How to change file encoding in Linux?

Question

ubuntu

I'm using ubuntu and set the installation language to english.
I received a file with Russian encoding and I can't read it.

enca readme.txt 
enca: Cannot determine (or understand) your language preferences.
Please use `-L language', or `-L none' if your language is not supported
(only a few multibyte encodings can be recognized then).
Run `enca --list languages' to get a list of supported languages.

locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

Trying to force code change

enconv -x CP1251 readme.txt 
enconv: Cannot determine (or understand) your language preferences.
Please use `-L language', or `-L none' if your language is not supported
(only a few multibyte encodings can be recognized then).
Run `enconv --list languages' to get a list of supported languages.

enconv --list languages
belarusian: CP1251 IBM866 ISO-8859-5 KOI8-UNI maccyr IBM855 KOI8-U
 bulgarian: CP1251 ISO-8859-5 IBM855 maccyr ECMA-113
     czech: ISO-8859-2 CP1250 IBM852 KEYBCS2 macce KOI-8_CS_2 CORK
  estonian: ISO-8859-4 CP1257 IBM775 ISO-8859-13 macce baltic
  croatian: CP1250 ISO-8859-2 IBM852 macce CORK
 hungarian: ISO-8859-2 CP1250 IBM852 macce CORK
lithuanian: CP1257 ISO-8859-4 IBM775 ISO-8859-13 macce baltic
   latvian: CP1257 ISO-8859-4 IBM775 ISO-8859-13 macce baltic
    polish: ISO-8859-2 CP1250 IBM852 macce ISO-8859-13 ISO-8859-16 baltic CORK
   russian: KOI8-R CP1251 ISO-8859-5 IBM866 maccyr
    slovak: CP1250 ISO-8859-2 IBM852 KEYBCS2 macce KOI-8_CS_2 CORK
   slovene: ISO-8859-2 CP1250 IBM852 macce CORK
 ukrainian: CP1251 IBM855 ISO-8859-5 CP1125 KOI8-U maccyr
   chinese: GBK BIG5 HZ
      none:

The file is still in Russian encoding

enca -L ru readme.txt 
MS-Windows code page 1251

What else did I not consider?
Thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

I decided as follows
I still didn’t want to set the default utf-8 encoding so that I could change the encoding
enconv file.txt