The purpose of the article is to reveal the negative aspects of using the term "empire" to characterize the Russian state and determine its geopolitical nature. The research is based on the achievements of a linguistic turn in socio-humanitarian studies, which have not yet been adequately taken into account in legal science. Leximes, as units of a particular language, do not simply denote certain phenomena of the surrounding world, but function as peculiar entities that determine the horizons of a native speaker, a particular picture of the world including value preferences and attitudes. It is recognized that in social communication don’t function abstract definitions, but rather concepts that predetermine the real content of discourse. Attention is drawn to the fact that in modern scientific and public discourse there is a process of revival of the term "empire" in the positive sense of the word. But the foreign term "empire" and the corresponding concept "empire" are not relevant to Russia, because they do not reflect the actual history of the emergence and formation of the Russian state. In the chronological framework of the New Age and Modern History, it is proposed to introduce a fundamental difference between colonial empires and territorial powers. On the one hand, it will be objective to say about the British and Russian empires that they used to have a vast territory with a populations that were diverse in ethnic, religious and cultural aspects. But, on the other hand, in form and essence, these were different territorial and political entities. In the course of deliberately obscuring this difference, a political myth was created about Russia as a "prison of peoples", which, unfortunately, was accepted by the majority of the domestic intelligentsia. In relation to the issue of ratio between the concepts of "empire" and "state" the conclusion has been made about the need to overcome the compiling-imitative style of Russia's development, which should be manifested in a more careful attitude to the development of a system of scientific and legislative terms that define the nature of Russian society and the state.