Hosking TrustDistrustUSSR 2013

Trust and Distrust in the USSR: An Overview
Author(s): Geoffrey Hosking

Source: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 91, No. 1, TRUST AND DISTRUST IN
THE USSR (January 2013), pp. 1-25
Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London,
School of Slavonic and East European Studies
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/slaveasteurorev2.91.1.0001
Accessed: 02-04-2024 03:59 +00:00
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Modern Humanities Research Association, University College London, School of

Slavonic and East European Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to The Slavonic and East European Review
This content downloaded from 101.53.9.29 on Tue, 02 Apr 2024 03:59:10 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Trust and Distrust in the USSR:
An Overview
GEOFFREY HOSKING
The Significance of Social Trust

The destructive intensity of the 1930s Terror in the Soviet Union is usually
explained, with varying degrees of emphasis, in terms of the Communist
Party’s political monopoly, Stalin’s drive to absolute power and/or the
chaos generated by rapid social and political change. These factors were
all undoubtedly very important. But in the twentieth century there have
been plenty of other one-party regimes with power-loving leaders driving
rapid social change. The sheer ferocity and ubiquity of Stalin’s Terror is
unparalleled anywhere else, however, except perhaps in China around 1960
and Cambodia in the 1970s. What made the Soviet Terror so much more
destructive than equivalent political campaigns in most other countries?
I suggest that a further factor is vital to explain the destructiveness of
the Terror: the wildfire spread of generalized social distrust. We do not
usually treat trust/distrust as a part of the social structure, yet I believe it
is as important as power in explaining how societies operate. The way in
which people trust or distrust each other is part of the deep grammar of
any society. We tend not to notice it because trust (though not distrust) is
usually habitual and unreflective, and affects our behaviour in ways we are
unaware of until there is a crisis.1
It may seem surprising, but for most human beings trust is the default
option. We tend, in fact, to trust beyond the point where objective
assessment suggests we should no longer do so. Trust is not infinite,
Geoffrey Hosking is Emeritus Professor of Russian History at UCL SSEES.

This and the following four articles are revised versions of papers delivered at the
conference on ‘Trust and Distrust in the Soviet Union’, held in February 2012 at the School
of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. The organizers are
grateful to the British Academy for its support.
1
See my ‘Trust and Distrust: A Suitable Theme for Historians?’, Transactions of the
Royal Historical Society (sixth series), vol. 16, 2006, pp. 95–116.
Slavonic and East European Review, 91, 1, 2013
2 GEOFFREY HOSKING
though. When distrust takes over, it does so rapidly and cumulatively, and
can be extremely destructive in its effects. That is exactly how financial
crises develop, from the South Sea Bubble to our own ‘credit crunch’.2 In
battle, soldiers normally trust their comrades and commanders, but when
that trust falters armies can disintegrate with surprising speed. That is
what happened to the Russian army in 1917.
Social scientists have written a great deal about trust in the last few
decades. I will here take two modern Polish sociologists who began their
lives under Soviet-style socialism. They were especially sensitive to the
high levels of generalized social distrust prevalent in such conditions, and
were therefore concerned to establish conditions conducive to its opposite:
generalized social trust. Unlike most sociologists, Barbara Misztal is
very aware of unreflective trust. She explains it as part of a ‘habitus of
trust’ — ‘habitus’ in Bourdieu’s sense of a milieu created and sustained by
social learning. A habitus of trust is ‘a protective mechanism relying on
everyday routines, stable reputations and tacit memories’.3 She posits three
kinds of habit which sustain trust: i) routine social habit; ii) background
assumptions; iii) ritual, ceremonial and rules of etiquette.4 Together they
reduce social complexity, enabling us to function on ‘auto-pilot’ for much
of our life, saving effort and attention for the unfamiliar. Without any
serious reflection we can trust our judgment and the people we interact
with. She pays especial attention to the way in which both individuals
and institutions build up a reputation for competence, virtue, probity or
honourable behaviour, which enables them to be trusted.5
Misztal is keenly aware of how a shared history can function as a
stabilizer. She shows how collective memory reduces the complexity and
restricts the uncertainty of our social environment, facilitating mutual
comprehension and making interaction with those around us easier
to understand. The Soviet state, of course, created its own version of
collective memory, summarized in its essentials in Stalin’s Short Course
in the History of the CPSU, which focused on the class struggle and
the Bolsheviks’ leadership of workers and peasants in the Revolution.
This memory was bolstered by rituals and commemorative events, also
intended to reinforce a new hierarchy and a new form of social solidarity.
But this memory was monolithic and uncontested; Misztal emphasizes
2
I develop this theme further in my Trust: Money, Markets and Society, Calcutta, 2010.
3
Barbara Misztal, Trust in Modern Societies, Cambridge, 1996, p. 102.
4
Ibid., ch. 4.
5
Ibid., pp. 120–39.
TRUST & DISTRUST IN THE USSR: AN OVERVIEW 3
that memory needs regular monitoring, otherwise it can too easily be
manipulated by unscrupulous political leaders.6
Piotr Sztompka is more specific about how a ‘culture of trust’ is created.
He nominates four conditions:
1. Normative coherence: the confluence of law, morality and custom to

