Dear Vladimir,

 > ISO 8859-5 is used in many commercial unix flavors and in
 > cyrillic text exchanges abroad russia; ...

Bad news! The troika 866, 1251, KOI8 had an air of tolerable
complexity.

I got from internet the comment:

>ISO 8859-5, Soviet GOST 19768-74 follows the Soviet GOST Standard
>19768-74, ST SEV 358-88 for placement of the Russian alphabet.
>Registered with ISO on May 1, 1988, Registration No. 144.

Malyshev has listed DEC as using ISO 8859-5.  VMS as well as UNIX
I presume.   Do you know another major unix flavor that uses
ISO 8859-5?  

If anyone listening could spot the codes for any of  <<  >> <  >
,,  ``  '' and the number sign for DEC and followers, I would be
grateful.  The standard itself refers only to letters, I have
added it to yesterday's ftp posting.

 > cyrillic text exchanges abroad russia

Could you give an example?  I am not sure I understand.

          Best wishes,

             Larry S