Russian Name Generator

A Russian name has three parts: given name, patronymic and surname, and each follows rules that are easy to get wrong. The patronymic is built from the father's name, so Ivan's son is Sergey Ivanovich and his daughter is Anna Ivanovna. Surnames change with gender too: a man is Sokolov, Lebedev, Ilyin or Pokrovsky, while his sister is Sokolova, Lebedeva, Ilyina or Pokrovskaya. Names of Ukrainian origin ending in -enko or -uk, such as Shevchenko, stay the same for both sexes.

The stock of first names is smaller than in English, which is why diminutives carry so much weight. Aleksandr is Sasha to friends, Dmitry is Dima, Yekaterina is Katya and Yevgeny is Zhenya, while formal address uses first name plus patronymic. Era matters as well: Galina, Lyudmila, Gennady and Valery belong to people born under the Soviet Union; Artyom, Matvey, Arina and Milana dominate maternity wards today; and Prokhor, Yefim, Agrafena and Pelageya sound like a nineteenth-century village.

This generator mixes all of those registers, transliterated consistently (Sergey, Yevgeny, Yury, Ksenia rather than Sergei, Evgeny, Yuri, Kseniya), and it includes historic noble surnames such as Golitsyn, Trubetskoy and Sheremetev for period fiction. Pick a full three-part name for documents and dialogue, or a first-plus-surname pair for a cast list.