The article posits that contemporary Russian political order presents a reality structured by value and institutionally by competitive principles of legitimating. The process of market-based class structuring that started due to decay of soviet estates was suspended until being finished. The space of distributive exchanges, restoring usual for Russian history estate-rental political order, with an authoritative core (center) of society is now rapidly expanding. Thus social structure of Russia today is a peculiar estate-market symbiosis, within which classes are restructured institutionally and normatively by post-soviet estates. Market based interactions and Modern political institutions are displaced to social periphery that shields the rental-estate core in its communication with an outer worlds and thus provides external legitimacy of the system. Nevertheless, in Russian political theory the traditional concepts describing political order with the terms related only to a thin Modern shield are prevailing. They analyze Russian political order through their internal normativity, even admitting its various deviations from prescribed norm, but they ignore Russian societies’ rental-estate core inherent specific. Thus alternative approaches sensitive to distributive exchanges and attempting to grasp theoretically and methodologically the specific of rental-estate core seem to be more relevant in analyzing Russian political processes.