The article deals with the analysis of the concept of “code” in the modern civilizational approach. The use of this concept is supported by information sciences and technology, genetics and proteomics, in particular – by the influence of semiotics and structural linguistics. The use of the structural and semantic method in the civilizational approach means the understanding of culture and society as symbolic and linguistic phenomena. According to the author’s point of view, the main difficulty of the civilizational approach is connected with the problem of choosing a language to be the language describing historical processes. The pointing up of cultural and historical differences conflicts with the need for a single effective language of description. This problem, in the author’s opinion, could be solved by the historical science on its way to mastering the general anticolonialist discourse, as well as the tools of the school of the world-system analysis combining universalism with attention to historical specifics and perceiving liberal evolutionism from the “seamy side”, as a negatively marked phenomenon. The author of the article shows possible ways of interaction between the civilizational approach and world-system approach in description of the sociopolitical reality. The author speaks about the synonymity of the concepts of “civilizational code” and “cultural and historical type”, gives basic concepts and symbols of the Russian-Byzantine cultural and historical type, as well as traces the origin of the “civilization code” concept.