The reign of Tsar Peter I Alekseevich is a special period in Russian history. Undoubtedly, the reforms of Peter I became the most important stage in the history of Russia. Peter the Great is one of the few Russian sovereigns who officially spoke about his political ideology, and at the legislative level presented a detailed explanation of the tasks he set for the country. The laws, written personally by Peter I or prepared with his direct participation, represented a kind of project of the future structure of the Russian state, the fundamental principles of the new establishment of all areas of life of Russian society. It is in his legislation that Peter the Great fully appears as an interesting political thinker who, based on ancient political traditions, introduced ideological innovations into the political life of the country.

The article analyzes the concept of “sovereignty” as a value category in the socio-political discourse of the 19th century. The modern understanding of sovereignty in the 19th century corresponds to the concepts of “independence”, “autocracy”, “originality”, etc. Nine major semantic blocks have been identified, which reflect various aspects and nuances of the conceptual understanding of sovereignty in Russia in the 19th century. The analysis of the sources was carried out on the basis of the search base of the National Corpus of the Russian Language, while in total more than 4600 texts created in 1801–1900 were studied. As a result of content analysis and political-textual analysis of more than 4,600 texts created in 1801–1900, it was found that for Russian intellectual thought of the 19th century ideas about independence, identity, freedom, harmony, security, cultural and economic independence, autocracy and Orthodoxy constitute an ideological and value complex directly related to ideas about state sovereignty.

The article focuses on two important problems for contemporary Russian political science: the problem of understanding the concept of ‘statehood’ and the problem of building a model of Russian statehood. In the first case, the various points of view existing in Russian social and humanitarian knowledge are considered in detail, and on the basis of the Russian traditionalist conservative methodology, an original understanding of statehood as a stable axiological complex of spiritual and political principles is proposed. In the second case, based on the axiological nature of statehood, the research potential and limitations of possible modeling of statehood in general and Russian statehood in particular are clearly shown. At the same time, new methodological approaches have been developed that seem to allow continuing work on the development of normative and historical models of Russian statehood.