The article aims to identify the basic legal mechanisms, by which the state realizes identity policy and develops society's ideological conceptions of social and political reality: political and legal documents (conceptions, strategies), President's Addresses, language policy, etc. The paper analyses in detail the concepts of legal and political identity, identifies their interrelation with civil identity. The authors conclude that the considerable role in the consolidation of the Russian nation belongs to collective and traditional values that are reproduced in the legal discourse of the state and represent the elements of conservative political and legal ideology.