In 1912, Russia held empire-wide elections to the Fourth State Duma, a parliamentary body established in 1905. In Odessa, the election campaign revealed that Russians fought not only about which candidate to elect, but also about underlying concepts of politics and democracy. When two rival newspapers, Odesskaia pochta and Iuzhnaia mysl, endorsed different "progressive" candidates, they started a debate over competing meanings of democratic representation: the politics of compromise and coalition-building versus the politics of class identity.