Russian Female Name Generator

A Russian woman's name signals her generation almost instantly. Girls born today are Sofia, Anna, Maria, Alisa, Yeva, Viktoria, Polina and Vasilisa; their mothers are Yekaterina, Natalya, Olga, Yulia, Svetlana and Oksana; their grandmothers are Galina, Lyudmila, Valentina, Tamara, Nina and Zinaida. Reach back to a nineteenth-century village and you meet Pelageya, Agafya, Praskovya, Matryona and Fyokla, while the Soviet 1920s produced inventions like Oktyabrina, Ninel (Lenin spelled backwards), Vladlena and Iskra. A few names never go out of style: Anastasia, Yelena, Tatyana, Irina and Marina appear in every decade.

The grammar matters as much as the choice. Surnames take a feminine ending, so the daughter of Mr. Sokolov is Sokolova, of Mr. Ilyin is Ilyina, of Mr. Pokrovsky is Pokrovskaya; only Ukrainian-style names such as Shevchenko, Kovalchuk and Kochubey stay unchanged. The patronymic adds -ovna or -evna to the father's name (Sergeyevna, Dmitriyevna, Ilyinichna), and first name plus patronymic is how colleagues and students address her. Among friends she is Katya, Nastya, Lena, Masha, Dasha or Sveta.

This generator mixes all of those registers, including Tatar and Bashkir names like Guzel, Dinara and Alsu, noble surnames such as Golitsyna and Trubetskaya, and the -skaya priestly surnames of old clerical families.