no subtitle love

so, i have a problem with russian subtitles. when watching english movies with my gf i think she would enjoy them a lot more if i could get russian subs for them, but whenever i dl them to watch (on VLC) the result is always random ироглифы, not Cyrillic. is there any way of changing something in the options so that it displays the russian properly?
thanks in advance and с наступающим!!

VLC options
Инструменты -> Настройки-> Subtitles & OSD -> Default Encoding -> CP1251

or experiment with other values

ill give it a go, thanks!