It’s for over a decade that Russia has been living through a systemic crisis which has brought forward the issue of essentially new political orientations to be worked out, the author of the article states, substantiating the thesis that the search for ways and means to overcome this crisis and to pass over to a different qualitative state makes the notion of “political self-determination” a relevant instrument of conceiving the fundamental tendencies developing in the country. On the basis of detailed analysis of key antinomies of Russian political life, he comes to the conclusion that at the present time it is essentially important for Russia to determine on a course along three axes: (1) authoritarianism — democracy, (2) civil society — corporate system and (3) federalism — unitarism. It is demonstrated in the article that these three antinomies are organically bound up with each other and option on any one of them is inevitably joined with option on the other two. According to the author’s conclusion, Russia’s political self-determination is a complex problem whose solution is possible only within the channel of an integral strategy of development and modernization of all the aspects of society’s life activity.