The study of autocracy has undergone a revival in the last two decades, and scholars of Russian politics have played a central role in this renaissance. Russia hands have examined elections, legislatures, and courts; mined the sources of President Putin’s approval ratings; and analyzed how propaganda and misinformation buttress the Kremlin. They have depicted the rise of a new middle class, a surge in nationalist identity, and the dynamics of Russia’s fractured opposition.

One topic conspicuously absent from the study of autocracy is Russian labor. Some might argue that such neglect is justified given the country’s weak labor unions and relatively few strikes. Stephen Crowley begs to differ. In his important new book, Putin’s Labor Dilemma: Russian Politics between Stability and Stagnation, Crowley makes the relationship between the country’s political leaders and the working class central to Russia’s postcommunist transformation.

Crowley argues that, even though labor strikes have been relatively few and sporadic in Russia under Putin, the fear of labor unrest has prompted the Kremlin to forego much-needed economic reforms and to compromise with labor to preserve social and political stability. Well aware of the difficulty of trying “to explain why something didn’t happen,” (p. 21), he presents an impressive array of evidence to make this case. Crowley documents trends in the politics of Russian labor over time, shows how strike activity has moved from large cities to smaller provincial towns left behind by Russia’s economic boom in the early 2000s, and provides evidence that strikes have largely focused on avoiding layoffs rather than pushing for higher wages.

Crowley complements this overview with closely drawn case studies. His rich treatment of the Kremlin’s response to protests in Russia’s largest single-company town, Tolyatti (aka Russia’s Detroit) is particularly good. Here he shows how cost-cutting efforts and large layoffs at the automaking giant AvtoVAZ could only be accomplished with massive resources from the Kremlin to keep the firm and the city solvent and to quell opposition from workers.

Crowley’s discussion of a wildcat truckers’ strike that began in late 2015 is also excellent. Faced with the imposition of a new tax collected by companies with close ties to Putin, truckers across the country coalesced into an opposition movement. He shows how they initially focused on economic demands and avoided politics, in part because they had so little faith in the political system. But when the state plays such a large role in the economy, economic demands eventually become political ones. By the end of the protest, one leader of the movement even enters a quixotic campaign to unseat Putin. Crowley deftly depicts the folly of trying to separate political and economic demands in labor politics in Russia.

Throughout the work Crowley confronts the question of why the Kremlin so fears labor unrest, given the country’s subservient official labor unions and low strike rates. He argues that even though the odds of labor protests bringing down the regime are low, they are not zero, and given the great costs to the Kremlin of losing power, it makes sense to address even long-shot threats to its power.

A great strength is Crowley’s ability to put Russian labor politics in comparative context while also recognizing how Russia-specific features complicate those comparisons. The challenges of deindustrialization and the middle-income trap are hardly unique to Russia and play a central role in Crowley’s analysis. More broadly, the Kremlin faces the well-known dilemma of economic reform: economic reforms may bring the dispersed benefit of greater efficiency to society at large, but they also impose concentrated economic costs on specific groups that are well placed to block them. Thus, rather than encouraging layoffs at financially troubled large enterprises, the Kremlin continues to subsidize them to prevent politically destabilizing labor unrest.

While recognizing the general forces at play, Crowley also emphasizes how the Soviet legacy of political geography and town planning continues to shape labor politics. Soviet planners left Russia with far more medium-size and small towns than one would expect for its level of development, making coordination across cities a challenge. More than 30% of Russians live in cities with fewer than 100,000 residents, and only 14% live in its three largest cities. In Canada and Australia, these figures are 31% and 50%, respectively. In addition, central planners created many towns that rely on a single firm for their survival. Restructuring enterprises in these single-company towns is especially challenging because workers have few alternative sources of employment, and local political leaders fight hard to keep their cities afloat. In addition, the Soviet developmental model encouraged firms to provide a broad range of social benefits that regional governments are loathe to replace. The political logic of economic reform bites hard everywhere, but especially so in post-Soviet Russia.

Crowley’s depiction of Russian labor demonstrates the agency of Russian workers (limited though it may be) and, in doing so, reveals the inadequacy of cultural stereotypes of Russian workers as largely apolitical and passive before authority but also capable of spontaneous strikes. In Crowley’s treatment, Russian workers recognize that the deck is stacked against them but are quick to identify when structural conditions are conducive to extracting benefits from the state and their employers.

Crowley’s work offers an important corrective to those who view labor as largely irrelevant to Russian politics. It also views the Kremlin as much more constrained by politics than many accounts suggest. Far from being an omnipotent ruler, Putin faces a difficult trade-off. As Crowley notes, “By preventing mass layoffs, the government can maintain social stability, but only at the cost of economic growth, the absence of which is itself a potential threat to social stability” (p. 205). Few observers are better placed to address these topics. Crowley has long been a keen observer of Russian labor politics, and by providing a nuanced treatment of a topic that has not received sufficient attention, he enriches our understanding of Russian politics and comparative politics more generally.

The book also raises some questions that merit further attention. If the Kremlin resolved labor unrest in Tolyatti, Pikalyovo, and elsewhere by providing massive resources to those who demonstrated, why did other workers and local leaders in other cities not follow suit? To put the question another way, why did successful strikers in these cities stay bought and not return to the streets? More generally, why don’t we see more strikes when the government follows a policy of appeasement? Appeasing protestors only sharpens the problem of moral hazard because rewarding strikers increases incentives to strike.

To be sure, Crowley notes how the Kremlin uses “pre-emptive authoritarianism” to disrupt organizational ties between workers in large enterprises and prevent coordinated strike activity, but one might have expected more strikes once the Kremlin demonstrated that such actions would be rewarded rather than punished. It might have been helpful to consider an in-depth study of a single-company town where one would expect labor unrest but it did not occur.

Appeasement is one tool to manage the potential for labor unrest, but so is repression. Present to varying degrees throughout Putin’s term, repression looms increasingly large in Russia. In the last 12 months (that is, while Crowley’s book was in production), the Russian state uprooted the main opposition movement led by Alexei Navalny, decimated the remaining pockets of independent journalism, and chased a good number of political opponents from the country. In chapter 9, Crowley depicts how the Belarussian state brutally repressed labor strikes following unexpected protests against vote fraud in the summer of 2020. Might workers in Russia now fear a similarly brutal crackdown and therefore avoid protest? More generally, what role did the fear of repression play in limiting labor protest in the Putin years? As the old Russian jokes goes, “In Russia, we use carrots and sticks. When we are done hitting them with sticks, then we hit them with carrots.”

Finally, Crowley makes a convincing case that the threat of labor unrest has stalled economic reform in Russia, but how important was the fear of labor unrest relative to other factors in this outcome? Answering this question is a challenge, but it would be helpful to consider the relative importance of other explanations for labor’s quiescence and the failure to introduce economic reforms. Narrowly interested oligarchs, high energy prices, and weakened institutions of accountability are all part of the story too.

These questions aside, Stephen Crowley has written a terrific book on an understudied topic in Russian politics that also raises important issues for comparative labor studies. Written in a clear and accessible style, Crowley’s work should find a warm reception from a range of audiences.