The Russian People’s Council’s Decree “The Present and the Future of the Russian World”, adopted at the XXV World Russian People’s Council, proclaims Russia as the “one that withholds”, which fits perfectly into the Russian theological and philosophical tradition of understanding katechon. In our view, it seems relevant to analyze the concept of “katechon” and the related concepts of “legitimacy” and “state of emergency” in the context of the social doctrine of Russian Orthodoxy. In the “Fundamentals of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church”, modern states are defined as secular, free of religious obligations. Thus, the Church views the modern legal system as imperfect, since human law will never match the wholeness of the divine law. What is more, such a situation creates the premises for a state of emergency, which, in our opinion, correlates in the Russian Orthodox social doctrine with the possibility of declaring civil disobedience by the Church in cases where secular laws conflict with the divine ones. This means that the Church acts as a sovereign, capable of passing a verdict on the legitimacy/illegitimacy of existing legal regulations, and therefore of the state itself. Hence, we cannot define any state entity as a katechon from the viewpoint of the Moscow Patriarchate social doctrine. A modern state can become a katechon if the goals and objectives of the Church and the state coincide both in worldly tasks, and the salvific mission of the Church.