Russian-American here: in Russia you don't get to choose what to study, mostly. Certainly not in middle or high school -- everyone studies the exact same set of subjects. In college you don't get to choose individual subjects, you choose the profession, and that comes with a set of courses already baked in, some of which you'd never take on your own.
Whether you're good or not at something, that's something you cant discover until you're pretty decent at it (see the Suzuki method), so you get exposure to a pretty broad array of subjects, one of which is informatics. I have no doubt this plays a role in exposing more kids to programming. I do not know whether any of the kids make it to the top percentile of "talent". For me (although this is 20+ years in the past) and the majority of my classmates, high school informatics didn't do anything. I already knew vastly more than the teacher, and had a computer of my own, a really shitty one, but it was a computer. The teacher knew it too, so I was allowed not to come to the class, and got "5"s (Russian version of "A"s) automatically.
One thing that definitely does help is that kids who suck at school are kicked out after 9th (8th back then) grade, and are expected to get vocational education, whereas those headed for college get 2 years of uninterrupted focus on their math and science at a much higher level than the dumb kids could handle. At least that's how it was with me. A group of us have (illegally) hired our math and physics teachers to (get this!) study advanced material on the weekends.
Now that I have a kid of my own, it's hard to even imagine that he would take this kind of concern in his own affairs. He has everything, so he will probably amount to nothing. There's no incentive. It's not "either you get good at something, or you'll clean pig manure for the rest of your life" dichotomy. It's more of a "play computer games all day, and then shake down your parents for cash when you turn 18". Vastly different environment.
I would also like to point out, that top engineers almost invariably end up in the West. Russia has the "oil curse" and the "management curse". The oil curse is because in a country so rich with natural resources the taxation and business environment are geared towards those wildly profitable companies, and doing anything else doesn't make sense. The management curse is that managers in Russia typically demand unconditional respect for authority and think they should be much better compensated than an engineer. Both of those things are something a top hacker will almost certainly have problems with. In the West, you're more likely to be listened to and treated as an equal.