The paper is devoted to the political form known as the civilizational state. Trends in geopolitical development indicate that only civilizational states can serve as the foundation of a multipolar world order because other actors lack the ideological resilience and corresponding resources necessary for such a role. Russia’s distinctive teleology lies in its own state-legal mission as a civilizational state. The defining characteristics of a civilizational state in Russian history began to emerge as early as the period of the Old Russian state. The features inherent in Russian statehood as a civilizational state enabled the Russian people to preserve a relatively high degree of religious, cultural, and legal unity, to consolidate around Moscow, and to transform the state into a genuine empire. The category of «civilizational state» should be incorporated into stable legal terminology and appropriately reflected in constitutional legislation.