The article analyzes the trading activity of the middle class in the cities of the Tomsk province of the Russian Empire in the pre-reform period. The emphasis is made on its diversity. Using the archival sources, the author gives a description of the legal status of the Siberian tradesman, his rights and obligations in this field; describes the proportion of middle-class trade-wide turnover. The article describes the characteristics of trading activity in the bourgeois class in the cities of the South-western Siberia, as well as problems encountered by the intervention of municipal authorities. The author raised such issues as the variety of trading sessions in the bourgeois class, a variety of commodities, its quality, and profitability. The paper also gives statistics on such parameters as the dynamics of the middle class trading activities in the pre-reform period and discusses the features of trade burghers in different cities of the Tomsk province, as well as the problems they faced. It is shown that the region was characterized by uneven development of trading activity and the range and scale of the trade depended on the climatic, geographic and socio-economic conditions of the living. The most attractive in this respect was the Tomsk region. In this paper, special attention is paid to the relationship of merchants and burghers. The author highlights the fact that the middle class worked for merchants as clerks.