The study looks at the processes of the Russian language neologization in the light of lexicographic trends actualized in the situation of cultural shifts in Russia at the beginning of the 20th and 21st centuries. The material under examination includes words marked as "new" in the "Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language" edited by D. N. Ushakov. The aim of the study is to identify the trends of neologization in the Russian language represented in the dictionary, against the background of the lexicographic tradition of describing the fund of current and new words, which has been reflected in numerous lexicographic sources of neologisms that penetrated into the Russian language in the 21st century. Using the method of continuous sampling of words marked as "new" and via ideographic reconstruction of lexico-semantic sets, neologisms are sorted into groups that reflect the realities of political and state governance, social impact, cultural and educational spheres, production and agriculture, economy and business, military service, everyday life, i.e., the areas of life of the people who lived in the first decades of the 20th century during the period of construction of the new proletarian state. It has been found that new words actively emerge in the socio-political sphere and production activities in the country, while facts of everyday life are least represented in the new lexicon. A partly similar trend is observed at the beginning of the 21st century, but if for the new lexicon of the first decades of Soviet statehood, semantics of collectivism was more characteristic, the language of recent history is characterized mostly by individualistic meanings. This is manifested by the active borrowing of Anglicisms from the field of psychology of relationships, self-awareness and self-development, personal interests of man, which unite people into sub-cultural communities and determine the specific features of their lifestyle. The relevance of new words and their rooting in the language system are corroborated by derivational links, which are realized in the formation of whole word formation paradigms, chains or pairs from neologisms, among which the creation of feminitives is particularly noteworthy. It has been revealed that the processes of word-forming and semantic derivation have similar trends in the process of the emergence of new words at the beginning of both the 20th and 21st centuries.