ABSTRACT
This chapter studies the impact of empire and empire’s aftermath in today’s Northern Eurasia.1 It does so by comparing the former Soviet Union to other regions of the world where empire first flourished and then collapsed in the twentieth century.2 In the last hundred years the collapse of empire occurred in three waves. The first was the result of the Great War of 1914-18, which destroyed the dynastic, land empires of the Habsburgs, Ottomans, Romanovs and Hohenzollerns. The second wave occurred largely in the twenty years after the Second World War. It encompassed the West European, maritime empires, above all the British, the French and the Dutch. The third wave came with the collapse of the Soviet informal empire in East-Central Europe in 1989 and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. This chapter looks first at empire’s legacy in its former colonies, then in the former territorial core of the empire, and finally at the impact of empire’s disappearance on inter-state relations in its former territories and more broadly.
