OBJECTIVES: Schizophrenia is a psychiatric illness that associates thought process disintegration and poor emotional responsiveness. The S-QoL is a self-administered questionnaire that assesses quality of life (QoL) among people with schizophrenia. The scale is a 41-item questionnaire with eight subscales (psychological well-being, self-esteem, family relationships, relationship with friends, resilience, physical well-being, autonomy and sentimental life). The objective of this study was to validate the Russian version of S-QoL. METHODS: The scale was of instrument used in a clinical trial with 260 patients. Statistical examinations covered factor analysis, internal consistency of subscales, construct and discriminant validity. The reproducibility (Test-retest) was assessed with patients whose clinical global impression (CGI) improvement  score declared unchanged between baseline and endpoint (10weeks), whereas patients whose health status was improved are used to evaluate the sensitivity to changes. RESULTS: The sample is composed of subjects from Russia with 53% of female. Cronbach’s alphas were estimated to be higher than 0.77. Factor analyses demonstrated the same structure as the French version. Item internal consistency (IIC) and item discriminant validity criteria were met for most items (i.e. IIC was > 0.40, and correlations between items and their respective rest-scores in one dimension were all greater than correlations with another dimension). For the subgroup with no CGI improvement (56 patients out of 260), Test–retest demonstrated a highly correlation (range 0.49-0.79) between the two assessments. Assessing the sensitivity on the subgroup of 161 patients for whom an improvement was declared (mean change = -1.47), a significant difference was found for the global score and for all dimensions except the psychology dimension. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, the S‐QoL, which has sound psychometric properties, is a valid instrument for measuring the disease specific HRQoL of patients with schizophrenia in Russia.