What is GOST 7.79-2000?

GOST 7.79-2000 is the Russian and inter-state standard for romanizing Cyrillic. It defines two systems: System A uses diacritics, while System B uses only basic Latin letters and digraphs. This tool uses System B, which is the version used for ASCII-safe transliteration.

Why does Russian ж become zh and not ž?

System B avoids diacritics entirely so it works in plain ASCII. It encodes single Cyrillic letters that have no Latin equivalent as digraphs: ж=zh, ч=ch, ш=sh, щ=shh, and so on.

Is the transliteration reversible?

GOST System B is designed to be reversible. Multi-character sequences such as shh and zh are matched longest-first when converting back, so most text round-trips cleanly between Cyrillic and Latin.

Does it handle uppercase letters?

Yes. Capital Cyrillic letters map to capitalised Latin output and the casing is preserved on the way back, so sentence capitalisation and proper nouns survive the conversion.

No. The conversion uses a local lookup table in your browser, so nothing is sent to a server.

Russian ↔ Latin Transliterator (GOST)

The Russian ↔ Latin transliterator romanizes Cyrillic text using GOST 7.79-2000 System B, the official ASCII-only scheme used across Russia and other CIS states for documents, databases and identifiers. It maps every Russian Cyrillic letter to plain Latin characters — using digraphs where no single Latin letter exists — and converts back the other way.

How it works

GOST 7.79-2000 defines two systems. System A relies on diacritic marks (ž, č, š); System B, used here, keeps everything in 7-bit ASCII by using letter combinations. The tool stores the full Cyrillic→Latin table and applies it character by character. Each Cyrillic letter is replaced by its Latin equivalent: б→b, в→v, ж→zh, х→x, ц→cz/c, ч→ch, ш→sh, щ→shh, ы→y', э→e', ю→yu, я→ya. The hard and soft signs map to '' and '.

Converting Latin back to Cyrillic matches the longest digraph first — shh is tried before sh, which is tried before s — so the reverse stays unambiguous. Characters with no mapping (Latin punctuation, digits, spaces) pass through unchanged.

Example

The word “Россия” (Russia) transliterates to Rossiya. “Хорошо” (good) becomes Xorosho, and “Щука” (pike) becomes Shhuka. Converting Moskva back yields Москва.

Notes

System B preserves a clean round trip at the cost of looking less natural than passport-style romanization — х becomes x, not kh, and ц becomes cz. If you need names for travel documents, those use a different (ICAO/GOST R 52535) scheme, not GOST 7.79-2000. Everything runs locally; your text is never uploaded.