section titles, cyrillic and hyperref

Question

I need to use cyrillic. I hacked from somewhere the def of \textcyrw you see below. Everything works fine, but when I need to use \textcyrw within a section title. It seems that the culprit is hyperref. Your advise is welcome.

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{article}
\usepackage[OT2,T1]{fontenc} 
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[american,russian,italian]{babel}
\usepackage{hyperref} % no problem without hyperref

\newcommand\cyrillic{%
\renewcommand\rmdefault{wncyr}%
\renewcommand\sfdefault{wncyss}%
\renewcommand\encodingdefault{OT2}%
\normalfont
\selectfont}
\DeclareTextFontCommand{\textcyr}{\cyrillic}

\begin{document}
\section{AAA}
\textcyr{Личное дело} % works fine
\section{\textcyr{Личное дело}} % gives error
\end{document}

The error message I got is:

! Argument of \@sect has an extra }.
<inserted text> 
            \par 
l.- \section{\textcyr{Личное дело}}

----- fixed

the following fixed it, although I am not sure why:

\pdfstringdefDisableCommands{%
\let\textcyr\relax}

Answer 1

OT2 is really an outdated way to produce Cyrillic text. Since you seem to be able to input Russian text directly, it's better to use T2A:

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{article}
\usepackage[T2A,T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[american,russian,italian]{babel}
\usepackage{hyperref} % no problem without hyperref

\DeclareRobustCommand{\textcyr}[1]{\foreignlanguage{russian}{#1}}

\begin{document}
\section{AAA}
\textcyr{Личное дело} % works fine
\section{\textcyr{Личное дело}} % gives error
\end{document}