The adoption of Western ideas in Russia was a multifaceted process, dependent on their adaptation to the Russian social and political context. The rapprochement between Russia and British culture began mainly after Peter I’s visit to England in 1698. Theophane Prokopovich, one of the tsar’s leading ideologues, was a good expert of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English authors. He easily adopted the formal side of their reflections on socio-political issues. His justification of absolute state power is reminiscent of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. In his reflections on equality, a concept so often embraced by Enlightenment thinkers, the Metropolitan of Moscow, Plato II, in fact, refers to theology and to the moral principles of orthodoxy. The “Orthodox Enlightenment” thus offers a synthesis of lay and sacred cultures, of traditional theology and new Western intellectual practices.