The article seeks to analyze factors which induced the peoples of Daghestan to reject the Near East model of ethno-confessional development and to make their choice in favour of integrity of Russian Federation and of their abiding within it. According to the authors’ hypothesis, such turn of developments was conditioned by Dagestan society’s “unstable stability” rooted, in its turn, in the time-honored tradition of multi-ethnic and multi-confessional coexistence in Dagestan, reinforced by a Russian-Soviet institutional mechanism in the forms of Moslim Spiritual Board and of the system of ethno-territorial federalism. Among most important conditions of Dagestan’s “unstable stability”, the authors perceive the autonomy of territorial communities, the cross structure of social splits, the renunciation of the principle of “ethnic purity”, and the availability of institutions of consociational democracy.