The author analyzes the category "national safety", emphasizing, that it represents peculiar unity of three principles: national survival, national well-being, and national development. In the clause there are described 15 factors defining specificity of functioning of the national mechanism of safety in Russia (narrowing of the problem of national safety only up to one aspect - to military safety; strengthening of interdependence of national, regional and international spheres of safety; diffusiveness and uncertainty of the future structure of the world; inability of the nuclear weapon to prohibit from new threats; negative influence of image of Russia on the international safety in the western countries; use of various claims to Russia as means to parasitize on its natural resources; appeal to national safety as the last reason in political decision-making; preservation of the state as priority object of safety; transition to new system of maintenance of state security; restraint of rates of democratic refo