When does street protest breed yet more dissatisfaction with the status quo? What use are authoritarian efforts to monitor potentially-explosive simmering social restiveness? The threat of mass public protest looms large for all authoritarian regimes, as solving the problem of authoritarian control (Svolik 2012) and preventing the spiral of an informational cascade are crucial for authoritarian survival (Kuran 1991). At the individual level, when people observe protest taking place locally, this may shift their perceptions of the ruling regime and, ultimately, may push them over the threshold at which their grievances turn into active contention. In this paper, I examine the effects of being exposed to public displays of discontent on attitudes towards the authorities and on subsequent willingness to engage in protest. I compile a dataset of over 1.4 million public opinion survey responses on protest sentiment and regime satisfaction in Putin-era Russia from 2007-2019 and combine this with databases of on-the-ground protest across the country. Together with difference-in-differences and event study designs, this allows me to identify the effects of protest on public opinion in a prominent authoritarian regime. I find that while observing protest depresses approval of local regime representatives in particular, evidence for broader effects on authoritarian support or on wholesale spirals of defection is weaker.