This paper deals with the two lexical categories in Russian : gender and declension class. The former, which is a syntactically relevant lexical category, is argued here to have three values on the basis of agreement patterns observed in Russian syntax : masculine, feminine and neuter. In this regard, there is no need to posit what has been termed the agreement class as a lexical category. Declension class, which is a morphologically relevant lexical property of substantival lexemes only, is argued here to constitute three classes (I-declension, II-declension, and III-declension), while Russian substantival morphology has four declensional types. Further, this paper argues that once the nominative singular form is taken as the base form of a noun it is possible to predict the values of these two lexical categories by two distinct lexical rules : the gender assignment rule and the declension class assignment rule. Each of them is postulated in accordance of the principle of markedness : marked terms are either lexically specified or assigned by marked subrules.