Authors

Discussion

The notion of a “middle class” in the Russian Empire is deeply problematic. As a sociological category it resists application to society was still structured by estates and legal privileges, and it failed to capture the diversity of urban populations. Scholars have instead relied on the concept of obshchestvennost’ (the educated public) as a framework for studying civic life and the emergence of a public sphere. Yet this term, while powerful, referred to a narrow stratum of educated elites and excluded the majority of townspeople. The central question thus arises: how was the broader urban population described, and how did these designations shape social imaginaries?

In administrative and legal usage, city dwellers were categorised as obyvateli (inhabitants), meshchane (petty burghers), and occasionally bourgeois. Initially these terms were neutral, embedded in estate classifications or bureaucratic language. However, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries they underwent a semantic shift. In journalism, satire, and everyday speech, they lost neutrality and became clichés loaded with connotation. These words came to symbolise passivity, vulgarity, mediocrity, and related traits.

This transformation reveals the symbolic work of language in late imperial Russia. The labels that once served to enumerate and regulate populations turned into rhetorical tools of distinction, signaling moral hierarchies and social critique. They marked the widening gap between the self-conscious obshchestvennost’ and the “ordinary” city dwellers who did not participate in public life. At the same time, they encoded anxieties about modernisation, cultural legitimacy, and the uncertain boundaries of respectability.

The paper proposes to analyse these categories not only as administrative relics but as cultural tropes that shaped perceptions of urban society. Tracing their use in official discourse, popular journalism, literature, and satire allows us to see how the vocabulary of everyday life produced symbolic boundaries within the city. The shifting meanings of obyvateli, meshchane, and bourgeois show how urban communities in the late Russian Empire were imagined, critiqued, and contested, caught between the estate structures and new forms of social differentiation.