provide a set of norms to enable people to engage confidently with each
other, and within which trust is normally unreflective. The opposite
is normative incoherence, or what Durkheim called anomie, within
which distrust is much more likely to be the default option in social
interaction.
2. Stability. The first condition will operate more effectively if it is long-

lasting, and changes only gradually and in a consistent direction.
Under these conditions in everyday interaction trust does not need to
be calculated but can be exercised out of habit. In periods of fast social
change one’s expectations of other people’s reactions become uncertain,
and placing trust thus needs much more conscious calculation. Suspicion
and distrust become much commoner.
3. Openness. It is important that the structure of society and government

is as transparent as possible, that people have information about the way
they function and how their components interact, and also access to
comments and ideas about them. Where a lot of information is secret or
too complicated to understand, trust is likely to be withheld, rumours,
gossip and conspiracy theories will abound, and people will be more
prone to look for ‘enemies’. Similarly, where the public exchange of
ideas is restricted, they will still be exchanged privately, but without
the verification and clarification made possible by open discussion,
so that extreme, paranoid and violent theories can more easily take
hold, promoting intense distrust. This is the soil in which terrorism —
including state terrorism — can readily take root.
4. Accountability. When things go wrong, as happens even in high-trust

societies, it is important that we should be able to identify who is
responsible, hold them to account and if possible obtain some redress
for damage. This is a guarantee that power will not be routinely abused
6
Ibid., pp. 139–56, and her Theories of Social Remembering, Maidenhead, 2003.
4 GEOFFREY HOSKING
and obligations will normally be respected. It is an insurance policy
against misfortune, which enables people to feel more secure and to
adopt a more trustful orientation towards other people, institutions and
contingencies.
Witch-Hunting
My basic hypothesis is that Stalin’s Terror marked the apogee of a
catastrophic breakdown of social trust, both generally and in the party-
state apparatus. His campaigns are often characterized as ‘witch-hunting’,
and the metaphor is appropriate. We can see a similar breakdown in
generalized social trust in parts of Europe in the sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries.
In religion and culture normative coherence and stability were disrupted
by far-reaching reforms in both Protestant and Catholic churches.
Reformers were intending to purify the church and through its influence
to create a godly society by combatting evils such as drunkenness, crime,
petty violence and family breakdown. They were educated and highly
literate; hence they laid great emphasis on the Word and correct doctrine.
They rejected the casual and eclectic practices by which most people
had previously tried to ward off misfortune: making the sign of the
cross, wearing amulets, blessing the crops or carrying images of saints.
Prohibiting such practices proved baffling or even threatening to ordinary
believers, especially the illiterate. Deprived of many of their accustomed
safeguards against danger and risk, they were less able to face the future
with confidence, especially in relation to the fertility of animals, the crop-
cycle, human procreation, marriage and family life — all areas which in
any society are subject to fortuitous and unpredictable eventualities.
In this more vulnerable milieu a new narrative of radical evil took
shape and received widespread currency. Some theologians asserted
that certain people in the midst of the community, usually women, had
concluded a pact with the devil and had become accomplices in a great
conspiracy designed to destroy godly society. Against the moral framework
propounded by both Catholic and Protestant reformers, which envisaged
human fertility and human love as contained within a strict and stable
framework, the witch-hunters evoked a counter-world in which human
affections were systematically abused, fertility destroyed and families
destabilized and fragmented. Some older women, who were normally
seen as bearers of social trust, upholders of tradition and community,
were suspected of concluding a pact with the devil and then dedicating
themselves to his work of destroying families, killing children, poisoning
animals and casting a blight on crops.7 Under interrogation, which usually
included torture, the accused would confess to playing their part in this
narrative. They would then be put to death, typically by burning at the
stake, to purge the evil they represented.
This narrative of radical and all-encompassing evil made sense only
in the context of a universal church (or, now, three would-be universal
churches: Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist) endeavouring to create a
totally godly society and evidently not succeeding; it dramatized the
contradiction by portraying the obverse, the construction of a totally
ungodly society. At a time when it was feared that the final great battle
between God and Antichrist might be at hand it seemed crucial to
some authorities both spiritual and secular to redraw boundaries much
more emphatically, and to shore up the norms of the orderly society by
reminding everyone of the dangers facing it.8
Not all parts of Europe were affected equally. Witch-hunting was
especially virulent where religious reform was contested, or had happened
suddenly, or in border regions, where different confessions lived not far
from one another. Another factor was the stability — or lack of it — of the
judicial system. Witch-hunting tended to be most intense where traditional
village or manorial courts were giving way to magistrates’ courts, but
were not yet fully integrated into royal court systems. Poorly trained
local magistrates were more likely to accept the narrative of diabolical
conspiracy than royal or high-level judges, who had more detachment
and were less willing to sanction the unregulated use of torture in the
investigation. Inquisition courts were also less gullible in the face of
witchcraft accusations, since they had more meticulous methods for
assessing evidence.9
Soviet Society in the 1930s

