The article is devoted to the problem of the correlation of the words-concepts "empire" and "power" in the context of the ideological foundation of Russian state-building. The authors proceed from the fact that the national language is a universal form and an integral result of the cumulative activity carried out by the community of people speaking it and thinking through it. The word-concept is the primary element of language–thinking. Its content gradually includes, with a greater or lesser degree of intensity, the entire experience of people's activities. Constant words-concepts that define the semantic horizon of language-thinking are of the highest interest. The substitution of constant elements entails a violation of the stability of the ideological system as a whole. "Empire" and "power" are considered by the authors as semantically conditionally oppositional words-concepts due to their different (on the one hand, Western, on the other — Russian-Russian) cultural and historical geneology. Turning to the historical material, the authors reveal the fundamental differences in the semantic content of the words-concepts "empire" and "power", revealing the features of the civilizational strategies of the West and Russia. The article emphasizes that metaphysically, the intuition of empire presupposes war as a seizure, appropriation, domination on the basis of political organization. At the same time, the New European, i.e. bourgeois interpretation of the empire, the seizure unfolds in the modality of colonialism, appropriation — in the modality of alienation, domination — in the modality of exploitation. Sovereignty as a principle of political organization unfolds in the modalities of donation, consular service, economic development, in which the essence of each element of the objective world is fulfilled, i.e., the essence of each element of the objective world is fully realized.