In three years, Russian students will be able to test into college with help from their mastery of the Chinese language.

Yesterday, the director of Russia's Federal Service for the Supervision of Education and Science announced how Chinese would soon become included in state testing across the country.

According to People's Daily, Russian 9th graders in 2018 can look forward to the prospect of having the option of being tested on Chinese on their final exams. That will help to prepare them for the United State Exam which 11th graders must pass if they want to enroll in college.

Foreign languages are an elective subject on this exam. Currently, students are given the choice of English, French, German and Spanish. By 2020, Chinese will be included as well.
This expansion has been in the works for some time. Back in 2015, Russia's education department announced that Chinese would be included in the college entrance exams for certain districts like Moscow, St. Petersburg, and those in the Far East.

Currently there are 123 state primary and secondary schools in Russia that offer Chinese courses with over 17,000 students studying the language.

Of course, this is quite the change from half a century ago when the newly-founded People's Republic of China based much of its education curriculum off the Soviet model and promoted the teaching of Russian.
Today, Chinese students aren't given the range of choices in foreign languages that their Russian counterparts are, resulting in hundreds of millions of English-language learners, some of whom are taught by Russian teachers with quick tempers.http://shanghaiist.com/2017/02/01/chinese_language_russia_exam.php