Yuri,

>IE object has charset property, but it seems is readonly;
>at least I was unable to change the encoding with oie.document.charset=....

I haven't checked recently´, but I'm positive that charset was read/write
in IE5 at least. There were issues with it sometimes being "turned back" <g>.
From old code:
oie.document.Charset = 'iso-8859-1'

No expiriences with cyrillic charsets/descriptors here...

HTH

thomas