Transliteration into “our” alphabet of words from another alphabet such as Cyrillic (eg., Russian) or Chinese varies with the times. When I was small the term czar was used for the tsar. There is another thing that determines the transliteration, which is whatever the received system of the times, SOME OF THE TRANSLITERATIONS ACCORDING TO THE SYSTEM OF AN OLDER TIME ARE RETAINED BECAUSE THEY HAVE HADE SUCH WIDE CURRENCY. This is why Catherine is called Catherine instead of Ekaterina–there have been so many books on her and so many even ordinary persons have heard of her that scholars see no reason to revert to her actual name in another alphabet. When they changed the system for translating Chinese some time ago a few WIDE CURRENCY spellings in English were retained, ie., Taoism is still Taoism instead of Dowism. I don’t remember what they call Peking, Peiping, Bayjing, or Bayping or Beiping nowadays.
Also, I recently read someplace that the wife of a tsar was NEVER NEVER called a tsarina; she was always called a tsaritsa. And one or more persons above wondered why we couldn’t call the tsar’s wife a tsarevna. This would be very wrong because the ending -evna or
-ovna means DAUGHTER OF. For example, the noted Madame Blavatsky
was Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, meaning her father’s name was Peter.
. And Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky’s father’s name was Ivan because a vich ending means son of.
And didn’t Peter the so-called Great stop using the term tsar and use the European term emperor? Tsar, which used to be czar, like kaiser, comes from the ancient Roman emperor Julius Caesar.
don willard, correct, Peter was the one who created the Russian Imperial state, but the Emperors still called themselves Tsar, as in, God Save the Tsar. Nicholas (well, if you want to get corrct is Nikolai), always referred to himself as Tsar.
Tsarina isn’t a correct term, but it’s probably one of those translation problems.
And in Russian, it IS written Tsar and not Czar.
Indeed - my bad. I got lost in the genealogy. :o Thanks for the correction.
As for the rest, I won’t go into the transliteration issues, but would like to point out that there is often a difference between a commonly used title (like for instance “queen”) and an official title (eg, “Emperor of all the Russias”).
Hum, I’d never heard “Grand Prince” before.
Chumpsky! 
<anal> If you want to get really technical, her name was Sophie Auguste Friederike, Prinzessin von Anhalt. That was her name at birth – she adopted Ekaterina upon her Orthodox conversion. </anal>
.:Nichol:.
That’s right, Nichol. 
I don’t know why everybody wants to be so bloody literate.
—Yes indeed Catherine I DID succeed her husband-otherwise, she would NOT be called Catherine I.-----
That’s very well might be… for a few years.
<Bosda Faints.>
Well, the first Catherine only reigned for two years before she died, IIRC.