Forced Trust: Emotional Bonds between People and State in Soviet Russia (1917-1991): A History of Trust and Distrust

• Applicant: Dr. Alexey Tikhomirov
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2015 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 271503585

Trust is an essential part of individual lives and the workings of modern society. Not only democracies, but also dictatorships like the Soviet state and socialist regimes in postwar Eastern Europe needed trust as a crucial resource for social integration and stability of the political order. But how much trust did a dictatorship need to ensure the regimes viability? How did the propaganda state produce the trust necessary to legitimate itself? How did the population experience trust and distrust in the insecurities of everyday life? Answers to those questions are important to understand problems of democratic transition in post-communist countries and to explain how neo-authoritarian systems are produced today. My project, a cultural history of trust and distrust in Soviet Russia 1917-1991, is a historical study to illuminate the role of trust and distrust in organising the Soviet political order. I hypothesize that the Soviet state preserved social cohesion with the paradoxical principle of forced trust: the bureaucratic systems ineffectiveness made people feel defenceless, compelling them to distrust official institutions and join imagined networks of trust under ultimate protection from party and state leaders. As a result, forced trust became a key feature of communist modernity: the growth generalised distrust was the basic precondition for producing compulsory personalised trust in the leaders against a background of radical distrust to enemies-other-minded people. I treat trust and distrust as socially constructed, politically directed and individually experienced feelings that changed over time. By looking at multiple meanings and spaces, discourses and rituals, institutions and agents of trust and distrust, this study examines the policies and practices that shaped the everyday life of millions of Soviet people and defined the grammar of the Soviet civilization from the beginning to the fall of this alternative scenario of modernity.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants