Hey, Trying to solve this for a very long time now...

SELECT MATCH(name) AGAINST('????????')

(russian) doesn't work, but

SELECT MATCH(name) AGAINST('abraxas')

(english) work perfectly.
I know it's something with character-set, but I tried all kind of settings and it didn't work.
For now it's latin-1.
LIKE works
This is the show variables charset related:

character_set_client - latin1
character_set_connection - latin1
character_set_database - latin1
character_set_filesystem - binary
character_set_results - latin1
character_set_server - latin1
character_set_system - utf8
character_sets_dir - /usr/share/mysql/charsets/
collation_connection - latin1_swedish_ci
collation_database - latin1_swedish_ci
collation_server - latin1_swedish_ci

chunk of /etc/my.cnf

default-character-set=latin1
skip-character-set-client-handshake

chunk of the dump:

/*!40101 SET @OLD_CHARACTER_SET_CLIENT=@@CHARACTER_SET_CLIENT */;
/*!40101 SET @OLD_CHARACTER_SET_RESULTS=@@CHARACTER_SET_RESULTS */;
/*!40101 SET @OLD_COLLATION_CONNECTION=@@COLLATION_CONNECTION */;
/*!40101 SET NAMES utf8 */;
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `scenes_raw`;
/*!40101 SET @saved_cs_client     = @@character_set_client */;
/*!40101 SET character_set_client = utf8 */;
CREATE TABLE `scenes_raw` (
`scene_name` varchar(40) DEFAULT NULL,
...blabla...
) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=901 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

(I did tests without skip-character-set-client-handshake too)

SHOW TABLE STATUS WHERE Name = 'scenes_raw'\G
Name: scenes_raw
Engine: MyISAM
Version: 10
Row_format: Dynamic
Index_length: 23552
Collation: utf8_general_ci
Checksum: NULL
Create_options: