This paper is an extended comment on Schoorlemmer’s (1995) theory of tense in Russian, more accurately on her attempt to link aspectual structure with temporal structure. Schoorlemmer (henceforth S.) claims that tense in Russian behaves very differently from English or Dutch tense. In particular, she is forced to assume quite unorthodox temporal modifications, and the temporal behavior of Participial Passives is not clear at all. Our paper wants to restore simplicity to the issue. We think that S.’s way of looking at the aspectual structure of Russian is basically correct but that her theory of tense runs into conceptual difficulties. These are due to Reichenbach’s (1947) tense semantics, which S. applies without modifications to Russian. Our proposal tries to retain S.’s insights while at the same time trying to avoid the said difficulties. The claims we want to defend may be roughly summarized as follows. Though the Russian verb has no perfect morphology, it has temporal PERFECT readings, viz. the PAST PERFECT and the FUTURE PERFECT. We obtain these by the assumption that the perfective (not perfect!) morphology licenses two different semantic aspects, viz. the relation of including an event or the relation of being after an event. Following recent practice (notably (Klein, 1994)), many linguists call these relations PERFECTIVE and PERFECT respectively. To avoid confusion, we will use Klein’s more technical terminology, which will be introduced in (40). To use a concrete example, consider the following pair of sentences: