The article describes the comparative analysis of the concepts of democracy put forward by the representatives of the alternative directions of Russian philosophy at the end of XIX and first half of XX centuries. The author of the article notes the development of the ideas of democracy, observed and described in ancient Greek philosophy, by such thinkers of the Enlightenment as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles-Louis Montesquieu, and others. The author of the article allocates two divergent directions in the theoretical development of a democratic form of a public administration: the classical-liberal version described by John Locke, and the revolutionary democratic project described by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. According to the author’s opinion, the revealed divergences were reproduced in the liberal and radical currents of the Russian political thought of the studied period. Russian liberals Boris Chicherin and Pavel Miliukov were both oriented towards the ideal of constitutional law, liberal values, and a strong power. Vladimir Lenin, the famous Russian follower of Marxism, criticizes the formal character of the bourgeois parliamentary, and identifies democracy as a form of a class state, hence defining a proletarian democracy as a direct democracy (People’s Authority) and systematic violence over the deposed classes that are not bound by any laws. Fyodor Stepun, the Russian religious philosopher, compares the liberal democracy of the Western European model and the totalitarian democracy of the Bolshevik dictatorship, and concludes the «failed meeting» of liberalism and democracy. This aspect of the analyzed concept, as the author believes, holds paramount importance for the modern Russian public consciousness.