cp866 and cp1251? Something is seriously wrong there. This Russian user's OS is using two different obsolete 1-byte encodings, and claiming not to know anything

cp866 and cp1251? Something is seriously wrong there. This Russian user's OS is using two different obsolete 1-byte encodings, and claiming not to know anything about UTF-8. Is he running Python in, say, a Command Prompt window that's maintaining compatibility with a Russian-localized version of MS-DOS? I can see how he can't move to Python 3, because Unicode support in his environment is basically impossible. That's a deeper problem than just Python. If he's been writing Python 2 code that deals with Russian text, it's probably producing mojibake when run on any machine but his own!