>>> sys.getdefaultencoding()
'ascii'
>>> print sys.stdout.encoding
US-ASCII
>>> type(s)
<type 'str'>
>>> s
'\xd0\xb0\xd1\x84\xd1\x8b\xd0\xb2\xd0\xb0\xd0\xb2\xd1\x8b'
>>> str(s)
'\xd0\xb0\xd1\x84\xd1\x8b\xd0\xb2\xd0\xb0\xd0\xb2\xd1\x8b'
>>> print s
афывавы

>>> str(s)
u'афывавы'

>>> repr(s)
u'афывавы'

>>> s.decode('utf-8')
u'\u0430\u0444\u044b\u0432\u0430\u0432\u044b'
>>> print s.decode('utf-8')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-6: ordinal not in range(128)

s.decode('utf-8')
print s

import codecs, sys
sys.stdout = codecs.getwriter('utf8')(sys.stdout)

>>> sys.stdout = codecs.getwriter('US_ASCII')(sys.stdout)
>>> print s.decode('utf-8')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/codecs.py", line 351, in write
    data, consumed = self.encode(object, self.errors)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-6: ordinal not in range(128)
>>> print s
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/codecs.py", line 351, in write
    data, consumed = self.encode(object, self.errors)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xd0 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)