Cyrillic

I'd like somebody to explain the Gorbachev one

this seems to be a general problem in transliteration - eg feng shui pronounced fung shway or shee or shoi or whatever.

There are plenty of -ovs around, why are some -evs?

this sheds some light:

By the way, this problem is encountered in Russian as well, albeit on a smaller scale. The Russian letter Ё is usually typeset as “Е”, because Ё is missing from some keyboards. In Russian, this is a completely appropriate solution. Transliterations should not, however, be made from a stripped down spelling. Because of that practice, certain established transliterations, like “Gorbachev”, “Khrushchev”, “Potemkin”, and “Rublev”, are erroneous, and they should be corrected: Gorbachov (Горбачёв), Khrushchov (Хрущёв), Potyomkin (Потёмкин), and Rublyov (Рублёв). Actually some modern encyclopædias do carry these.
http://www.elisanet.fi/mlang/strip.html

same problem different solution:

There's also the distinction between e and ë: these are actually two distinct Cyrillic letters with different sounds (written the same way in both alphabets), but just to make life interesting for us the Russians often omit the umlaut, thus causing it to be omitted in the transliteration as well. This is why familiar names like Gorbachev and Khrushchev sound like they have different vowels in their last syllables than they appear to: in fact they should be spelled Gorbachëv and Khrushchëv.
http://www.pronunciationguide.org/Russian.html

ah that's interesting, ledge. So e + umlaut is pronounced /yo/?

The h and g one still baffles me. When I was an English teacher, I had a Russian student who referred to Prince Harry as Prince Gary, and said Harry Lineker instead of Gary Lineker. On the other side of the coin, Harry Potter is known as Gary Potter over there.

I'm also keen to know why Russian names ending in -enko are not spelt -enka to reflect the way they're actually pronounced.

Isn't -enko Ukranian?

I can think of Russian -enkos, e.g. Chernenko.

Let's not forget the Tragedy of Gamlet.

Turned into a musical comedy in the Russian version of Gilligan's Island.

Or should that be Hilligan?

I have a Russian customer named Gary, maybe I should start calling him Harry.

Just like the Russian Spongebob's pet snail!

names ending in -enko are ukrainian in origin.

russian has no 'h' sound, whereas ukrainian does. the same cyrillic letter represents 'g' in russian and 'h' in ukrainian (and belarusian).

ukrainian does have a (relatively rare) 'g' sound to, but uses a different letter to represent it.

Thanks cb. That clears up quite a bit