Why, in the face of massive delays in the payment of wages throughout the Russian Federation during the 1990s, did so few Russian workers engage in organized protest? This empirical puzzle has important implications not only for understanding how the fragile post-Soviet regime managed to endure more than a decade of severe socioeconomic crisis, but also for general theories of social mobilization. In her highly original and thought-provoking book, Debra Javeline argues that the relative quiescence of Russian workers can be explained parsimoniously: In the face of the complexities of post-Soviet political and economic transition, workers could not collectively decide who was to blame for wage arrears, and hence could not organize effective protests against any particular individual or institution.

Javeline's main body of evidence for this hypothesis is a nationwide survey of 2,026 adults that she and her Russian partners carried out for the United States Information Agency in the fall of 1998. Previous efforts to analyze the reasons for low worker activism in Russia, Javeline argues, have been based primarily on macrosociological data; the use of poll data allows for a more careful exploration of the microfoundations of collective action (or its absence). Indeed, her systematic refutation of alternative hypotheses in the literature on the basis of her survey results is remarkably convincing. Some scholars have argued that the absence of Russian worker protest is due to the dependence of workers on managers for nonwage benefits, such as medical care, housing, and subsidized food—but Javeline's data show that such dependent workers report protesting more often than those receiving fewer benefits from their enterprises. Some scholars have argued that Russians do not protest wage arrears because many of them receive additional wages and food in the informal economy—but the author's data show that second sources of income have no significant effect on the propensity to protest. Several demographic factors typically associated with protest activism, such as age, gender, and education, also have either no effect or limited effects on social protest.

By contrast, Javeline's key independent variable, the ability to assign blame for wage arrears to specific institutions and/or people, shows up as a powerful and significant predictor of propensities to engage in strikes or demonstrations in every regression model she tests—as does a general “interest in politics,” which, the author argues, works together with blame attribution to make respondents more likely to believe in the efficacy of protest. The only other variables with consistently significant effects on the dependent variable are urbanization, income (with greater poverty encouraging greater protest), the length of time workers have gone without wages, and exposure to specific appeals to join protests from workplace organizers. Since so few Russians report protest engaging in activism of any sort, Javeline argues, even a small increase in the number of Russians who could assign blame for wage arrears to specific people or institutions would have had a major impact on the size of national protests in the Yeltsin era (pp. 140–41).

Objections to the author's argument are likely to center on the adequacy of opinion poll data for assessing the independent and dependent variables here. For example, she quantifies worker protest by asking respondents to self-report their participation in major national protests of wage arrears in March 1997 and April 1998, as well as their general activism on workplace issues over the past three years prior to the survey date. This raises the concern that politically sophisticated respondents who know just whom to blame for wage arrears might be more likely to speak openly to pollsters about their past activism than participants who show up to protest for more spontaneous, unsophisticated reasons. Another possible methodological problem, examined in some depth by the author, is that the survey period in fall 1998 came just after the collapse of the Russian ruble during a severe governmental crisis, making this a difficult time to gauge the long-term trends in Russian attitudes. Finally, as Javeline admits, her sample contains too few respondents to test for the impact of profession on worker protest; this, combined with the fact that she studies a later time period, blunts much of her critique of Stephen Crowley's comparison of coal and steel workers in Hot Coal, Cold Steel: Russian and Ukrainian Workers from the End of the Soviet Union to the Post-Communist Transformations (1997). Still, she makes a good case that such methodological objections do not invalidate the systematic relationships among variables she uncovers.

Less convincing is Javeline's argument that a key reason for the inability of Russian workers to assign blame for wage arrears in the 1990s is the objective complexity of this problem (p. 17). She shows that even respected scholars have pointed to diverse and contradictory causes for the nonpayment of wages in Russia, including the ineffectiveness of central and local political elites, the poor advice of international financial organizations, the corrupt behavior of local managers, and the general structural problems of post-Soviet economic transition. But surely every major social crisis that might induce mass protest is similarly complex! Methodologically, at least, it is hard to see how one could test the hypothesis that “objectively complex” problems are less likely to generate specific blame assignment than “objectively simple” ones. Moreover, as Javeline herself is well aware, subjective conspiracy theories can quickly simplify the explanations of complex social problems for those who accept them; indeed, she concludes her book by warning that the Russian crisis is ripe for exploitation by demagogues (p. 242). If so, it would seem that the primary reason for Russian confusion about whom to blame for wage arrears must be sought in subjective factors, such as the weakness of antiliberal ideology and the absence of effective revolutionary leadership in post-Soviet Russia to date. Indeed, the recent electoral success of antiliberal nationalists in the 2003 Duma elections occurred long after the peak of the wage arrears crisis in Russia had passed, posing a puzzle for this part of her analysis.

Despite these quibbles, the central argument of Protest and the Politics of Blame, that the general cognitive confusion of individual Russian citizens during the turbulent 1990s has played an important role in hindering protest efforts, is persuasive. One hopes that other scholars will build on Javeline's work in analyzing the politics of blame in the framing of social mobilization in other comparative contexts.