>>>

>>>set collate="RUSSIAN"
>>>

>>
>>Don't. Collation should be set for certain indexes individually, where you need them - on names etc - not on numeric or date fields. Probably can't be done anyway. Indexing a non-character field on anything but machine sequence is, if not impossible, leading to errors.
>>
>>>but i still get ???? instead of the russian characters
>>
>>Get it where? You should be able to set the .FontCharSet for any control, including _screen. Mind you, this does not include form captions, as they are governed by the current machine's character set for non-unicode programs, which is set somewhere in the control panel, regional settings or some such, depending on your version of windows. If there's a mismatch there, you'll get question marks or all accented characters (because the cyrillic set is, in cp1251, all in the upper half, which maps to these accented things in other codepages).

I was facing similar problem (at the end I didn't need that solution) although the backend is SQL Server.

My article on this topic may help OP as well
http://blogs.lessthandot.com/index.php/datamgmt/datadesign/displaying-and-saving-unicode-data/