Abstract: The paper intends to give a fresh perspective on the problem of per capita income distribution modeling in developing countries based on the example of Russia. The main purpose of the paper is to characterize the shape of the Russian personal income distribution. The paper provides an approach that combines traditional lognormal distribution function for common income values, which is used by Russian officials, and Pareto tail of distribution for high levels of income. The preliminary results demonstrate that the combined Pareto-Lognormal function better approximates Russian income distribution. This point makes the approach provided in the paper useful both for further theoretic research and for elaborating practical statistics approaches.

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