"LS" == Laurent Siebenmann writes:

 LS> Students of Russian are often hampered by the lack of a Russian
 LS> keyboard. And visitors from Russia to the West find themselves in
 LS> the same embarrassment.
[...]
 LS> I am sure we all agree. ASCII-Cyrillic was devised to let me use
 LS> these perfected 8-bit systems even when hampered by lack of a
 LS> Russian keyboard.

An alternative could be to use Emacs which provides cyrillic (and
other) input methods for latin keyboards. E.g. typing latin letters
one could enter cyrillic texts directly and then save them in any
encoding (cp1251, koi8r, iso8859-5, utf-8, etc).

Of course, cyrillic screen fonts should be installed, but this is
usually easier than having a cyrillic keyboard.

Best,
v.