The author proceeds from the analysis of the functional limitation of the authoritative and the administrative subsystems of the state, pointing out that the relations of those subsystems bear a fundamentally overt character ruling out stable formalization. In its practical accomplishment, the said functional limitation creates an indeterminate and an unbalanced composition in the state regulation of social communications and in the meantime engenders concealed, latent communications primordially included in the internal organization of the state and preconditioning the real status and the real combination of the mechanisms of authority and of administration. What is investigated in the article are the sources and the prerequisites of the formation of this latent medium (which the author differentiates, perceiving in it a penumbral and an umbrageous spheres), the character and dynamics of its interrelations with the public forms of authority and administration. The elaborated methodology of analyzing the structures of the state’s authoritative and administrative subsystems is applied by the author for the investigation of the Russian case. The author points to the process, going on since the beginning of the 1990s, of deep destruction of the public sphere as an especial mechanism of state rule, and at the same time –priority of the penumbral and umbrageous methods of state rule.