> Is there any WAY to get around this? How can I convert it
> to Russian without making it unicode?


I don't think so...  From http://www.php.net/types.string:

"A string is series of characters. In PHP, a character is the same as a
byte, that is, there are exactly 256 different characters possible. This
also implies that PHP has no native support of Unicode."


sorry,

nik