Dear Vladimir,

This religious sect has a distinguishing
tenet asserting:

** << Every letter should be input by TeX
with category "letter" (i.e. category code 11). >>

LaTeX does not accept this and currently
inputs most cyrillic characters with category
"active" (=13).

Malyshev's various TeX systems have all
permitted users to respect this tenet if they
wish.  If one keeps this in mind, his
deviations from LaTeX policies are not hard to
explain. He also allows LaTeX active input
with T2A DVIs yielding Type 1 based PDF ---
though only for Russia and the Ukraine so far.

Cheers,

Larry Siebenmann