Russian is an Eastern Slavic language spoken mainly in Russia and many other countries by about 260 million people, 150 million of whom are native speakers. Russian is an official language in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and in a number of other countries, territories and international organisations, including Tajikistan, Moldova, Gagauzia, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, and the UN. It is also recognised as a minority language in Romania, Finland, Norway, Armenia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

There are a number of transliteration schemes for Russian. We use the BGN/PCGN romanization system, which was developed by the United States Board on Geographic Names (BGN) and by the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use (PCGN). It is designed to be relatively intuitive for English speakers to pronounce, and is also known as the British Standard.

Sources: http://omniglot.com/writing/russian.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_language