Affluent merchants and entrepreneurs in the city of Odessa - On the formation of a bourgeois identity in late imperial Russia

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the legal liberal-oriented Russi an-language press in Odessa depicted the city's wealthy merchants and entre preneurs in two different ways. Firstly, in obituaries and descriptions of funerals, and accounts of the opening of their testaments, they were portra yed as honorable citizens. Secondly, in short biographical sketches and in interviews after their selection to leadership of the local stock exchange committee or to membership on the State Council, for example, they were des cribed as political citizens. Both constructions were essentially positive, as the press did not generally propagate other potentially negative identi ties, e.g. the commercial adventurer or the crude bourgeois. Journalists as cribed certain values to the honorable citizen (an ethos of hard work, entr epreneurial initiative, caring for his family and for the poor) that reflec ted a type which Max Weber called "Honoratioren." Descriptions of funeral p rocessions show that this social group had won a high reputation in local s ociety. After 1905/06 and more clearly after 1909/10, however, liberal Odes sa journalists began to define the society of late tsarist empire as a mode rn class society in which the entrepreneurship itself figured as political citizenship. The press especially celebrated, for example, the 1915 electio n of G.E. Veinshtein as the first representative of Odessa and the region n orth of the Black Sea to the State Council. This was seen as the political breakthrough of a new social class: He personally integrated different soci al strata, as he was a wealthy Odessa entrepreneur, an engineer, a prominen t member of the Constitutional Democratic Party, and a prominent agent of O dessa's Jewish community. So the daily liberal press in Odessa depicted bou rgeois heroes and propagated civil and bourgeois values and concepts. But t his does not mean that we can speak of a bourgeoisie as an elaborated socia l class in late tsarist society.