Is there a chance to get Kyrillic Strings from MySQL databases?

I am using the Select (MySQL) Node and want to load kyrillic text from the MySQL database.
It seems the Select node converts everything to question marks, whereas the DB itself can serve e.g. UTF8.
Is there a chance to hack this quickly?

does this help: forum-alpha/unicode-in-mysql

thanks for your quick reply, sounds promising, will try it!
Genius! Also very simple. Will have to upgrade - the installation is still running b28.