Dynamics of political ideas in post-Soviet Russia is hard to understand without researching the medium in which these ideas are worked out and propagated and in which they compete. On considering the trajectory of the development of the public sphere in Russia for the past 20 years and on demonstrating the intricacy of the traversed path from the unacknowledged dualism of the official and the unofficial public spheres in the USSR to the perestroika-period public sphere and then – through the conflicting pluralism of the 1990s – to the present domination of the “mild variant” of official ideology, with pluralism driven off to marginal zones, the author comes to the conclusion that the dynamics of the production, propagation and competition of political ideas in post-Soviet Russia ever had its own logic, without the study of which it is hardly possible to understand the evolution of the Russian political system as a whole and the prospects of its further development.