This article focuses on the concept of monarchy with an emphasis on the traditional Russian “autocratic” model. Mikhail Suslov inquires into the ways this concept is being used in today’s Russian Orthodox Church and in the circles of religiously motivated intellectuals. Informed by the “contextualist” tradition in conceptual history, this article traces the concept of monarchy back to pre-revolutionary and émigré thinkers and argues that two understandings of the term have been evolving throughout Russia’s modern history: the tradition of “divine kingship” (tsarebozhie ), now largely marginalized, and the Slavophile interpretation that shifted substantially toward the idea of popular sovereignty and is now dominant in official and mainstream Orthodox political thought. The Slavophile concept of monarchy is internally contradictory and unstable, making its usage problematic, but, at the same time, it opens the possibility for new and original theorizing.
