I'm new to doing anything with any language that isn't english. So far the only I've ever done with programming is take input in the basic english letters + numbers and output it. Now I have to manipulate some text in Russian (especially from the Russian wikipedia page) but I have no clue where to start. I google and google but all I get are results that talk about unicode, UTF-8 and other things but those don't make sense to me because I'm not sure what those are referring to. Wikipedia entries themselves appear to be written for people who already know this stuff.
Can anyone point me to a good starting place?
It seems like you should first get an idea of what Unicode is. Joel Spolsky's article The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) might be a good starting point (for experienced people it's quite uninformative, though).
After that you should look into how Perl handles Unicode, like taking a look at the Perl Unicode Tutorial.