Studies of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in Russian have generally found vowels in VCV sequences to have little influence on each other’s articulation. This has been attributed to Russian’s contrastive palatalization, which is assumed to block coarticulation by preventing the pharynx and tongue body from moving smoothly from one vowel configuration to the next during stop closure. If this is correct, coarticulation should be minimal even for reduced vowels. This hypothesis was tested by examining coarticulation in the nonfront reduced vowels of Russian. Here, F1 and F2 were measured at the onset, center, and offset of five repetitions of prestress /o/, poststress /o/, and stressed /a/ produced by native speakers in /tVb——b(j)V‘‘tilded el’’/ and /pVd—— d(j)V‘‘tilted el’’/ nonsense words. Posttarget consonants were plain or palatalized; flanking vowels were /i,a,u/, symmetrical. All speakers showed substantial coarticulation throughout the poststress target, during the first half of prestress target, and in the onset of stressed target. These results suggest that contrastive palatalization does not preclude significant vowel-to-vowel coarticulation.