‘Para-Royalty’ Between Nationalism and Transnationalism: Russian Images of Personal Rule

Abstract

Recent historiography, and especially intellectual history, has highlighted significant continuities between different stages of Russia’s modern history. Monarchy, however, has so far been considered an institution of the distant past: Russian Tsarism seems to have been fully supplanted by other forms of authoritarian rule operating under democratic and communist constitutional conditions. The current political situation in Russia and its neighbouring countries and especially the prevalent leader cult, however, conspicuously reflect the ambivalence and connections between de jure democracy, de facto elite authoritarianism, and the public projection of quasi-monarchical one-person rule.

This chapter uses the Russian case and its transnational dimensions as a testing ground for the concept of ‘para-royalty’, thus attempting to transfer and adapt particularly useful aspects of the concept of monarchy to an age of post-monarchical states—and highlighting that Russia today is less a façade democracy but a pseudo-monarchical regime.

On the one hand, para-royalty appears to be a straightforward strategy of defending authoritarianism in the normative environment of democracy by reference to ideas of national leadership, rendering it even less accountable by projecting ideas of a strong, perpetual, and legitimate nation. On the other hand, the Russian case highlights the complicated intersection between ideas of nation and those of empire—and the ambivalent symbolic function of imperial monarchy.