This paper deals with F0 declination in Russian. The study was conducted using statistical data derived from the Corpus of Professionally Read Speech. The results confirm the relationship between F0 slope and the utterance length for Russian. At the same time they reveal a) individual strategies in preplanning declination slope of the phrase or utterance; b) strong dependency of the F0 slope on the intonation pattern of the utterance: thus complete final declaratives have steeper slope than non-final units, at the same time interrogatives (yes-no questions) with rising nuclear tone display no declination in the pre-nuclear part. These results support the idea that declination is linguistically controlled.