PS to Vladimir:  I am still hoping you will report on
emacs facitities for typing Russian text with just an
ASCII keyboard. Did I misunderstand your earlier post?

PS to all:  

In Valery Alexeev's russian.el there is

russian-encoding-libcon-decoding-rule

This rule presumably attempts to restore the original
Russian text from the libcon 7-bit transcription. Could
someone tell us how well it works; is it perfect on
literary text, on proper names, ... ??  The
ASCII-Cyrillic converter pretends to restore
100% any 8-bit text at all.