This paper discusses the interaction between the discourses of empire and nation as it emerged in the debates about the proper object of research and the criteria for legitimacy of the newly founded discipline of ethnography in the Russian Empire in the last decades of the 18th and throughout the 19th century. A special emphasis will be laid upon the particular features of the appearance and evolution of ethnographic preoccupations in the Russian Empire starting with the second half of the 18th century, when the first attempts at the synthesis and classification of ethnographic enquiries can be discerned, and spanning the first half of the 19th century. In this context, the case of Bessarabia represents an illustrative example of the uneasy interaction between the specialized and supposedly “objective” knowledge of learned experts and the agendas of the central and local authorities and officials. My basic goal has been to uncover the relationship between the “imperial” and the “universalistic” dimensions of Russian ethnography.