The article raises the question of applicability of the criteria of a developed or of a developing country, to Russia. In this connection, the author addresses himself to the issue of specific features of the modernization process in our country. He discovers that the criteria of progress are themselves an ambivalent phenomenon, therefore the very estimation of success or unsuccess of modernization in Russia is a complicated research problem. Hence the varied, often quite opposite conclusions made by students of the problem of whether Russia does or does not belong to developing countries. The course of Russian modernization in the 20th century has demonstrated both the presence of indications of a developing country and such specific features that go off the logic of the third world development. The problematic situation is further complicated by the cardinal change in Russia’s development at the turn of the 1980s and in early 1990s when she regained those indications of an underdeveloped country which she had managed to get rid of, during the Soviet period.