The article discusses various solutions to describe the Russian conjugation and especially the e ~ ë alternation. Based on an strictly phonological approach, it is shown that the present tense has to be represented as having three vowels, /i/, /e/ and /o/, in its desinences, and that the common practise to write /-ot/ etc. cannot be justified on a phonological and distributional analysis. The results apply to other areas of Russian morpho(no)logy as well, like past tense and stem alternations (nes, nesla) etc.