The paper describes the types and the reasons for violation of the literary standard of Russian in official texts. It is concluded that violations of the standard (“stylistic deviation”) are the result of not only illiteracy of the officials, but they are also caused by the type of communication in general. A number of deviations are caused by communicative goals of official style - these deviations must be described and even included in the literary standard (for example frequent deviation of punctuation in official documents). Other deviations are caused by the peculiarities of official communication. In this connection we described the mechanism of influence of official communication on the appearance of deviations in official texts. Besides, we analyzed deviations caused by the stereotypes about official texts existing in the minds of the native speakers. Lack of knowledge of the literary norms of official language leads to mistakes in the documents that make it impossible to interpret the document in a proper way. To eliminate such mistakes certain measures may help: exam in the Russian language for public officers; establishment of linguistic cervices to check the documents addressed to many people (laws, statements, recommendations, prescriptions, etc.) from the point of view of their conformity to the rules of the Russian language and from the point of view of clearness; legal responsibility for violation of the Law on the State Language of the Russian Federation.