The article is divided into two parts. The first, entitled “Russian Federation: Construction without a Design”, examines the experience of establishing a federative state in Russia. The author finds the experience infelicitous. He sees the reason of the infelicity in the uncritical acceptance of the federative project which never had historical foundations in our country. In his opinion, Russia used to be and remains an empire. And therefore construction of new democratic Russia will require the use of imperial mechanisms, too. Federative arrangement was imposed on the country by the Bolsheviks who did not seek to fill it with adequate content in conformity with the given type of statehood. The author holds that the imperial system, by virtue of the modernization process, will be in the long run replaced by another, more up-to-date system. And as the optimum variant, for that matter, he also points to Russia’s eventual transition from empire exactly to federative system. But, anyway, at the present moment Russia is not a federation. In the second part of the article — “Russian Federation: Imperial Design” — points to what, to his mind, real transition from empire to federation might look like. He criticizes the model of Russia’s transition to a unitary state, qualifying as justified, for the time being, the simultaneous existence within the country of both an empire and a federation of territories with different constitutional status.