Аннотация:Non-perturbative effects of the QED-vacuum reconstruction exposed to the supercritical Coulomb field are considered with emphasis on the behavior of the vacuum energy E_VP. It is shown that in the supercritical region E_VP turns out to be a decreasing function of the Coulomb source, resulting in decay into the negative range as ∼−Z^4/R, and that it is indeed the decline of E_VP, which provides the required energy for (presumably possible) positron emission. The properties of the resonance decay, found this way, are in agreement with those achieved by other methods. The additional problems of spontaneous emission, caused by lepton number conservation, are also discussed.