The paper examines conceptions of the relationship between the notions of «administrative law» and «state administration» in Russian pre‑revolutionary, Soviet scholarship, and contemporary administrative law scholarship. It demonstrates that over more than a century these concepts were at times effectively conflated and at other times understood differently. Changes in scholars’ views were largely shaped by the constitutional approach to defining executive bodies and state administration, by the varying attitudes in Soviet society toward administrative law and the science of administration at different historical stages, and by the development of views on the informational nature of governance. The author concludes that the cyclical character of this process also has an international dimension. It is determined that a new cycle began to emerge in Russia with the introduction into the Constitution of the Russian Federation of the concept of a unified system of public authority and with the appearance of the term «public administration» in the scholarship. The new phase is characterized not by a mere verbal identification of administrative law with public administration but by an inseparable substantive connection between them, manifested in the constant application of administrative law norms in the exercise of public administration.