Traced in the article are the fundamentals of geopolitics: of the subdiscipline’s prehistory, of the classical period of its development, and of its contemporaneity. The author presents comparison between different classical and between different modern national schools, compares the best known ideas, concepts and theories and comes to the conclusion that notwithstanding the continuation of the classical tradition, the modern geopolitics displays quite a few fresh new features preconditioned first of all by the alteration of the structure of the world, of the international political climate and by the inventing of the weapons of mass destruction.