UTF-8

I have files with data and text in Russian Windows encoding (CP1251). My 
current locale is UTF-8 (Linux). My Fortran program parses strings in 
files and produces computations. I use a utility named 'recode' to 
convert text to UTF-8. Windows version of program works without errors, 
but Linux version can't parse these files, because Russian Unicode 
characters place two bytes per symbol. Which solution is there?

Thanks