Workaround A: Wrap the Cyrillic strings in the Unicode() python function outlined here: http://docs.python.org/library/functions.html#unicode and add the line #-*-coding:UTF-16-*- to the top of the python file, then save in UTF-16 encoding.Workaround B: Only use CP-1251 encoding when localizing python scripts in the Cyrillic (Russian) language.