областной, окружной, краевой

15:32 Jul 9, 2013 

There's also a wealth of information on Federal Subjects of Russia and Russia in general at http://www.statoids.com/uru.html

15:18 Jul 9, 2013 

I use my own modified version of the United States Board on Geographic Names (BGN), which is pretty much the same or the same as other transliteration schemes. In the event you don't have it, here's a list of raion names giving the needed root names along with the adjectival ones. http://www.statoids.com/yru.html. Hope it's helpful.

14:41 Jul 9, 2013 

I use the system adopted in the US Defense Department and CIA, avoiding the Library of Congress' system with its ligatured ia, iu, etc.

14:32 Jul 9, 2013 

For transliteration, I use J. Thomas Shaw's "The Transliteration of Modern Russian for English-Language Publications" (MLA, 1979). It is used by libraries throughout the United States and the Library of Congress. It provides four different systems for transliteration, with discussion of when each system is appropriate. I would agree that, for general readers (i.e. not specialists in Russian studies), the diacritical mark for the soft sign should be omitted.

If anyone knows of a similar authoritative source for transliteration used in British English, I'd love to know!

14:26 Jul 9, 2013 

Yeah, the hard sign, that's a hard one to deal with!

14:16 Jul 9, 2013 

and the quotation marks used to represent it. In your example, I'd write "...the oblast' zoo"

14:10 Jul 9, 2013 

Gary, the ['] can become complicated, e.g., The oblast''s capital is Orel - that's a double apostrophe (one for possessive) not a quote symbol. Or how about, Five oblast's' capitals are in Siberia; Ol'ga's Volga boat trip to the oblast''s zoo. I don't know about the OED, but Webster's Third New International Dictionary gives oblast with no '. Just saying...

01:23 Jul 9, 2013 

I use it with oblast['] for consistency since I include it when transliterating all proper names which appear in Russian so that one can go back and search Russian-language sources. Of course, if the Russian is a phonetic rendering of a non-Russian (or non-Soviet) name I try to find out how the name was spelled in English.

01:17 Jul 9, 2013 

The " ' " on oblast(') is rarely used now for the geographic name, or for any name as far as that goes. What does ' mean to any non-Russian speaker? How do you pronounce an "apostrophe"? It's always been stupid to include it--Ol'ga vs Olga vs Volga. Do you think Ol'ga is going to be pronounced any different than Volga (except of course for the V)?!Dumb!
Local Heroes: The Political Economy of Russian Regional Governance
Kathryn Stoner-Weiss - 2002 - Business & Economics
The economics section of the Novosibirsk branch of the Academy of Sciences under Anatolii G. Granberg helped promote the idea of freer inter-oblast trade ...
USAID Facilitates Inter-Oblast Collaboration to Improve Access to FP ...

tfh.jsi.com/Success/volyn_rivne.htm‎
April 2010 - USAID's Together for Health (TfH) project supports partnerships to improve reproductive health (RH) and family planning (FP) services in 15 oblasts ...
Russia: Creating Private Enterprises and Efficient Markets - Page 20 - Google Books

18:01 Jul 8, 2013 

I see what you mean.

17:15 Jul 8, 2013 

The same transliterated nouns can be used as adjectives (e.g. oblast' cancer center), or translated as "regional" (межобластной can be "inter-regional"). It's a matter of preference.