Being initially a newspaper journalism, the Russian journalism developed as a magazine journalism throughout the 18th/first half of the 19th centuries. Only starting from the second part of the 19th century, due to the initiated capitalisation of Russia, the newspaper became the leading type of periodicals. The lecture is devoted to the major newspapers of the second half of the 19th/early 20th centuries, their publishers and editorial teams. Such trends in the development of newspaper periodicals as increased circulation, periodicity, significance, retail sales etc. are discussed.