The fastest and easiest way to view cyrrilic chars in virtual terminals (TTYs) is to setup a font, which contains them, in /etc/vconsole.conf file. Changes, made here, persist after reboots.
By default, /etc/vconsole.conf defines only the keyboard layout to use in TTYs, with KEYMAP= instruction. For example:
KEYMAP=us
Add the FONT= line to, which will define the default font for TTYs. For example:
KEYMAP=us
FONT=LatGrkCyr-8x16
Reboot the computer.
LatGrkCyr is only one of many fonts with cyrillic chars. To get the complete list of them, run the command:
ls /usr/share/consolefonts | grep -i cyr | sort
The folder contains not only console fonts, but also useful READMEs, which describe them.
After reboot, check the result in TTY by displaying some file with cyrillic text. For example:
cat ~/cyrillic-file
