An inconsistency in your transcription with what I'm learning of Cyrillic led me into learning how <е> and <ё> differ in Russian--that is, not enough--which leads to perhaps a more constructive question than I thought of proposing originally; was this tendency widespread among those languages using Cyrillic in the former Soviet Union? That is, is it to be expected in Kazakh, pre-reform Uzbek, Belorussian and the other languages under heavy influence from Russian before 1990?

I believe other languages that use the ё symbol write it consistently; it's too bad that Russian does not, because even native speakers sometimes can't tell which is intended, and for learners it's a real minefield. Proper nouns are a particular mess. (I've seen it asserted that the name Lev, as in Tolstoi, was pronounced Lyov until the early 20th century; I have no idea whether this is true or not.)

As for transliterations, Russians usually render it as a plain e (reproducing the Cyrillic ambiguity); I do so when writing to Russians, but here, where I assume most of my audience doesn't know the language, I give the actual pronunciation.

That's fuuny, I thought I was the first one to put a link to sokr.ru on that blog. It's a well-known site, actually, because it's made by the most famous Russian web designer - Artemy Lebedev, son of Tatyana Tolstaya, author of "Кысь".

Lebedev is Tatyana Tolstaya's son?! You learn something new every day.