The studying of Russia's political history is still predominantly based upon the modernization paradigm which presupposes the permanent tension between tradition and innovation. Such an approach implies the understanding of the differences between Russia and European countries in terms of temporal gap, with the 'well-ordered police state' (as Marc Raeff wrote) served as a 'catch-up' political model borrowed by Russia from the more developed states. Whether such an understanding is relevant to the concepts and ideas of the historical actors of Russian 18 th century? The article explores this question through the case of Nikita Panin's political projects. We discover ambivalence in Panin's approach to the concept of gap between Russia and Europe. Panin considered social and political troubles of 18 th century Russia to be a consequence of certain underdevelopment, but at the same time he lamented the degeneration of Russia's 'form of government', the vanishing of 'fundamental laws', and the total degeneration of morals and disappearance of virtues. However, in his 'Discourse on Permanent State Laws' Panin refused to consider Russia as a despotic country. Panin's understanding of despotism was influenced by Montesquieu, who, in turn, offered rather cyclic interpretation of political history; monarchy and despotism are interchangeable, and the former is always in danger of degeneration into the latter. As - in Panin's vision - the 'fundamental laws' once vanished, they cannot be unconditionally qualified as European innovation; as monarchy could degenerate into despotism, than Russia's prosperity was a question of durability and not of modernization and development. Thus, Panin preferred to address the problems of political reform and change as a renovation rather than innovation, as a cyclic rather than progressive phenomenon. Such intellectually constructed tradition allowed the understanding of palace coups anomaly and other Russian vicissitudes of 18 th century as nothing more than a transient moment in Russia's history.