When the Soviet Union fell, why did company towns experience protests that differed in scale, intensity and aims? In her award-winning book, "Protest in the Provinces: Coming to Terms with Capitalism in Russia’s Company Towns," Allison Evans, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Political Science, College of Liberal Arts, compares protest in three cities with different economic bases — steel in Cherepovets, defense in Komsomolsk-na-Amure, and oil and gas in Surgut — during the 1990s.

The book identifies two factors that explain the variation: the degree of the core enterprise’s dependence on the central state, and whether local elites were divided. Together, these factors shaped how political and economic elites attempted to impose social control, using strategies ranging from repression and co-optation to responsiveness. In turn, these strategies influenced the resulting patterns of protest. The analysis rests on local media coverage, archival research, and interviews gathered over a decade of fieldwork. Evans’s book is the winner of the 2026 Ed A. Hewett Book Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies.