The article deals with the formation and development of the institution of constitutional justice in Russia. An analysis of the organization and activities of the Committee for Constitutional Control of the USSR, the Constitutional Court of the RSFSR and the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation is carried out. The purpose of the work is to study the historical and legal problems of the origin in the USSR and the subsequent development of constitutional supervisory and control bodies. When organizing the study, methods were used: comparative legal (comparative), historical and legal, analytical, formal legal, method of abstraction, which allowed to formulate the main conclusions. The author proves that the constitutional and normative model of organizing extrajudicial constitutional supervision in the USSR of the 1989 model is hardly applicable to modern Russia, if we mean the federal level of public authority. The current Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation favorably differs from its institutional predecessor in its judicial status and competence, which covers a very limited partof constitutional control activities, which is methodologically correct and very promising. At the same time, the historical and legal experience of organizing the USSR Constitutional Supervision Committee is relevant and arouses modern interest due to a number of important circumstances. This concerns the use of the institution of preliminary normative control and the problems of organizing extrajudicial bodies of constitutional or statutory control in the constituent entities of the Russian Federation.