Russian nasledie studies are a complex academic practice with its own organizational infrastructure, institutionalized formats of scholarly communication and established publication framework. A survey of public activity in this area reveals that most such studies view nasledie as historical and cultural phenomena. At the same time, just like Russian term politika, the polysemantic term nasledie in the Russian-language scholarly discourse carries the risks for misinterpretation and consequently for inaccurate research conclusions. Reference to the English-language thesaurus of heritage can help to overcome real and potential difficulties and errors in the research work as it does in the term politiка. This helps distinguish between legacy and heritage in nasledie (similarly to distinguishing between politics and policy in politika). The term legacy conceptualizes the ways the present is determined by the past, while heritage has to do with issues of memory politics where it serves to construct material and immaterial objects in the process of production and reproduction of multi-level political identities.