Was Karamzin a conservative? Conservative-monarchical conception of N. M. Karamzin in modern historiography

The subject of this article is the question of N.M.Karamzin political views orientation, the place and the specifics of his political outlook in the general compendium of conservative and monarchical concepts, as a contemporary historian, and worked out and systematized in later times. The main theme is the coverage of this problem in modern Russian historiography and the attempts of Russian history and world conservatism researchers to analyze course and outcome of Karamzin's political philosophy evolution, classifying views of the historian from the perspective of a modern vision of the conservative and monarchic idea development. The result of the work. Having through in his youth the fascination with characteristic of Age of Enlightenment romantic liberalism, Karamzin did not accept the French revolutionary terror and seriously revised his early views in the 1790s. In the period of writing the “History of the Russian State”, he appears as a consistent conservator, who nevertheless retained the notion of internal spirits freedom as the main value, and the duty of serving to the Motherland as an inalienable demand for a bearer of supreme power. Conclusion. N.M. Karamzin, according to one of the modern typologies, can be designated as an adherent of the so-called “substantial conservatism”, whose final political views were formed not without the influence of a liberal project, but in mostly part - as a result of frustration in it.