Pavlova Str., Samara, 443011, Russia Received 27.10.2015, received in revised form 29.06.2016, accepted 19.11.2016 The article deals with the features of the system saving mechanism functioning in criminal law, gives the detailed description of its structure and contents and reveals this mechanism value for providing branch integrity. <...> Due to this mechanism, criminal law processes the branch system and makes its elements consistent and coherent. <...> Such structural elements as the principles, purposes and objectives of criminal law, branch presumptions and fictions, prejudices, lacunes and collision rules are carefully investigated in the article. <...> Keywords: systemacity of law, criminal law, system saving mechanism, principles, purposes and objectives of criminal law, legal presumptions and fictions, prejudices, lacunes and collision rules. <...> It is necessary to understand that the modern criminal law is not only a set of laws and institutions, not only a standard organization, but a legal phenomenon that includes 1) criminal law as a complex system organization formed by the standard instructions and contained in legal acts as the sources of criminal law; 2) legal institutions consisting of the criminal law and standard instructions repeated in them; 3) authorized sources of the criminal law; 4) criminal and legal relations of guarding, precautionary and regulatory character. <...> This list is not comprehensive, because there is a particular phenomenon in the system of criminal law that unites all aforesaid elements © Siberian Federal University. <...> All rights reserved * Corresponding author E-mail address: anden2012@yandex.ru – 2928 – and provides their effective coexistence and interaction. <...> This integrating legal phenomenon is a so-called system saving mechanism, the one that provides integrity, systemacity and the coordination interaction between all the branch elements in criminal law. <...> The System Saving Mechanism in Russian Criminal Law saving mechanism includes such legal components as principles, purposes and problems of the criminal law, presumptions and fictions, lacunes and collision rules, and this mechanism operates through system communications between the above mentioned branch elements. <...> E. Pudovochkin remark that the principles of criminal law carry out an important protective stabilizing function: they act as a “filter” that passes into the criminal law norms corresponding to the branch principles, and also <...>