In 1998 the author published an article ‘What Rus’ ‘letopisi’ were written for?’ (‘letopisi’ can be translated as ‘chronicles’ or, rather, ‘annals’). Here this article is re-published and then followed by a review of new scholarly ideas as well as some considerations on the possible ways of resolving of this problem. Among such ways the author suggests: a study of such aspects of the letopisi-writing as the process of annalists’ work, the circle of events written down in the annals, the status of the annalists and their patrons, the possible audience of the annals; an attention to comparative data (what was the purpose of similar texts in other countries); a study of the place of the annals among the other written texts in Old Rus’; a study of later texts which in the 15th–18th centuries probably took away some of the letopisi’s functions.