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.

Based on archival sources, this paper examines North Vietnam’s labor regimes during 1945—1970. Soviet and Chinese models are found to be influential there up to the late 1950s. An early emphasis on labor mobilization was gradually replaced by a concern for control to increase economic efficiency and to cope with pressures from workers. As in the Soviet Union and China, a hierarchy based on political criteria was created in the workplace but the state failed to motivate workers to work hard despite intense political campaigns and propaganda. Productivity and labor discipline declined in the 1960s while collusion between state enterprises and the informal sector to steal state resources was widespread. Similar to their counterparts in other socialist states, Vietnamese workers were assertive and able to evade state demands and control. They depended on the state for their food and clothes but the state was not able to count on them for quality labor. The failure of the Vietnamese state seemed to speak not only to workers’ ingenious strategies for survival but also to the inherent limit of Stalinist regimes in creating compliance.

Based on a survey of ‘off-duty workers’ in Guangzhou, this paper explores the changing structure of social support in China. It focuses on the material aid and guidance in job search received by these workers. It concludes that while the state and its enterprises still play an important role in workers’ economic life, informal social networks have become more pertinent. These social support networks reduce workers’ dependence on the state and provide a social buffer for the transformation of state socialism into market socialism. They also imply a revival of autonomous space in a society that will have more resources to negotiate with the state in the future.