We have several forums working in Russia. There is no problem if, as written above, UTF-8 is used. We did not experiment or set the encoding Windows-1251. What for? UTF-8 works for everything.
There was no blank page on any of the forums. The browser does not switch to windows-1251.
I tried in 3 browsers to force to expose Windows-1251. If the forum is in utf-8 we only gets the wrong encoding. A blank page is not observed.
