Problem with accessing Russian UTF database

I'm having real trouble with the jdbc driver for postgres... I just
installed the latest version...

I have a database, UTF8 encoded, which has data in Russian.  I can view it
beautifully using PGAdmin3 or any other ODBC connection.

This is the connection string I'm using (from Tomcat 5.5)

String URLdb =
"jdbc:postgresql://127.0.0.1:5432/oldzautest?user=noe&password=genesis&charS
et=UNICODE";

However, when I try to retrieve data from it, I get this garbage, where the
questionmarks are the Russian text...

<data>
        <db_content>
            <row>
                    <contents content = "1"  />
                    <contents content = "1"  />
                    <contents content = "?????"  />
                    <contents content = "????????"  />
                    <contents content = "?????????"  />
                    <contents content = "1965-03-10"  />
                    <contents content = "1"  />
            </row>
        </db_content>
</data>

Interestingly enough, if I send Russian data to the database through the
jdbc driver, it writes it into the DB as a bunch of garbage... but retrieves
it beautifully as Russian text...

I've set the client_encoding to UTF8 on the server...  What am I doing
wrong?  What am I missing?  I'd be thrilled to interact privately with
someone who has solved what for now is a mystery to me.

Thanks!

Ron