The paper presents a detailed analysis of the phonology of the Russian ‘word’ based on the principles of the Firthian theory of Prosodic Analysis. The word is defined as the unit of stress placement and systems of vowel units are set up according to the stress prosody operating on the syllable. Palatality is treated as a prosody of syllable beginning and/or syllable ending having phonetic exponents in both the consonant and vowel phonematic units. Thus, it will be seen that such an analysis avoids inconsistencies and inadequacies of the phoneme-based approac