Protest and Labor in the Oil Capital of Russia: Company Town in Transition

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Dynamics of Communist and Post-Communist Countries

Abstract

When the Soviet Union collapsed, it was the largest producer of oil in the world, but within a decade, Russia’s oil industry had fallen apart and was only beginning to rebuild itself. Not only did the collapse of the oil industry have profound effects on the country as a whole, but it also deeply impacted the oil workers and communities that supported the oil industry. How did local societies react to the crash? What strategies did elites employ to maintain social order? Did societal actions and elite strategies shift as the oil industry rebuilt itself? To answer these questions, this paper focuses on the so-called “oil capital” of Russia, Surgut, in the Khanty-Mansi region of Western Siberia. Surgut presents an interesting case because resource extraction is a particularly fraught sector due to the highly volatile nature of the global commodity market into which Russia’s oil industry was thrust. Nevertheless, the reorganization of the oil industry in the early-1990s allowed Surgutneftegaz to consolidate a vertically-integrated company under the leadership of Vladimir Bogdanov (Surgutneftegaz’s oil tycoon). Although production crashed dramatically in the early-1990s, Surgutneftegaz stabilized in the mid-1990s, and consolidated and rebounded in the late-1990s. The within-case variation in Surgut’s economic prospects allows for the comparison of protest patterns within a company town in various economic circumstances to attempt to isolate causal factors leading to the protest patterns observed. Drawing on a content analysis of local newspapers and archival documents, this paper will clarify the effects of the transition to a capitalist economy and hybrid political regime on protest and labor in one of Russia’s most strategically important cities.

Author

• Allison D. Evans, University of Nevada, Reno