The article draws parallels of the political process in the USSR- the RSFSR with the current Russian political process. It is noted that the growth of the crisis in Russian politics as well as in the Soviet one is associated with a set of political, economic, and social factors, the first one being basic conditioned by monocentric arrangement of Russian political system. Political reasons causing the instability of the Russian political construct functioning within monocentric rigidly pyramidal arrangement of the Russian political system are guild mechanism of formation of the political elite, the suppression of civil society institutions formed out of range of the president’s pool. Forming loyal to the head of state public structures directly by the state, suppressing dissidence using vertical alignment of political relations and vitalization of loyalty to a superior in the vertical power structure, restriction of public control over the government and bureaucratic class by limiting political rights and freedoms of Russian citizens are also considered. These reasons lead to the closedness and deintellectualization of the Russian state and its satellites, transaction costs, drive civic values out of citizens’ consciousness and returning to submissive political culture. Political stagnation causes negative effects in economic and social spheres of the society, leads to imbalance between the objectives of development of the state, nation, and every individual, and their resource maintenance, which leads to destruction of both formal and informal system relations of the government with the population, and overpressure of political structure. National factor and the process of defederalization, rise of xenophobia and intolerance have significant negative impact on Russian politics. The process of transformation of the Russian polity fits into the frame work of the soviet scenario which might lead to a system crisis in the country. Historical, comparative and sociological research methods were used while writing the article.