The paper studies major functions of the “stabilization fund” created in Russian economy in the last three years. It is shown that the fund usage as an instrument of money sterilization was not justified by the recent economic performance in Russia, and the empirical evidence casts doubts upon the fund capability to restrict money supply not to mention damping of inflationary pressure. The deterministic model of the fund dynamics did produce fundamentally different conclusions with regard to its macroeconomic role which depends upon assumptions with regard to the future dynamics of the monetary base. The alternative view of the stabilization fund based upon its analogy with the financial derivative, namely to the forward contract, was developed in the second part of the paper. Assuming the process of “oil incomes” of the government to be lognormally distributed the stochastic model of stabilization fund dynamics was constructed and evaluated. In particular, it proved that the growth rate of the fund should be significantly less than that of ”oil incomes”. This corollary appeared to be fully in accord with the view of the fund as the risk neutral insurance against different risks.