ABSTRACT
During the first decades of the twentieth century, the international order was radically changed, first by the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and then by the downfalls of the Romanov, Habsburg, Hohenzollern, and Ottoman empires due to the First World War. The outbreak of the First World War brought about radical changes in the interrelations between the imperial governments and the political movements of ethnic minorities. Under the influence of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks invented an updated version of the autonomous region, that is, the autonomous republic. This chapter discusses the autonomous regions developments in the European and Eurasian borderlands, starting from the first half of the nineteenth century through the First World War, with special reference to the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. It describes the succession of 'imperialness' in Russia through the Revolution of 1917 had particular significance for the problem of stability in the Eurasian borderlands.
