Pronkin Sergei Vladimirovich

The concept of “cancel culture” in politics can be used to denote the mechanisms used in political communication to deprive one or another political actor of the opportunity to use state power to achieve their own goals. As an act of communication, “cancel culture” is in a complex relationship with the activity of physical elimination of political actors or repressive policies. The objective of this article is to identify in the history of the Russian state in the 18th–19th centuries the mechanisms of “cancellation” of the heir to the throne, used to replace one heir with another or to change the principles of succession; to identify typologically close elements in the application of these mechanisms. The result of the study was the identification of one common feature of the two “cancellation” processes — an extremely significant role played by the personal qualities of the heir to the throne. The identified specific features of each of the cases of cancellation consisted in the fact that in the first quarter of the 18th century the mechanism of demonstrative cancellation was used, and in the first quarter of the 19th century — hidden cancellation.