This paper aims to explain the characteristics and internal mechanisms of protest activity and solidarity among Russia’s industrial workers over the past two decades. Both academic discussions and officials’ attitudes toward protests prove contradictory. Even in periods of increase, labor activism has remained limited. Yet authorities continue to show concern about real and potential discontent, while academics puzzle over the dominance of quiescence as well as the reasons for sporadic activism. The research presented in this article advances our understanding of both: the limits of protest, and the causes, forms and goals of Russian labor’s periodic collective activism. We rely on a combination of available statistical and recent survey data to try to resolve the paradoxes of labor’s quiescence and conflict, as well as elites’ neglect and concern. The research finds changes in patterns of labor activism over the two decades. During the 1990s, most strikes were limited, defensive, managed, or desperate in character. In Russia’s recovered economy, from 2006 a qualitatively different, “classical” pattern of strikes and labor relations emerged. Workers’ collective actions mainly affected large, profitable industrial and transnational enterprises and took the form of “normalized” bargaining and conflict between labor and management. With the 2008–09 recession workers returned to the defensive strategies of the 1990s, protesting wage cuts and factory closures. Survey research from 2010 shows workers to be almost evenly divided between groups with positive and negative attitudes toward solidarity and bargaining.

After almost a decade of passivity, Russian workers are once again striking. For the first time since the 1990s, labor unrest has spread across the country, affecting foreign and domestic investors, well-to-do industrial and natural-resource enterprises and infrastructural installations. But unlike in the 1990s, these strikes have accompanied an economic boom, suggesting that patterns of Russian labor unrest are beginning to resemble those in other countries. Analysis of several recent strikes, meanwhile, suggests the early emergence of a new labor proto-movement, characterized by feelings of entitlement and injustice that stem in part from government rhetoric, while pushed into opposition by the state’s refusal to accommodate genuine labor mobilization.