Allison D. Evans, Ph.D.

My research can be bundled into three primary (and often overlapping) areas of interest. First, how post-Soviet cities, industries, and workers adapted to and challenged capitalism in the 1990s and more recently. Second, explaining different patterns and practices of protest using subnational comparisons. Third, the political consequences of natural resource extraction.

Recent Publications

1. “Exploring Local Political Opportunity Structures: Protest and Social Control in Russia’s Provinces,” Russian Politics. 2023. Vol. 8, No. 4.
2. “Privatization and Judicialization in Resource Extraction: Comparing Labor Militancy in the Oil Fields of Russia and Kazakhstan,” Comparative Politics. 2022. Vol. 55, No. 1.
3. “The Dynamics of Labor Militancy in the Extractive Sector: Kazakhstan’s Oilfields and South Africa’s Platinum Mines in Comparative Perspective,” with Rudra Sil, Comparative Political Studies. 2020. Vol. 53, No. 6.
4. “Labour Protest and Industrial Peace: Russian Steelworkers’ Encounters with Economic Reforms and Unraveling Social Protections,” Economy & Society. 2018. Vol. 47, No. 3.

Book

In the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Russia embarked on a series of neoliberal and seemingly democratizing reforms—advocated for by myriad Western advisors—that sought to undo in a short time generations of a communist planned economy, fused Party-State autocratic political system, and highly centralized governance, known as “shock therapy.” Russians were indeed shocked—shocked at runaway inflation, political chaos, declining living standards and life expectancies, rising unemployment, and persistent wage arrears. Coming to terms with this new reality was a fraught process for many, and Russia’s company towns often found themselves in desperate straits—an extreme microcosm of what was playing out across Russia’s vast landmass.

Despite similarly dire economic decline, some groups in some of Russia’s company towns protested more intensely than others. This book explains marked variation in the scale, intensity, and aims of protests across cities with similarly concentrated and strategically important local economies during the 1990s. The case studies demonstrate the importance of locally specific patterns of elite relations and dependence on the central state as well as distinctive elite strategies for social control and engagement with local citizenry to explain protest variation. In Cherepovets, political and economic elites were united to support a newly-independent steel industry, so elites employed co-optation and suppression strategies that created a context for small and locally oriented protest. In contrast, Komsomolsk-na-Amure experienced large and intense protest waves as a result of an elite strategy of convergence because elites united with “the masses” to oppose the state’s neglect of the military industrial complex. Surgut’s post-communist experience was shaped by emergent elite divisions and a changing relationship between the oil industry and state, resulting in elites employing a variety of social control and community engagement strategies, which had contradictory effects on protest. The emergent variation in protest structures may be driven by local factors, but the pathways collectively represent a finding that is portable and novel, contributing to the literatures on company towns and social movements.