The article deals with the review of contemporary state of the study of the political discourse addressee category in the works of East-European linguists; the topicality and importance of the study of the addressee category is substantiated. Inadequate attention towards the research of the discourse addressee constituent in comparison to the text constituent and the forwarder constituent of the political discourse is pointed out. The necessary connection with the addressness (targeting) category in the study of the political discourse addressee constituent is emphasized. The paper includes a brief history of the research of the addressness (targeting) category, as it is the basis of the study of the political discourse addressee phenomenon. It is shown that the attention to an addressee as a category appeared in linguistics quite a while ago and can be attributed primarily to the works of M. Bakhtin and Yu. Lotman, owing to who the interest to the category in question was spread throughout other European linguistic schools and university research departments. Notwithstanding its long history, the categorical features of text and discourse targeting are still not formulated clearly enough, either in linguistic or in non-linguistic paradigms; however, the necessity of the multi-paradigm studies is acknowledged. There exist a few papers, published within the last decade, in which certain attempts were made to outline and determine categorical features of the addressee category. However, they either dealt with other kinds of discourse, for instance, with the belles-lettres one, or were made on a limited research material. Hence, the category in question remains poorly studied, and this fact only emphasizes the timeliness of its further research.