The object of this research is the phenomenon of verbal political symbols – the signature of political discourse that has lost its original meaning; and in the course of secondary designation receives opportunistic meanings beneficial to the political actors for the purpose of influencing public consciousness. The subject of this research is the possible grounds for classification of verbal political symbols, as well as the basic typological rows operationalized for utilization in empirical studies of political communications. The author examines the methodological aspects of classification in accordance with the concepts of social constructionism and symbolic politics, as well as the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic grounds for classification of symbols. The main conclusions consist in revealing basis grounds for classification of verbal political symbols: semantic (attribution to certain thematic conglomerates of the concepts; affiliation to political ideology; attitude towards position of the government), as well as syntactic and pragmatic (status and level of authority of the subject – creator of a symbol, mainstreaming, lifecycle of a symbol, universal functions of verbal symbols in politics). The author's special contribution consists in the analysis of thematic conglomerates of the concepts inherent to the Russian political discourse. The novelty of this work lies in application of typological approach towards the phenomenon of verbal political symbols, as well as in determination of the key characteristics that can be used for classification of discursive symbolism in the future.