This paper studies political, economic and administrative aspects of intergovernmental relations in Russia since the beginning of the 1990s. We distinguish three stages in the development of Russian federalism, which differ from previous classifications available in the literature – the pendulum of (de)centralization (1991–2003), critical crossroad with the radical shift back to the centralization path (2003–2005), and the era of further pervasive centralization and transformation to the de facto unitary state (2005-present). At the latest (third) stage, we identify two mechanisms of centralization – linear and non-linear, which differ in their design but similarly contribute to the general trend, and provide several supporting examples of both of them.