This article offers a new perspective on autocracy. We analyze how the autocrat iscompelled to confront time—and ultimately mortality—as a political problem. As aregime type, autocracy revisits one of the oldest questions in political life: the ques-tion of what makes the polity persist and stay identical with itself over time, in spiteof inevitable changes in its makeup with the passing of time. Since autocracy entailsa blurring of the distinction between the natural person of the ruler and the legal-political person of the state, the autocrat faces the challenge of embodying both con-tinuity and change in political life directly, physically, in a way reminiscent of theEuropean Middle Ages and early modernity. Considering the case of Vladimir Putin,we discuss the implications that follow for our understanding of autocracy. Mostnotably, this aspect of autocracy makes the mere prospect of the death of the rulerseem not only personally but also politically unacceptable. Autocracy, we argue,should therefore be understood as an essentially unfinished regime type, indefinitely suspended between the ruler’s claim to personally embody the body politic and the eventual, inevitable, demonstration of the unsustainability of that claim. We con-clude by discussing what it would take to actually bring autocracy to completion,which is nothing less than the immortality of the ruler.