I get the same issue as https://bitbucket.org/sjl/t/issues/3/no-cyrillic-support in italian (utf8 locale), but it works just fine if I invoke t.py using python3
eg:
As ugly as it is, trying hashlib.sha1(text) to accomodate python2 and falling back to hashlib.sha1(text.encode('utf-8')) for python3 works_for_me (tm)