Improving the governance is one of the priorities of the reforms in the area of higher education in Russia. Radical reforms and massive democratisation of the sector in the last 25 years resulted in accumulation of many development issues: the quality of public services, the efficiency of public spending and the modes of interaction between state, society and institutions. Supervisory boards are the latest addition to the landscape of the university governance. The paper discusses the legal framework of the supervisory boards in Russia, analyses how it relates to the best world practices in the sector and how it reflects in the actual composition of the boards and affects the roles they accomplish at the universities. The paper concludes with the discussion of the areas of concern in the current boards' practices and suggests how they can be improved.