From the README file for Lingua::RU::Charset:
Lingua::RU::Charset - Perl extension for detecting and converting
various russian character sets: KOI8-r, Windows-1251, CP866,
ISO-8859-5, X-Mac-Cyrillic, russian text in english letters,
russian part of Unicode and UTF-8. This module can be especially
useful for computers with broken cyrillic locales (like foreign
web hosts).

This module does not use locale or unicode and is written in pure Perl, 
so it will probably work at any computer.

WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Lingua-RU-Charset/