A Middle Volga City as the Middle Ground: Urban Plebeian Society in Late Imperial Russia in Search of a Common Sense This article reconstructs the social dynamics in two Russian urban centers, the two major towns of the Middle Volga region, Nizhnii Novgorod and Kazan, as part of a more general attempt to recast the research agenda once formulated as a “lower-class culture in flux” in the context of a new imperial history of Russia. After the revolution of 1905, the structural diversity of Russia’s regions and populations was complemented by an unprecedented upheaval of social mobility, both upward and horizontal (migrations). The most modern loci of Russian empire, its urban centers, became the test - ing grounds for imperial society’s ability to accommodate this dramatic escalation of its diversity. The cases of Nizhnii Novgorod and Kazan reveal the situation in the deep heartland of the empire, usually perceived as the embodiment of “Russianness” (in cultural and political sense). As the article suggests, even these loci by no means can be seen as the empire’s normative (homogeneous and dominating) ‘core’, which displaces the traditional perception of the empire as a dual core-periphery system. Multilayered and multifaceted diversity was equally characteristic of the borderlands and of the central regions of the Russian Empire. Specifically, at the center of the author’s inquiry is the question of how the ethno-cultural diver - sity of Russian imperial cities correlated with better-studied socioeconomic stratification. How were these overlapping maps of diversity (ethnic vs. social vs. territorial vs. political, etc.) coordinated, and how did people themselves account for and bridge their differences in order to negotiate a compromise and produce a common social sphere? Last but not least, this article tackles the problem of the very limited applicability of explanatory models developed by historians of the educated middle classes and bourgeois public sphere for the case of a “migrant city” dominated by unprivileged and undereducated social groups. Relying on the array of sources documenting the social experiences of the “lower classes” (comprising the absolute majority of the urban population), the article looks into the social mechanisms and practices at work in the process of forging a common social sphere of the “nontextual” mass society out of the diverse body of recent migrants to the city.