[Wine] forcing codepage for non-unicode apps

[alex.d at hushmail.com]

Hello.

I've a problem running a few apps that are supposed to output some 
text in Russian, but it's not displayed correctly (instead it looks 
like text in the web browser when wrong charset is selected).

I think these applications try to use GDI or standart Windows 
controls with non-unicode text in Windows-1251 Cyrillic codepage 
and it doesn't work. AFAIK in Windows XP there was an option 
somewhere, to set a "default codepage" for non-unicode apps - which 
is probably what I need to make them behave correctly.

Can anybody explain how to force this in Wine (if there's a way), 
preferably so that it doesn't change anything in Linux generally?  
And yes, I did try googling - it handed me links to some quite 
confusing discussions on this matter. LANG, LC_ALL and LC_CTYPE 
environment variables mentioned in those do not seem to work (or 
I'm doing something wrong). At least LANG=ru_RU or LC_CTYPE=ru_RU 
didn't help but created some weird side-effects in the terminal 
instead.

Thanks for any help.