The article is devoted to the current problem of creating a Russian language phraseological minimum. The topic of lexical (including phraseological) minimums is one of the oldest and most discussed problems both in linguistics and in the methodology of foreign languages teaching. The study of the subject goes in two main directions: Searching for the core of the lexical (phraseological) system and creating minimums for learning foreign languages. The main method used in this work is the method of analytical and synthetic processing of information and the statistical method. Both scientific sources and language material are selected from lexicographic sources, Russian National Corpus, textbooks and texts of modern Russian criminal prose which served as the material for the research. The article provides a brief overview of the main lexical, phraseological and paremiological minimums of Russian language, analyzes the basic principles of their creation and offers a way to solve the problem. Some principles of selecting units for the minimum are clarified. Special attention is paid to the problem of creating a phraseological minimum for teaching Russian to foreign students. The current minimums are created mainly on the basis of methodological principles, since the linguistic principles, as the authors of minimums for foreign students write, are not sufficiently developed. It is proposed to start by creating a phraseological minimum of the average native speaker on the basis of research of dictionary materials and sequential processing of a list of texts on certain topics. This work was started by the author on the material of texts of modern Russian criminal prose when writing the “Phraseological dictionary of modern Russian detective” and will be continued.