Russian last names: 140+ surnames and their meanings

A Russian full name has three parts, and only the last one is the family name. In Иван Иванович Алексеев, Ivan Ivanovich Alekseev, Ivan is his given name, Ivanovich says his father was called Ivan, and Alekseev is the surname he inherited. His sister is Anna Ivanovna Alekseeva: the same father, so the same patronymic in its feminine form, and the same surname with -a.

Mixing up the middle part and the surname is the most common mistake in family trees and novels. The patronymic changes every generation, because it comes from the father's first name. The surname stays in the family.

Formal address and official order

Russians address someone politely with the given name and patronymic: a teacher, a boss or an older neighbor is Ivan Ivanovich, never Mr. Alekseev in everyday speech. Friends use a short form such as Vanya. Official forms, registers and class lists often put the surname first: Alekseev Ivan Ivanovich.

Patronymics follow simple rules, with a few exceptions

Add -ovich or -evich for a son and -ovna or -evna for a daughter: Pavel gives Pavlovich and Pavlovna, Sergey gives Sergeyevich and Sergeyevna. A handful of names ending in -a are irregular: Ilya gives Ilyich and Ilyinichna, Nikita gives Nikitich and Nikitichna, and Foma, Luka and Kuzma work the same way. Build one below.

The ending tells you how a surname changes for a woman and a family, and often where it comes from. Most Russian surnames take an extra -a for women; a few endings never change. Some of these endings are more typical of Ukrainian or Belarusian names, so an ending alone is a clue to check, not proof of where a family came from.

Alekseev and Alekseyev are the same name. Russian is written in Cyrillic, and every system for turning it into Latin letters makes different choices for a handful of letters. Passports, maps, libraries and old German records each follow their own system, so one family can appear under five spellings. Start from the Cyrillic, and the variants stop looking like different names.

Ask which surname is most common in Russia and you get two answers, Smirnov or Ivanov, depending on who was counted. A 2005 study led by the geneticist Elena Balanovskaya ranked the surnames of rural families in five regions and put Smirnov first. A list from the Institute of Russian Language the same year, and a 2019 count of about 29 million mobile phone subscribers, both put Ivanov first.

The 2019 list includes Magomedov, Aliyev and Karimov because it counts all of Russia, including the North Caucasus, the Volga region and Central Asian families; the 2005 lists cover Russian surnames only. Where a name is most common is another story. In Vladimir Nikonov's classic Geography of Surnames, Smirnov ranks first in the Upper Volga regions of Yaroslavl, Kostroma and Vologda, and in the 2019 data it peaked in Kostroma region at about 4.4% of people. Ivanov peaked in Pskov region at 4.7%, and Popov is most concentrated in the Komi Republic in the far north.

Russian writers love a surname that says something about the character, a tradition Russians call govoryashchiye familii, talking names. They are great for fiction and terrible evidence of what real families are called: no study of common surnames includes Raskolnikov. If you borrow one, readers who know the book will hear the joke.

Every meaning on this page comes from published name dictionaries and the Russian words behind each surname; where scholars disagree, the note gives the most widely accepted reading. Cyrillic spellings follow standard Russian. Spellings in the decoder are generated from each system's published letter table, so check a real record when the exact spelling matters.