The article deals with contradictions of the process of democratization in Russia. It is not by referring to subjective errors of any political forces that the author accounts for them, but by considering particular features of the so-called “catching-up” development of the country. Characteristics figuring among such features are, for example, political amorphousness of the “lower strata”, weakness of civil society, paternalistic illusions of the population, etc. What follows as a consequence of all the above mentioned is motion, far from being the optimum one, in a “false sequence”, when it is the power, and not civil society, that turns out to be advanced for the role of the agent of transformations. And, as a result, - the problems and “zigzags” of Russia’s political, social and economic modernization.