Soviet society in the 1930s had many of the same characteristics, but
more pronounced, since not only a religious revolution, but also an all-
encompassing political and social one had taken place:
7
Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 2nd edn, London, 1995,
chapter 2.
8
Stuart Clark, ‘Inversion, Misrule and the Meaning of Witchcraft’, Past & Present, 87,
1980, pp. 98–127.
9
Levack, Witch-Hunt, ch. 3.
6 GEOFFREY HOSKING
Old traditions and conventions had been forcibly spurned and cast
aside.
The new authorities had been able to take power only after a long and
brutal struggle which destroyed many social institutions.
They projected a universal doctrine of salvation which envisaged
creating a fully humane society, from which the evil of capitalism
would be eliminated.
They needed to find scapegoats, ‘enemies’, for the evident fact that
they were not succeeding and that many people’s lives had visibly
deteriorated. Besides, they had plenty of real enemies.
Judicial institutions were new and untried, had not developed systematic
ways of assessing evidence, and were dominated by the politically
powerful.
All of Misztal’s and Sztompka’s pre-conditions of trust had been

enfeebled or wiped out. In the 1920s the Communists consciously set
about destroying or taking over most of the social institutions which had
previously helped to uphold a habitus of trust, such as the church and
the family. It murdered the tsar, the source of symbolic (and more than
symbolic) authority in the old Russia. It overturned property relationships.
All institutions which had promoted openness and accountability (and they
had not been all that strong in tsarist Russia, though becoming stronger
towards the end) were undermined and replaced with simulacra controlled
by the party: the press, cultural institutions, schools, universities and
research institutes, law courts. The imposition of a single ‘correct’ ideology
cut off all possibilities of serious discussion or investigation of setbacks and
failures.
The new Soviet state also deliberately undermined everyday routines
and stable reputations. The civil war of 1917–21 intensified the process by
creating new enmities, intensifying old ones, and rendering elementary
everyday processes like gaining food, clothing and shelter unpredictable.
In September 1918 the writer Mikhail Prishvin noted in his diary: ‘I can feel
even the best and cleverest people, scholars included, beginning to behave
as if there were a mad dog in the courtyard outside.’ 10 The environment
favoured distrustful people with sharp reactions, a tendency which
prepared the way for the grotesque levels of distrust and summary justice
prevalent in the 1930s.
10
M. M. Prishvin, Dnevniki, 1918–1919, Moscow, 1994, p. 169.
These factors proved powerful inside the party too, engendering
grotesque configurations of trust and distrust. The Communist leaders
were profoundly marked by the experiences which had brought them to
power. They had endured privation together in the tsarist underground,
and some of them had suffered arrest and exile, sustained by their shared
belief in their own mission. They had fought a keenly contested civil war,
which it often seemed they would lose. Their consciousness was formed
by their awareness that they were surrounded by enemies and by popular
indifference or hostility even while, as they saw it, they were trying to bring
harmony and happiness to humanity.
Through these abrupt changes of fortune they forged a strong sense
of interdependence and mutual trust, without which they could scarcely
have persisted in their endeavour. Absolute trust in the party became a
hallmark of Communists of their generation, the generation which had
reached adulthood in the decade before 1917 or the decade after it. They had
lived through catastrophic social upheavals and a profound re-evaluation
of all values. To them ‘sticking together’, 100 per cent solidarity, seemed the
only way to avoid defeat and disaster. Each party leader reproduced this
mentality in his own milieu: when transferred from one post to another, he
would take with him his own trusted colleagues and subordinates. During
the 1920s Stalin strengthened his own position by aiding and abetting these
comradely transfers.11
Yet the same factors also readily gave rise to intense distrust among
the party leaders themselves. The messianic and apocalyptic narrative
which underlay the spiritual life of Communists divided the world into
‘comrades’ and ‘enemies’. ‘He who is not with us is against us’, became
a common saying. So serious were the problems facing the party that,
