The existing packages to edit cyrillic text (e.g. koi-transl.el or russian.el) have been made obsolete in emacs 20.2 by the International Character Set Support.
We do have fonts installed in Unix. You can use them by adding to your font path (er... I don't know how nor where! It seems to be persistent for me, although I cannot find where it is stored!):
xset fp+ tcp/pippin:7000
This instructs your X server to contact a font server on pippin, using port 7000. You can check the result with:
xset q
This serves also Chinese and other fonts, among which certain which might be the best default currently for emacs (if this size suits you):
> xlsfonts -fn '-etl-*-*-*-*-16-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1' -etl-fixed-bold-i-normal--16-160-72-72-c-80-iso8859-1 -etl-fixed-bold-r-normal--16-160-72-72-c-80-iso8859-1 -etl-fixed-medium-i-normal--16-160-72-72-c-80-iso8859-1 -etl-fixed-medium-r-normal--16-160-72-72-c-80-iso8859-1