The article presents an essay comprehensive enough, with free reflection on the ways and fates of democracy in the modern world. It has been written in response to, and as comment on a recently issued (in Dubna) collective work on political institutions as they are perceived at the outset of a new millenium in large regions of the world. (The book investigates the changes political institutions are undergoing in the West and in Russia, in Latin America and in Japan under such world processes developing, as globalization, transition to postindustrial society, and under mutual struggle going on between modernization and traditionalism.) The author of the article retraces, reconstructs and discusses thematic problem lines of the collective work, first and foremost the two most complex and at the same time most significant of them: (a) the unity in the diversity of the democratic processes of today; (b) rethinking the problem of democracy as it presents itself in the general theoretical sense with the «democratic area» having been tremendously expanded by the «third wave of democratization». In both respective parts of the article, much attention is given to the analysis of Russia's problems.