The article analyses reasons of amendments to Russian criminal law. Considering objective data, the author proves that neither criminal law «birthmarks», nor criminal situation belong to these reasons. The author studies reasons of long-running criminal law reforming process and gives 3 most important reasons: criminal law has become a politicy tool; significant changes happened in crime; criminal law has been adopted despite serious shortcomings. The author concludes that political process should not be the main factor of amendments to Russian criminal law. It requires more law making work on responsibility for socially dangerous behavior (when it leads to criminal and when to administrative responsibility) and on their legal attributes and legal constructions in a whole to eliminate declarativity, uncertainty and already provided crimes' duplication. The paper states that criminal law can not separate itself from crime situation since it is criminal evaluation of this situation's social danger. Manipulations with crime's perception lead to criminal law losing its connection to the real crime situation. It is important to pay attention to social causation of penal prihibitions and observance of requirements for dangerous behavior criminalization in order to bring the law closer to the right. It is also quite necessary to have a real up-to-date crime statistics. Criminal law can effectively meet its goals due to its stability, transparency and adequacy.