Its not actually caused by Romanization though, because if it were, it would have been spelt with an I or a Y, as is usually done when translating the Cyrillic ё, this is almost certainly due to later humorous interpretations, which, to be fair, Semen is a lot funnier of a name.
No, it is a result of romanization: the dots over the ё are often dropped, and so it was historically considerably more common to romanize ё identically to е, this is also why it's "Gorbachev" and generally not "Gorbachov" or "Gorbachyov".
I already pointed this out in the original comment.
Its not actually caused by Romanization though, because if it were, it would have been spelt with an I or a Y, as is usually done when translating the Cyrillic ё, this is almost certainly due to later humorous interpretations, which, to be fair, Semen is a lot funnier of a name.
No, it is a result of romanization: the dots over the ё are often dropped, and so it was historically considerably more common to romanize ё identically to е, this is also why it's "Gorbachev" and generally not "Gorbachov" or "Gorbachyov".
Always bugged the shit out of me that ё is romanized to e in a lot of cases.
Thing is though that in (at least Russian) people also often drop the dots and write a normal e instead of ë
Tell me about it!
Gorbačëv