r-t, you've been a great help, thanks, and that would probably work, and I appreciate the research.
But I ask you: since I already can switch between the two keyboards in tty as soon as I log in, doesn't it follow that there must be something, almost certainly in a text file used at start-up, that selects the keyboard layout to use for Russian? And if that's so, shouldn't it be possible just to change that setting? It would be cool to do this in the more efficient manner...
Thoughts?

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This any good:

http://www.shallowsky.com/linux/keymap.html

If you don't have X running, I think you just have to switch manually with the loadkeys command.

/bin/setupcon seems interesting. I wonder whether it might help here.

Or perhaps loadkeys could do this in a BASH script automatically run at set-up.

But there must be one that's ALREADY doing this, setting up the keymaps I get at log-in, no? THAT'S what I need to find, isn't it?

Using the loadkeys command seems to obviate the "shift-alt" set-up to switch between the layouts.
That would be self-defeating.
Still not there!

What I meant is that you had to use loadkeys to do the switch.

You can see the console key files in /lib/kbd/keymaps and they're far less developed than those for X in /usr/share/X11/xkb. Thinking about it, the need to switch from Latin to Cyrillic on the fly is characteristic of activities like word-processing, which are generally going to be done in a GUI environment. Running without X is more likely for systems administration, where you will want to pick a particular language and stick with it. That's why xkb drivers include keys for things like ISO_Next_Group, but the console drivers prefer things like Show_Registers. If you want to set Shift+Alt as ISO_Next_Group, you'll have to re-write a file: probably /lib/kbd/keymaps/i386/include/linux-keys-bare.inc.