The article analyzes how Roman contract law influenced Russian law in the late 18th and early 20th centuries. This influence occurred through the educational system and doctrine, influencing judicial practice. The need to refer to the Roman legal positions was due to the fact that the Russian normative legal acts of that time fragmentarily regulated contractual relations. By the 1910s, Russian law had formulated its own approaches to solving the main issues of contractual regulation, including on the basis of Roman law, but without direct references to it.