What happened in Baranchinsky, population 11,000, says much about the consensus Russia reached in 2009. Business did not want to spend money; workers did not want to relocate; the government did not want the political instability that comes with unemployment and was able to pay huge sums to stave it off. This consensus has kept much of Russia in a state of suspension, just when the economy would seem to demand change, said Natalya V. Zubarevich, an analyst at the Moscow-based Independent Institute for Social Policy. “This is a kind of quarantine, in which people simply wait until the end of the crisis,” she said. “The authorities are doing everything they can to support inefficient employment.” As for most people, she added, “they just want things to be the way they were.”

Image The Kremlin has been scrambling to address the future of places like Baranchinsky, where a single factory supplies heat, income and social security. Credit... James Hill for The New York Times

A central road runs through Baranchinsky and comes to a stop at the gate of the Electro-mechanical Factory. At the start of a shift, workers  mostly women  stream in as if inhaled by a giant lung, and nine hours later, they stream out, having changed their work clothes for fur coats and boots with kitten heels.

This rhythm has repeated itself since 1763, when Catherine the Great commissioned the factory to make artillery shells. But something changed with the fall of Communism. Defense orders vanished, and as the plant adjusted to the civilian market for electric motors and generators, there were periods when workers were paid in shoes, or not at all. Baranchinsky survived the 1990s, but life had become a roller coaster of good years and bad ones.

People in town blame Pavel Fedulov, a local oligarch who bought the factory in 2001. Mr. Fedulov snapped up dozens of local enterprises, and critics say he milked the factory of profits and invested nothing in its antiquated infrastructure. (Some machine tools were brought back from Germany as booty after World War II, workers said.) The plant was also hampered by age  it still produces its own fittings in an in-house foundry and smithy, a necessity during wartime  and faced rising competition from China and Europe.