The present study investigates the processing of Russian idioms and comparable literal combinations in reading. The design of the eye-tracking experiment was borrowed from (Vainio & Nenonen 2007). Native speakers of Russian read sentences containing verb phrase idioms (e.g., лезть в бутылку — to fly off the handle, lit. ‘to climb into the bottle’) and literal verb-object combinations sharing the same verb with the idiom (e.g., лезть в кровать — to climb into the bed). Both idiomatic and literal expressions were embedded in the same neutral sentence context. The selected idioms did not have plausible literal interpretations in that context. The results of the experiment have shown that there was no initial difference in the processing of idiomatic and literal meaning structures. However, the probability for rereading the object in a phrase was significantly lower and the rereading time was shorter if the object was a part of the idiom, so the facilitation in idiom processing was found, though only as a delayed