The article is written in the form of dialogue – one of the long standing scientific traditions of the problems examination, the authors consider it to be the best for the discussion of the present state and contentsof the theory of international relations. In the article are regarded the questions of the reasons of interest to thetheory of international relations, especially to the national, non-Western directions of its recent developmentas well as to the main perspectives of such an interest. From this point of view, of special interest is the Russian attitude towards the international relations. The question of the ontology of the “international” is examined,how it is changing and whether it is changing at all. The authors pay attention to the correlation between the theory of international relations and the ideological aspects of international relations: where the theory comesto its end, and ideology starts to play? Finally, the scholars study the problem of the theory / praxis correlation.It’s obvious that these questions do not have the unambiguous answers. So, the main task of the article is tostart the wider discussion concerning this problem in our country.