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Over the course of the nineteenth century, Russian ideas of society (obshchestvo) shifted from being limited to the noble estate to referring to educated people more broadly. This article is the first to explore how this shift played out on the pages of provincial newspapers (gubernskie vedomosti) in European Russia and Siberia, which were government-run periodicals that included an unofficial section in which local intellectuals could and did discuss the meaning of society at different scales, from the small size of the district to the vastness of Siberia. Russians both ordinary and extraordinary wrote for the provincial newspapers, expressing their views that: 1) nobles were society; 2) nobles should lead and enlighten a broader, multi-estate society; or, 3) society consisted of all educated groups, primarily the nobility and the clergy, but also the merchantry. Envisioning society at a smaller scale allowed the connections between estates to became more evident.