Abstract: Over the last years the federalism terminology hasn't been that popular and federalism has practically become one of the secondary questions of the state-building. The main theoretical approaches to federalism say that this topic is not quite important for our country because Russia can exist only as a unitarian centralized state. Based on these approaches, federalism values are alien to our country and in and of itself federalism is just a transitional form of government that must necessarily lead to the formation of the unitarian state. However, the political and legal environment has drastically changed lately and the federal form of government has changed, too. What is the reason for that? The author of the article explains this phenomenon and says that the development of Russian federalism has a 'pendulum-like' pathway as a result of profound system evolution of Russian state institution. The author of the article touches upon the following issues: fluctuations of federalism processes in Russia, system approach to the federative form of government and the legal base of Russian federalism as a system formation.