According to officially published documents, the designers of Russian administrative reform were patterning their design on the so-called “responsive bureaucracy model”, i.e. a model of open, transparent bureaucracy assigning primary importance to the citizens’ interests and enjoying public respect. Transition to such a model obviously requires change of the administrative bodies’ workers’ value-normative orientations, of their ideas of their own activity’s goals and tasks. Basing himself on the data of the monitoring studies carried out in 1997 and in 2003 to 2004, the author makes an attempt to find out how far our country has advanced in respect of re-patterning the administrative machinery’s behaviour over onto a new model of functioning. In so doing, he, in view of the fact that in recent years there has emerged real danger of the said machinery becoming transformed into a corporation entirely independent on society, concentrates his attention on civil servants’ attitude towards that part of the administrative reform, which relates to their interaction with common citizens.