The purpose of this paper is to explore the similarities and differences between Russian and Chinese students in their reading comprehension of a Russian-language text as well as in the cognitive strategies used to grasp the contents. The experiment involved 44 Chinese and 30 Russian university students, who were asked to read a text and create questions about it, which provided diagnostic markers of their cognitive styles. The cognitive strategies used by the students were evaluated as analytic / synthetic and abstract / concrete. The statistic processing revealed that the Chinese students tend to rely on the surface structures of the text, to focus on details and to think figuratively. By contrast, the Russian respondents are more likely to rely on the macrostructures of the text, its logic and composition. The results suggest that the cognitive strategies of reading comprehension are influenced by the national practice of teaching reading and culture-related attitudes.