Russian ship naming conventions

The Russian and Soviet Navy's ship naming conventions were similar to those of other nations. A problem for the non-Russian reader is the need to transliterate the Cyrillic names into the Latin alphabet. There are often several different Latin spellings of the same Russian name.
Pre revolution.
Before the revolution, the Imperial Russian Navy used the following convention:
Battleships.
Russian Battleships were named after: 
Cruisers.
Russian Cruisers were named after:
Destroyers.
Russian destroyers were named after adjectives: e.g. Burnyi = Stormy, Smeliy = Valiant
Submarines.
Named after fish or animals – e.g., Morzh = Walrus, Akula = Shark
Soviet times.
Renaming.
The Soviets changed the names of many ships after they took power in 1917.
Project(design) designations (design names).
The Soviets assigned a project number to each new design. The numbers were non sequential, submarine designs had numbers 600-900, small combatants 100-200 and large ships 1000 plus. The designs also had covernames, major ship classes were named after birds, e.g., Orlan = Sea eagle, Berkut = Golden eagle, Kreschet = Gyrfalcon. Submarine designs were given fish names, e.g., Akula = Shark, Som = Catfish, etc.
NATO naming.
"Also see NATO reporting name"
NATO assigned its own reporting names to Soviet ships. This was because the official Soviet designation was unknown.