Following the Soviet Union’s collapse, Russia implemented reforms aimed at transitioning to a market economy and devolving power to regional and municipal levels of government. Although it is well known that these reforms created significant uncertainty, economic crises, and protest, most existing studies do not explore the considerable variation in protest patterns across localities. This article asks why, despite similar pressures, some cities have experienced protests that are consistently larger and more intense than others. Focusing on the context of the many company towns that emerged during Soviet industrialization, I construct a paired comparison of two average-sized company towns using process tracing through interviews and archival documents. This article also employs an original protest database created through newspaper analysis that tracks not only the instances of protest but also protest size, demands, and targets. What emerges are two pathways that explain the divergent protest structures in the two company towns studied. In Cherepovets, a city that is less dependent on the central state, local elites pursued strategies of co-optation and suppression, limiting the opportunity structure for contentious politics to small-scale, local protests. In Komsomolsk-na-Amure, a city where the primary industry is in decline and dependent on support from the center, local elites converged with opposition groups to improve their bargaining position vis-à-vis the central government; this produced protests that were larger and more extreme and targeted the system as a whole.