In Python 2 (with or without IPython), you can use the unicode_escape
string codec to mimic proper Unicode repr
s:
In [1]: print repr([u"АБ",u"ВГ"]).decode('unicode_escape')
[u'АБ', u'ВГ']
https://docs.python.org/2/library/codecs.html#python-specific-encodings
Unlike Mark Ransom's solution, this works for most common data types (including e.g. dictionaries). Note that this prevents IPython's nice formatting of large data structures, though.