Try this:
String myString = "some cyrillic text";
byte bytes[] = myString.getBytes("ISO-8859-1");
String value = new String(bytes, "UTF-8");
Or this:
String myString = "some cyrillic text";
byte bytes[] = myString.getBytes("UTF-8");
String value = new String(bytes, "UTF-8");
The main problem with russian its to set UTF-8 encoding correctly.