The article describes the main concepts of the Russian political discourse - “politika (policy)”, “vlast' (power)”, “ideologiya (ideology)”. The author specially notes the integrative nature of the study which occupies a position on the borderline between linguistics, psychology, philosophy and politology. This fact makes it necessary to employ not only explanatory but also encyclopedic, politological and philosophical dictionaries. The study analyzes the concepts in the light of the cognitive approach which defines them as operation units of memory, mental lexicon, conceptual system and “brain language” and the holistic worldview, or as knowledge quanta. Conceptual analysis presupposes several stages: semantic analysis of a word in accordance with the data found in explanatory dictionaries; analysis of the term whose history and usage variability are reflected in special purpose dictionaries; transition to the level of conceptosphere demanding synthesis of the data previously obtained taking into account sociocultural peculiarities. In order to determine the dominating ideas about the policy in a community, it is necessary to use, in addition to dictionary definitions, the words of famous political theorists. “Politika (policy)” is a macroconcept of political discourse which incorporates several concepts of a high level of abstraction: “politicheskoe soznanie (political consciousness)”, “vlast' (power)”, “gosudarstvo (state)”, and “ideologiya (ideology)”. These concepts are so closely interconnected that it is difficult to establish hierarchical relations between them. The concept “politika (policy)” can be schematically presented as a hyperonym covering three microconcepts (“politicheskaya vlast' (political power)”, “gosudarstvo (state)” and “politicheskaya ideologiya” (political ideology)”, or, alternatively, as two microconcepts (“gosudarstvennaya vlast' (state power)” and “politicheskaya ideologiya (political ideology)”. In the Soviet explanatory and politological dictionaries, the seme “klas (class)” was the core element of the semantics of the word “politika (policy), which was in line with the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. The Russian language concept “vlast' (power)” has an economic origin (it is etymologically associated with the verb “vladet' (possess)”), which singles out the Russian language from other languages. Policy forms ideology (conception) associated with the role of man in society, state and the modern world. The article demonstrates that the political sphere concepts can be studied on two levels: semantico - terminological level and deep or linguocultural level.