The motif of the article is analysis of the “subordination” concept in different language and socio-political contexts. Regarding the concept, as well as the typology of subordination, based on it, as indicators for distinguishing private and public spaces, the authors demonstrate that, as distinct from European polities where this opposition stands out clearly enough, in the Russian polity it is constantly destroyed. They see the source of such state of things in the claim – traditional for Russia – laid by the state, to embracing the whole of social space. The present tendency to reducing public relations to private ones and to merging the two kinds of subordination is interpreted by the authors as historical revenge on the part of privacy which, by way of taking vengeance for the centuries of its being humiliated, is today seizing ever new spheres of public political space.