How To Convert Russian Chars To HTML Entities?

I have loads of text in russian chars that I need to put to a MySQL db (version is 3.23).

a) Is there some way to make MySQL db to accept russian chars?
b) If not, there must be ready-to-use functions to convert the russian chars to HTML-entities?

The site is done with ASP & VbScript, but of course JScript/Perl script based function suits well too. I've tried searching with Google too but thin results

The problem is that a person uses kind of a CMS where he/she can type different language versions of certain phrases. In practise there is a textarea type of field for all languages where he/she types the russian text which is then saved to a MySQL database.