The paper is devoted to the analysis of the symptoms and sources of the crisis in Russian sociology. Among the great variety of manifestations of this crisis, the authors focus on the uncertainty of the role of sociology in modern society; moving away from scientific rationalisations for social phenomena; growing fusion of the subject area of sociology.The symptoms of crisis mentioned above were subjected to empirical analysis based on bibliometrics and article survey. The sample was drawn from the research articles published in top Russian, American and British sociological journals. Subject areas of 3506 articles in 4 Russian and 6 international journals were investigated through the keywords analysis. Definite prevalence of “culture” and “values” subjects in Russian journals was revealed. Compared to international sociology, such areas as “State” and “public sector” seem to be underexplored in Russian sociology. Russian sociologists, in contrast to international scholars, also tend to pay more attention to local-level social phenomena. The authors argue that Russian sociological community is highly fragmented and lack attention to “real” social practices and fundamental problems of modern society.