Abstract: This article is dedicated to the research of development of the legal status of a foreign prisoner of war within the Russian legislation. The author analyses the Regulations on prisoners of war during the early XIX and beginning of the XX centuries, and determines the essence of the social-legal factor in establishment of the legal status of a foreign prisoner of war within the Russian law. The legal status of a prisoner of war in the Russian legislation had its own juridical structure, in which the principal elements were not the rights and responsibilities in the general civil sense, but a list of permissions and prohibitions placed on the individual held captives. As a result of evolving, such legal model was expanded by the additional elements, and within time transformed into the modern legislation on prisoners of war. Today, in the event that a person is captured, the government has to ensure the right to life and humane treatment of the captives. The scientific novelty consists in the examination of the establishment of the prisoner of war legal status on the Russian territory as a complex category that has its own genesis, and not the borrowed and adopted to the conditions of the internal governmental policy on treatment of prisoners of war.