[Access] How to get Russian chars back

Yesterday my colleague have showed me an access 2000 database from his friend with list of Russian poems, but instead of Russian characters it was western replacements (o with two dots above and so on). Well, Access 2000 is Unicode - then how come?? I think his friend either enter this database using non-Unicode staff, or converted from Access 97. So, how to get Russian characters back? Ok, here the way:

• convert mdb back to Access 97
• on a PC with default Russian locale open Access 97 version and check that Russian shows
• on same PC convert it to Access 2000.

Now Russian chars will be correctly stored in Unicode!