The paper deals with the evolution of the Russian demonstrative pronouns ėtot ‘this’ and tot ‘that‘, used in non-deictic functions, namely as anaphoric expressions and grammatical markers, since the 18th century. It is demonstrated that while in present-day Russian the proximal and distal pronouns are in complementary distribution in such functions, they were not complementarily distributed in the Russian language of the 18th–19th centuries and earlier. At the same time, the current distribution of demonstratives in Russian does not coincide with the one in modern Czech, Polish, and Bulgarian. I argue that the latter difference is due to different scenarios of the morphological evolution of the distal and proximal demonstratives in East Slavic, on the one hand, and South and West Slavic, on the other. Furthermore, the syntactic shift that occurred in the usage of Russian demonstratives since the 18th century is suggested to have been triggered by the “one meaning, one form” principle, i.e. to be similar to analogical levelling.