The Federal Law “On Legal Guarantees of Opposition Activities in the Russian Federation”, which was approved by the State Duma in March 1997, was rejected by the President, who was guided by purely political considerations. However, many ambiguities and gaps of the law, which was thought to regulate and govern the activities of the opposition as an independent legal entity, would have inevitably created serious problems if it had entered into force. In the 2000s, representatives of the opposition factions in the Duma tried several times unsuccessfully to revisit this issue. In this respect, the experience of the 1990s, when the draft law became federal law even if it never entered into force, seems to be the most effective and therefore of the greatest research interest. The Federal Law “On Legal Guarantees of Opposition Activity in the Russian Federation” can be qualified primarily as a kind of historical source reflecting the political situation of the second half of the 1990s. In contemporary literature, the law is considered only in the general context of the large scale problem of providing additional legal guaran tees to the political minority in the Russian Federation. In recent years there has been a sharp decline in the number of scholarly works dealing with the theoretical issues of the legal institutionalisation of the opposition and the adoption of a special statute guaranteeing the rights of “dissenters”. This article examines the problem of the legal legitimation of the opposition, which was actualised in the second half of the 1990s by the representatives of the left -wing forces, on the basis of the complex use of different sources (legal acts and bills, parliamentary materials, data from the periodicals, electronic resources). The subject of the study is the political and legal context of the development, adoption and reasoned rejection of the Federal Law “On Legal Guarantees of Opposition Activity in the Russian Federation”. Its study is relevant because there is almost no analysis of the development and adoption of the Russian law “On Opposition” as a special regulatory act, which additionally guaranteed the rights and special status of the alternative socio-political associations.