Russian Last Name Generator

Most Russian surnames are possessive adjectives, and the ending tells you where a name came from. The vast -ov and -ev group (Ivanov, Kuznetsov, Lebedev, Solovyov) was built on a father's name, a trade or an animal nickname, and a stress on the final syllable gives the -yov spelling seen in Korolyov and Zhuravlyov. The -in ending (Nikitin, Ilyin, Fomin, Shishkin) comes from words ending in -a, while -sky and -skoy (Pokrovsky, Troitsky, Trubetskoy) were taken by old noble families from their estates and by clergy from the name of their parish church, which is why Preobrazhensky and Voznesensky sound so ecclesiastical.

The rarer endings carry regional flavour. Surnames in -ykh and -ikh (Chernykh, Sedykh, Dolgikh) are typical of Siberia and the Urals; -ago and -ovo (Zhivago, Durnovo) are archaic gentry forms; and Tatar and Bashkir families inside Russia carry names like Rakhimov, Khabibullin and Nurgaliyev that use a Russian ending on a Turkic or Arabic root. Every surname in the -ov, -in and -sky groups changes for a woman: Ivanova, Nikitina, Pokrovskaya, Trubetskaya.

The list below is weighted toward everyday names a Russian would find unremarkable, with historic noble, clerical, Siberian and Tatar surnames mixed in, all transliterated the way they appear in English-language news and passports.