In today’s globalized world, in which many commodity markets are striving for economic concentration, antitrust laws are designed to effectively ensure the unity of the economic space, the free movement of goods, the freedom of economic activity, the protection of competition, including the prevention and suppression of monopolistic activity, and the creation of conditions for the effective functioning of commodity markets. To achieve these goals, antitrust laws include both public and private law institutions. However, despite this, the existing public law instruments of antitrust laws are not widely spread in Russia. The main objective of the study is to consider the possibilities of applying civil law remedies, in particular, the compensation for damages when committing antitrust offenses in Russia and abroad. The accomplishment of this task will allow achieving the key goal of the research - identifying the advantages and disadvantages of the current Russian legislation, existing judicial practice, familiarizing the experience of foreign countries in the field of competition protection among a significant circle of lawyers. The authors used a set of philosophical, general, scientific, specific scientific methods of knowledge of theoretical and empirical material. In the course of the present study, a dialectical materialist method was used, which allows to study the norms of antitrust, civil, arbitration law of procedure in their interrelation, interdependence, contradiction, taking into account comprehensiveness and objectivity in the study. Using the method of comparative legal research, the authors studied the level of development of the use of private law instruments of antitrust law in Russia, the United States and the European Union countries, as well as the dynamics of changing approaches to proving the validity of damages when committing anti-competitive acts. General scientific (analysis, synthesis, deduction, induction, systemic) and private scientific (historical, comparative legal, formal legal, technical legal, social modeling of research) cognition methods were used. The comparative legal research proposed by the authors allows to define the main directions for comprehensive improvement of legal norms in various branches of law, eliminate legal uncertainty in the area of damages caused as a result of violating antitrust laws, creating a favorable competitive environment, to optimize the antitrust service and the judicial system. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.