Generally speaking, historians apply Habermas's concepts and paradigms somewhat fitfully when examining late tsarist society. The Habermasian concept of Öffentlichkeit (which most translators termed public sphere) did have a rough Russian analogue, obshchestvo, but in the Russian context, this "society" had a number of class and educational distinctions. Obshchestvo often meant educated society, which meant excluding the vast majority of the empire's population such as the peasantry or the poor townspeople, the meshchanstvo. Moreover, the civil society that did exist in the late tsarist state was riven through with various conflicts and fissures, so that nothing approaching a really cohesive obshchestvo emerged. In contrast to pre-1789 France, Russian Öffentlichkeit was fragmented into various social cubbyholes and quite anemic.

One of the main causes of this social fragmentation was the Russian state itself. In short, the autocratic state was very much like Hamlet with regards to modernity; it alternated between wanting modernity and trying to halt its consequences. The state's intervention in the economy was over-weening and prevented the development of a self-confident capitalist class, but at the same time, the state desired a strong, independent industrial base that would keep Russia a great power. The idea of a vast Great Russian empire, propagated by Emperor Alexander III and to a lesser extent by Nicholas II, was at odds with the reality of a multiethnic polity in which Great Russians were around 40% of the population. The contradictions of the late-tsarist state are apparent in its attempts to organize larger Russian society. The tsarist soslovie (legal estate system) remained in force since the eighteenth century, but it was an increasingly archaic system of social differentiation and ranking. Members of the educated classes entered into their soslovie system at the start of their careers, but the relationship between soslovie and the state became increasingly strained by the Silver Age. The soslovie system was designed to function as a means to organize and control various segments of the population in relation to their service to the state. The problem was that by the Silver Age, sosloviaa were increasingly irrelevant to the actual picture of Russian social and economic life. The autocratic state tended to look upon educated, non-noble elements of society with deep suspicion and disdain. For their part, Silver Age professionals and other components of Russia's middling strata tended to grow more aloof from state service and frustrated with the state's inability to change with the times. The soslovie system though meant that such dissatisfaction often often found expression in relatively isolated social cul-de-sacs. In a highly influential essay, Alfred Rieber termed late Russian society as a sedimentary society in which a series of social forces accumulated over time and increasingly irrelevant layers of social categories silted up to create a type of social paralysis.

What this sedimentary society, the intelligentsia (a variation on the Russian word intelligenty) were increasingly at odds with both the state and society as a whole. Narodnikii (populists), for example, romanticized the Russian peasant commune, but few of these intelligenty had actual experience with the peasant mir and actual peasant life. The growth in education among the peasantry, literacy rates climbed quite high in the Silver Age, was not matched by growth in access to advanced or upper-level education. Labor organization among various groups in the Western provinces, which were among some of the more industrialized segments of the empire, often fragmented around issues of ethnicity that intertwined itself around class. Jewish socialist Bund groups often fought with various Polish unions, as well as Zionist groups, and Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) tended to look at other ethnically-based labor movements with disdain, but was itself riven with factions (Bolshevik and Mensheviks). Older historiography (eg Richard Pipes) would argue that the violence of the nineteenth century was when a violent ideology (Marxism) met with a violent group (the various intelligentsia), but such an interpretation misses key points about the Russian state's relationship with its intelligenty. In short, the tsarist state looked with disdain and lumped even moderate socialist and liberal intellectuals into the same category as the extreme left.

This is not to say that elements of Öffentlichkeit did not exist within Silver Age Russia. Voluntary associations and other forms of social organization grew by tremendous bounds in the late nineteenth century. But the obshchestvo often had the worst of both worlds in the late imperial period; it was neither fully autonomous from the state, but it was not an integral component of it either. The result was that civil society was very anemic in the run-up to the two revolutions and the wider fragmentation of society and ideologies found their expression in the violence of both 1905 and 1917.