recode text files in repo

[Victor Sudakov]

Dear Colleagues,

I have a mercurial repository with text files in Russian. At some point
in time, I converted them from the KOI8-R encoding to UTF-8, and
committed the converted files.

Now I'm in an awkward position. To see the text files (and diffs) before
the conversion point, I have to switch my locale and terminal settings
back from UTF-8 to KOI8-R. 

Is there a way to hack the history or repository itself so that the
files look like they have always been in the UTF-8 encoding, from the
very beginning?

I did this job once with CVS, recoding the ,v files in a text editor,
but there were few of them, and they were plain text.

-- 
Victor Sudakov,  VAS4-RIPE, VAS47-RIPN
2:5005/49 at fidonet http://vas.tomsk.ru/