The book is dedicated to the study of the political transformation of Russia in a long-term historic retrospective, focusing on the contemporary global trends of political and social change. Special attention is paid to the dynamic nature of the arising contradictions and to the conceptualization of the specific historic forms of Russian modernization as an embodiment of the Russian social and political system?s «reply» to the modernizing challenges of the West. The processes of deconstruction of the traditional social and political order and further efforts aiming to form the driving forces of Russian modernization are the principal problem knots in the conceptual framework of the study. The paper is addressed to researchers in contemporary politics, sociologists, experts in international relations and political development, students and teachers of social sciences.