Deteriorating economic conditions associated with Russia’s transition in the 1990s from a planned economy to a market-oriented economy adversely affected the vast majority of households. Few workers emerged unscathed. This study utilizes data from the nationally representative Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey to study perceptions of economic insecurity in Russia’s transition and post-transition economy and investigate how these perceptions vary across urban and rural workers. We construct three measures in order to document perceptions of economic insecurity among Russian workers in 1995-1998, when economic conditions were deteriorating, and in 2000-2004, when economic conditions had stabilized. Our analysis indicates that perceptions of economic insecurity coincide with economic reality – perceptions of insecurity are higher during ‘bad’ times, and lower during ‘good’ times. While the negative impact of the transition was equally severe among workers in both rural and urban settlements, we find that the recovery process occurred more quickly in urban settlements. We find that in both types of locales, perceptions of economic insecurity vary by worker characteristics – perceptions of insecurity are higher among workers with less education, among women, among unskilled manual and workers employed by the state (teachers, nurses, and social workers). We find that differences in observed characteristics of rural and urban workers explain a relatively small part of the rural-urban perceptions gap, so the gap is largely due to different rates of economic recovery in rural and urban locales.