SUMMARY: Emil’ Pain opens his article with the statement that empire is again at the center of political debates among liberal intellectuals, who see it as an illegitimate corruption of the nation-state. At the same time, American neo-conservatives and Russian neo-traditionalists see empire as a legitimate restoration of the traditional order. Pain reviews the return of Russian imperialism in politics and in public discourse. At the center of his analysis are the Russian state historical legacy, modern political practices, rising ethnic nationalism among the peoples of the Russian Federation, and the imperial rhetoric of Russian nationalists. He insists that special circumstances favor the reemergence of imperial practices, and those circumstances can be characterized as an “imperial syndrome” (a combination of neo-traditionalism and mental mapping structured by the relatively stable geographical, economic, social and cultural factors, characteristic of Russia). The imperial syndrome defines the limits and the mainstream of Russian politics. Empire, therefore, is not a rationally conceived project of the current Russian political regime – it keeps reproducing itself as a side-product of other political projects. The article scrutinizes elements of the Russian “imperial syndrome” and the specific mechanisms of its actualization. Pain predicts the possibility of the short-term restoration of an ethnocratic racist empire in Russia, however he claims that in a longer historical perspective Russia lacks the resources to sustain a stable imperial regime. Theoretically, federalism still remains an alternative.