A Book Talk with Allison D. Evans, PhD

Protest in the Provinces studies protest in Russian company towns after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This book explains marked variation in the scale, intensity, and aims of protests across similar strategically important company towns during the 1990s.

Protest in the Provinces provides a detailed and comparative history of on-the-ground events in three cities: Cherepovets (steel), Komsomolsk-na-Amure (defense), and Surgut (oil and gas). This study finds that the primary industry’s level of dependence on the central state and the presence or absence of elite divisions shape the strategies that political and economic elites use to manage discontent and grievances. In turn, elite strategies impact protest patterns.

A primary contribution of Protest in the Provinces is its illumination of the range of strategies local elites use for social control, including repression, suppression, co-optation, convergence, channeling, and responsiveness. These findings are based on an in-depth analysis of local media, archival documents, and interviews conducted during fieldwork from 2010 to 2019.