You can write 'privet' and everyone will understand it, but the official alphabet to write Russian is the Cyrillic. Moreover, usually people in Russia used to write SMS messages using the Latin alphabet. However, maybe you never will find a book in Russian written with Latin alphabet. In the other hand, you can easily configure your keyboard layout to write in Cyrillic in your computer, if you want. Probably you will just need some effort to memorize the key positions. To help you with that, you can use adhesives. Удачи!