The current historiography of the Russian revolutions of 1917 has seen a tectonic change in the way in which these events are interpreted. The idiom of the breakup of the empire or even decolonization has been firmly entrenched in the repertoire of interpretations of 1917, or even displaced the notion of revolution from the reading of this historic moment. Informed by the rewriting of Russian history before 1917 with the help of the concept of empire, the new reading of 1917 highlights nationality and national movements in place of class, transforms civil war into an ethnic conflict or colonial war, and privileges the continuity of Russian imperial politics and statehood over revolutionary transformations. The idiom of the breakup of empire propels a different historic force, namely nationalism, to take center stage in historical explanation and suggests that nationalism may be of shorter historical existence, but more powerful in brining empires to the end. The paper explores the historical dynamics of the early twentieth century in the Russian Empire and highlights the processes of nationalization of politics between the revolution of 1905 and 1917. At the same time, the author argues that parallel to the processes of nationalization of politics there developed processes of redefinition of imperial sovereignty and diversity that were shaped by universalist claims. Debates on the meaning of imperial sovereignty and subjecthood were accompanied by advancing new ideas about autonomy and federalism which served as new principles of reformed political order. The discussion of problems of nationality and territory was interwoven with questions of social reformism and class tensions. Looking at the space of public, parliamentary and party politics, the author traces the evolution of the new political imaginary of empire and links this discourse with the Soviet practice of federalism. The period of the aftermath of WWI in the region of Northern Eurasia (comprising the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Empires) has always been considered separately from the story of colonial empires at that time. The latter persisted and even expanded their imperial realms at the expense of the powers defeated in World War I. The inter-war period in the history of colonial empires is the period of modernizing empires and the adjustment to the growing salience of nationalism and self-determination. For Northern Eurasian empires World War I has been considered as the terminal point of their existence. Yet, new research into the historical trajectories of Northern Eurasian empires suggests that the two disconnected stories may be reconnected. The booming field of research into the short story of German colonialism has produced important insights about the continuities of novel colonial politics beyond 1914 and 1918 in the form of a new redefined sense of Germanness in the Weimar period and the transfer of racial and colonialist attitudes to interwar Germany’s eastern politics. A revisionist account of the Habsburg empire treats the principle of nationality as arising from the modernizing policies of the Habsburg empire and as integral and not-antagonistic to the notion of imperial society. The same account traces the continuities of imperial patterns beyond 1918 in the form of state-building of the new nation-states and attitudes of the mixed population of these states to the new authorities. The new account of the end of the Ottoman empire is written from the vantage point of the Armenian genocide. Contrary to the expectation that that first genocide in history was produced by triumphant nationalism and ethnic hatred, this account traces the origin of the event to the complex evolution of policies of the Young Turks aimed at the simultaneous preservation and reshaping of the empire. Viewed from the comparative perspective of these revisionist accounts of the "terminal" end of Northern Eurasian empires, the Russian case does not appear deviant in lacking a clear transition to the hegemony of nation-state as the main political and international norm of the post-imperial order. Yet, the Russian-Soviet case is peculiar in the aspect of the combination of the socialist revolution (and world revolutionary imaginary) with the federalist realignment of the post-imperial space.