In advance I'd like to say that I know the Russian language pretty fluent (I had voluntarily selected it during school time right during the Cold War despite being a Western citizen ;-) and even after long idle time it worked out surprisingly well (as long as hotel clerks didn't switch to English without notice ;-), whereas Anja and Volker know the cyrillic letters, but don't yet understand terribly much of the language.
Furthermore, for the conversion of cyrillic to latin letters (at city names or the like) I feel that free to in doubt bypass "official" rules and to use letters according to German pronunciation. In the reality anyway different conversion systems are in use and also within the same (con-)text not necessarily uniformly applied (and / however e.g. Google Earth knows no similarity search and shows also "cyrillic" places often enough only "somehow" in Latin letters) - interesting effects occur particularly with multiple consonants that contain a S. In Belarus some further variants result.
For the employed motorcycle this time the choice was the Suzuki GS650G Katana (from 1980 and thus almost 30 years old, but well conserved, with shaft drive and a fuel capacity for 450 km).
