encodings in pharo

Got totallly confused with encodings. I try to process strings with russian characters entered through Pier using caracters entered in Pharo itself (using RegEx, for example). But those strings are different. For example, code for russian symbol "No." by Pier string is (SmallInteger) 8470, but by Pharo it's 1069555990. I tried different combinations of #convert(...) methods in String and similar in WAKomEncoding but without any success so far... How can I convert from Pharo's encoding to Pier's one? (...sorry, but I'm unable to follow all those long discussions about encodings in Pharo) -- Dennis Schetinin