Tip O’Neill, the former Speaker of the US House of Representatives, contended that all politics are local. In Protest in the Provinces: Coming to Terms with Capitalism in Russia’s Company Towns, Allison D. Evans argues convincingly that the same was true during the 1990s in Russia. She does so through case studies of the survival strategies employed by three distinct company towns (Cherepovets, Komsomolsk-na-Amur, and Surgut) between 1992 and 2000, with a particular focus on the number and types of protests. Across all three cases, she documents that individuals and groups “predominantly organize around issues that affect everyday life” (142). Put more bluntly, protest in Russia during the 1990s was “overwhelmingly a local phenomenon” (142).

Evans picked her cases well. Each highlights a different industry. Each of the factories that dominate these towns was an economic winner under state socialism. Each struggled to find their footing in the transition, as did the towns where they were located, with varying results. Two explanatory variables emerge as critical in explaining the variations in the patterns of protest: the extent of unity among local elites and the extent to which the primary industry was dependent on the central state. Although there were certain common features, such as paternalism and divestiture of housing assets by the factories, she nonetheless found considerable variation among the three case studies and within each case study over time.

Evans does a superb job of guiding the reader through the twists and turns of the 1990s for each case. The level of detail is impressive but never oppressive. Her analysis is grounded in archival sources (which she notes that she was often the first to have consulted), a thorough review of the local newspapers, and interviews with local notables. Not only was she able to construct engaging narratives that wove together the stories of elites (political and economic) and ordinary workers, but she also built an amazing database of protest activities. She wisely opted to take an expansive view of what constituted a protest, including not just demonstrations and strikes but also written protests. As she notes, the latter have a long tradition dating back to the Stalinist era. Each case study chapter has figures in which she reports protest events on a monthly basis between January 1992 and May 2000 by type of protest, the subject-matter of these protests, and the level of government targeted by the protests.

At the outset, I was a bit skeptical of Evans’ reliance on local newspapers, recalling the sterileness and yellow journalism endemic to many local newspapers in the 1990s. To her credit, she acknowledges the potential dangers of relying on these papers, though she also uncritically shares a quote from one of the editors, who said that they “published everything because we could” (14). Whether that was consistently true of the three local papers she relied upon is unclear. What is indisputable is that these papers provided “the most complete and readily accessible account of protest available” (14).

Although the variation in the industries represented by her three cases allows for intriguing comparisons, I found myself wondering what Evans would have found had she studied company towns with the same industries. I suspect that levels of protest activities would have diverged, but by holding the industry constant, she might have uncovered more nuanced explanations. The book would have benefitted from including the voices of factory management more prominently. Evans integrates what she learns from interviews these managers gave to the local papers. As someone who did a series of factory case studies during the 1990s, I saw how differently managers spoke when talking to a journalist and when talking to a researcher who has built trust over time. But access is always difficult and Evans dug deeply into the sources available to her.

The book makes an important contribution to the literatures on contentious politics and on quotidian politics in Russia. Whether other social scientists will be able to follow in Evans’ path is unclear. As she notes in her conclusion, local newspapers are less able to provide comprehensive coverage and the wings of local officials have been severely clipped by the Putin regime. We are fortunate that she captured the reality of political life in these three company towns during the 1990s.