The article considers such a concept as "proletariat" at different stages of society development, and also analyzes the current situation of the proletariat in Russia. It was the factory worker who was the progressive part of the proletariat in the early XX century. But the change of the form of labor relations, the reduction of the number of proletarians employed in the sphere of industrial-factory production as a result of automation and robotization, and at the same time the annual growth of employment in the service sector gives us the understanding that in our time, the advanced detachment of the proletariat is not only factory workers alone.