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On a tangent: I wonder why wikipedia doesn't list the articles on boats by their original Russian names, but uses their NATO calling instead. Now you have the article "Typhoon sub" which is actually about Akula class submarines, and the article "Akula class submarine", which is about a submarine the Russians call "Shchuka".

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Part of that is that wikipedia is US centric (even it it tries to be NPOV in things like names this definitely leaks through), another part is that the majority of the editors would not be able to verify source in Cyrillic.

The same happens happens with the names of towns and of people all over wikipedia so it's no surprise to see it happen with the names of classes of submarines.

I don't think the USSR published the names, so whatever NATO called things became the de facto name for the rest of the world.

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