in atheist and religious literatures. When translating written texts, I follow the choices of capitalization made in the original; when quoting oral speech, I capitalize in those cases where I imagine the speaker would have done so.
In an effort to both respect local sensibilities and avoid making myself into a spokesperson for any of my interlocutors’ mutually conflicting projects, I depart somewhat from common conventions of naming in Anglophone anthropology. Having met many people in Russia who found the idea of assigning pseudonyms deceitful and suspect, I decided against using them. Some interviewees would probably have given me permission to use their real names if I had asked for it. But I preferred not to do that either, not being sure that I would fulfill the implicit expectation of what the final text would look like. Instead, I only use the real names of publicly known figures from whose published work I am also quoting. Everyone else is referred to by a description of the role in which I encountered them, e.g., “the dormitory supervisor,” “the Baptist minister,” “the lecturer,” etc. Since my work was with very recent archival documents, here, too, I only use the names of people who were acting in official capacities for which they are still remembered today, while anonymizing more incidental voices.