ABSTRACT
At the turn of the twentieth century the great land empires of Europe and the Middle East – tsarist Russia, the Ottoman empire and AustroHungary – were each faced by the dilemma of how to preserve their imperial state in the face of oppositional, potentially separatist nationalisms of their constituent peoples. Imperial forms of nationalism failed to preserve these contiguous empires, and the catastrophe of World War I ended with their collapse and dissolution. The Habsburg realm broke up into small states, each defined and dominated by a single ruling nation; the Ottoman empire lost its Arab lands, and a Turkish national state emerged in Anatolia. Russia alone survived the war as a large multinational state, but one that in the view of its new communist rulers was neither a nation-state nor a colonial empire. The transformation of the Russian empire into the Soviet multinational state was at one and the same time a successful state-making enterprise and a failure of the maximalist, internationalist and anti-imperialist vision of its founders.
