This paper demonstrates that a certain iconic relation between forms and meaning of inflected verb forms should be incorporated in describing Russian conjugation. First, the conjugational paradigm, into which a verbal lexeme enters, forms a hierarchical structure; thus, all conjugated forms are divided into two sub-paradigms, Past and Non-past. The Past sub-paradigm consists of nonpast tense forms, imperative forms, and other nonfinite forms conveying the present time, while the Non-past sub-paradigm consists of past tense forms and other nonfinite forms conveying the past time, It is observed that this paradigmatic hierarchical relation is diagrammed into the syntagmatic contiguous relation; thus in Russian the tense suffix is followed by number/person or number/gender suffix. Second, the morphophonemic segment/zero altermation, which is traditionally treated by the morphotactically conditioned “truncation” rule, is argued in this paper to reflect precisely the hierarchical structure the Russian conjugational paradigm manifests. Specifically, the “formal” alternation iconizes the past vs. nonpast “semantic” opposition. To capture this important functional aspect of Russian conjugation, two “conspiracy” rules are stipulated: V-deletion rule and j-addition rule. Third, it is proposed in this paper that the underlying representation of a verb lexeme should be based on the phonemic representation of its infinitive form, which is distributionally and grammatically the least marked form in Russian. This approach is radically different from Jakobson’s and the generativist’s approach, according to which the basic form (“full stem”) is posited on the basis of predictability criterion without however paying attention to the functional role of morphophonemic alternations. Finally, the description incorproates the solid linguistic fact of productivity; thus for those verbs that have nonproductive pattern with respect to segment/zero alternation, stem alternants are listed in their lexical entry, each being associated with its privileges of occurrence, while for verbs having productive zero/segment alternation, all stem variants are produced by relevant morphophonemic rules. In short, stem allomorphy is described in terms of rule-governed system for productive verbs (item-and -process model), and represented in the lexicon for nonproductive verbs (item-and-arrangement-model).