Protest in the Provinces: Coming to Terms with Capitalism in Russia’s Company Towns by Allison D.Evans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025. x + 242 pp. $99.00. ISBN 978‐0‐19‐780173‐4

has made a valuable contribution to scholarship for a variety of fields related to Russian studies.Her focus, as the title suggests, is popular expressions of protest-from letterwriting campaigns with only a few signatories to demonstrations encompassing thousands-in three provincial cities in the turbulent decade following the collapse of Communist Party rule in Russia.Sociologists and historians will be pleased to see the evidence that Evans has amassed on the issues that motivated residents of Cherepovets, Komsomol'sk-na-Amure, and Surgut (three cities that rarely if ever receive attention from Western scholars) to make their voices heard.But Evans's principal audience is the political science community, especially those interested in the dynamics of protest in "company towns," that is, urban centers dominated by a single industry or enterprise.The three cities Evans has chosen are similar in that they are all roughly the same size (between 200,000 and 300,000 residents) and survive largely thanks to either one employer or a small number of factories related to one area of production.In Cherepovets, the Severstal' steel plant accounts for the bulk of the city's workforce.Komsomol'sk-na-Amure is a major center of Russia's military-industrial complex, producing naval vessels and aircraft.And Surgut is Russia's "oil capital" with Surgutneftegas and Surgutgazprom, along with numerous enterprises connected to oil and gas production and factories needed to support the population in such an isolated region.Each of the cities witnessed waves of popular activism between 1992 and 2000, and Evans has carefully assembled figures on types of protest, numbers of participants, and the resolution of conflicts.A time of economic crisis such as the 1990s is an ideal focus for an examination of protest, and, indeed, the cities Evans has studied witnessed several waves of popular activism as the country made the painful transition to a capitalist economy.Although Western audiences might imagine such actions as crowds of angry workers waving banners and calling for the removal of Yeltsin or local officials, Evans's book reveals a far more complex array of variables that determined the type of political action, the objects of protest, and the number of participants.Critical to these variables are the types of industries in question, their relationship to the Russian state, and the behavior of the elites of these cities.Once Severstal' was privatized, for example, it was able relatively quickly to obtain a high degree of independence from state orders.The plant's leadership was interwoven with the political leadership of Cherepovets, and these elites typically resorted to cooptation of strike and demonstration leaders or even repressive measures.This kept protests limited in scope and concentrated primarily on local concerns such as unpaid wages or housing conflicts.By contrast, Komsomol'sk-na-Amure, as a major supplier for the Russian military, was almost entirely dependent on Moscow for its contracts.As a result, elites there found they could take advantage of popular protest as leverage in negotiations for the immediate needs of the factories and local residents.