My reply below got sort of garbled, so I will repost here.
I ran into this situation several times. The problem I encountered has to do with the naivety of the ladies who think you are going to come 5,000 miles just to see them alone.
Thus, they will send you an e-mail from a new e-mail address and sign it Sveta, or Irina, or Natalie. But Russians, unlike here, tend to stick with just a few common names, so inevitably you could be corresponding with 5 - 10 ladies with the same first name. They can also throw you for a loop by using other variations of their names in an e-mail. Natalie's will sometimes call themselves, Nata, Natale, Natalia, and even Natasha. And when they combine a different spelling with a different e-mail address; you are dead, no matter how well you have tried to keep records.
While I was in SPb, I was due to meet with a Tatiana for 4 days. Then I got an e-mail message signed by a Tatiana (who had previously spelled her name Tatyana) wondering when I was going to call her. So I called the Tatiana and told her I was still coming so she didn't need to worry. She didn't know what I was talking about, and it almost cooked my goose with her. So why didn't I know from the e-mail address which Tatiana-Tatyana it was. Believe it or not the original Tatyana told me she was having trouble with her e-mail and was using a friends e-mail. This friend had the same last name (which showed up in the header) as the orginal Tatiana, so I assumed it was her daughter or some such. Not even the best of record keepers can beat this sort of situation.
This is another reason why, when I was in SPb for a month, I refused to give out my apartment phone number to the ladies (I had a very good story to support the reasoning to them). But one of them had a cell phone which recorded the number of the incoming calls to her. And sure enough she called once (the night of 11 September to offer condolences) and said, "This is Irina." But I had not a clue as to which one it was, because I actually had 8 Irina's on my list (it must have been a very popular name during a certain time period). Not until she talked further, could I distinguish which one it was.
