My guiding principle in decisions on names and language has been immediacy of description and readability for a current audience, while trying to avoid anachronisms and achieve consistency across what was a tumultuous period of historical change, during which names and language were often contested, as they are today.
In descriptions of ethnicity and race I have eschewed terminology which might be used nowadays, such as African American, but which would be anachronistic for the period. I have preferred the phraseology in common parlance at the time. The use of collective nouns for groups of people in the text–such as ‘the Jews’–reflects the tendency of the times to identify whole communities by the (real or perceived) actions and beliefs of a few individuals (or simply by generalised prejudice against those communities). In this book, it is normally a paraphrase of the character speaking in the text. Judgements on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity or religion were commonplace in this period, based on lazy, age-old cultural assumptions and the more recent popularisation of false scientific theories. But this was also a time when the challenge to those assumptions and theories began to take flight.
The question of place names was of huge relevance in this period. Borders and populations shifted. Empires ruled by one (or in the case of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, two) population group collapsed; new states arose. In this book I have placed intelligibility and consistency above other considerations. Where they exist, I have used common English names (Salonika rather than Thessaloniki, Warsaw rather than Warszawa). For well-known places I have generally used the most easily intelligible place name for a modern English-speaking audience (Kiev rather than Kyiv and, with a couple of exceptions, Istanbul rather than Constantinople). If the place named is generally less well known, I have had to make a choice about using the administrative name or the name used locally. I have opted for Smyrna rather than Izmir, which is the name which would have been used by the majority of the city’s population up to the early 1920s. For Lviv/Lvov/Lemberg/Lwów I have chosen Lviv as the modern and most recognisable name of the city, even though it was controlled by the German-speaking Habsburgs at the beginning of the period (Lemberg), was essentially ruled from Moscow at the end (Lvov), had a Polish majority at one time (Lwów) and now a Ukrainian one (Lviv).
For proper names I have generally used spellings from the original language (Dáil rather than Dail, Friedrich rather than Frederick) except where a name may be mispronounced (Djemal rather than Cemal). With Russian names and with transliteration from Russian in general I have used whatever is most intelligible to a modern English-speaking audience even if that means some inconsistencies (Nicholas rather than Nikolai, Tsarskoye Selo rather than Tsarskoe Selo, Mogilyov rather than Mogilëv).
Except where otherwise indicated, translations are my own. I was helped in Russian translation by Sofia Gurevich and Inga Meladze, Polish translation by Tomasz Gromelski and Turkish translation by Zehra Haliloğlu. I have abbreviated original quotations for readability on a handful of occasions.
In February 1918, the Bolsheviks changed the calendar in use in Russia from the Julian to the Western Gregorian, which is thirteen days ahead in this period. This explains why the 1917 Bolshevik revolution generally described as the ‘October Revolution’ took place in November according to the Western calendar and why I count Rasputin’s burial as taking place at the start of 1917 though according to the Julian calendar in use in Russia it was still 1916. In the endnotes, I have used Old Style dates when citing documents from Russians up to February 1918 and Western calendar dates for documents from non-Russians (in other words, using the dates the writers themselves would have employed).