Аннотация:In 2013 according to the decree of the President of Russia V. V. Putin № 183 «About consideration of the public initiatives» directed by citizens of the Russian Federation with use of Internet resource «The Russian Public Initiative» Internet resource the Russian Public Initiative (in abbreviated form: RPI) has been based for the purpose of «ensuring development and strengthening of civil society, protection of human rights and the citizen, participation of citizens in the administration of the state». RPI is the first tool of direct electronic democracy created by the Russian State and is rather actively used by citizens of the country: in 5 years 12 717 initiatives have been brought, and on vote at the end of July, 2018 there were 2036 initiatives. At the same time researchers and users of RPI have specified a number of problems in RPI functioning as institute of direct democracy. The extremely low efficiency of RPI is indicated by all authors as the main problem. For all the time of existence of RPI the decision has been made on only 30 initiatives of citizens, the majority of which was initiatives of regional and municipal level. The other problems of RPI are: a need of difficult registration on the website of state services, limitation of the sphere of initiatives, the overestimated number of votes, necessary for consideration of the petition, unacceptable anomalies in counting of votes, lack of necessary statistics of votes on initiatives, violations of the RPI rules by expert group, opacity of work of RPI in general, selective reaction of the power to initiatives. Despite of these problems, according to the evolutionary theory RPI can be transformed into an adequate and effective institute of direct electronic democracy. Not only users of RPI, but also experts believe such transformation is necessary, desirable and possible. Real ways of transformation as a result of which RPI will just have those qualities what it doesn't possess now are offered and to perform those functions which doesn't carry out. In other words, present shortcomings of RPI have to be transformed in specular way into its advantages.