despite the 1921 congress resolution ‘On Party Unity’, for several more
years different opinions continued to be aired, and factions continued to
be formed around the party leaders expressing them. Each faction tried
to assume absolute moral authority or, in the words of Igal Halfin, ‘to
position itself as the one most conscious and therefore best capable of
interpreting comrades’ trustworthiness, commitment to the Revolution,
and moral potential’.12 That meant that disputes over the best strategy
tended to polarize opinion, transforming intense trust into intense
11
Gerald M. Easter, Reconstructing the State: Personal Networks and Elite Identity in
Soviet Russia, Cambridge, 2000, chapters 2–4.
12
Igal Halfin, Intimate Enemies: Demonizing the Opposition, 1918–1928, Pittsburgh, PA,
2007, p. 327.
8 GEOFFREY HOSKING
distrust. Stalin utilized his position as General Secretary to manipulate
appointments and to isolate opponents. As the crisis deepened, those
opponents became ‘oppositionists’, then ‘deviationists’, then ‘enemies’, in a
rhetorical escalation which typifies the tendency of distrust, if unchecked,
to become cumulative. Both the ‘Left Deviation’ and the ‘Right Opposition’
were ‘unmasked’ and defeated at party congresses. Stalin demonized the
leader of the former, Lev Trotskii, and expelled him from the Soviet Union.
Stalin’s distrust of his own colleagues was already virulent, but had not yet
actually become murderous.
The haste of the first five-year plans and the inexperience of most
administrators and many workers led to serious output shortfalls and a
spate of accidents, breakdowns and explosions. Everybody’s lives were in
upheaval, with new and often dangerous experiences presenting themselves
every day. Workers were becoming resentful and distrustful of the party
leadership. Senior officials, promoted through the nomenklatura system,
and inexperienced in dealing with practical problems, were grappling
with the daily emergencies which convulsed their massive new ministries.
Deprived of much necessary information and of alternative ideas about
how these difficulties might be tackled, both they and the population were
often ready to accept the only explanation available to them: wrecking and
sabotage by ‘enemies’.13
During the early to mid 1930s there were many other factors which
heightened leading Communists’ distrust both of the outside world and
of whole categories of people in their own society. The Japanese invasion
of Manchuria in 1931 and the Nazi accession to power in Germany in 1933
greatly strengthened systematic enemies of Communism and brought
them closer to the Soviet borders. Franco’s seizure of power in Spain in
1936 created a new crisis for the Comintern (especially since followers of
the reviled and exiled Trotskii were very strong there in the opposition);
Japan’s invasion of China in 1937 deepened its threat to the Soviet Union.
Faced with these multiple threats, the party leaders felt a redoubled need
to reinforce their own unity and seek a strong leader in whom they could
have absolute confidence. Starting with his fiftieth birthday celebrations in
December 1929, they themselves took the initiative in raising Stalin to that
status and in helping him to get rid of those few influential figures who
still criticized, albeit only in private, the excessive violence deployed in the
13
Wendy Z. Goldman, Terror and Democracy in the Age of Stalin: The Social Dynamics
of Repression, Cambridge, 2007, chapter 1, and her Inventing the Enemy: Denunciation and
Terror in Stalin’s Russia, Cambridge, 2011.
dekulakization, or who muttered that Stalin was power-mad and ought to
be deposed.14 His colleagues’ letters to him began to look almost fawning
in their deference to his opinions and instructions. Here, for example, is
Kaganovich writing to him about how to deal with the meagre 1932 grain
requisitions in Ukraine, where famine was about to break out as a direct
result of party policy:
Comrade Stalin, you have framed the question so broadly and clearly from
the standpoint of the party’s interests that there cannot be any serious
hesitation. Besides, […] you have not only the official political right, but
also the comradely and moral right to direct those you have moulded as
political leaders, i.e. me, your pupil.15
Here Kaganovich combines political, moral and personal grounds for

granting Stalin unquestioning trust.
The leaders’ growing control over the media, culture and the education
system ensured that this message circulated through all of them in
meticulously pre-programmed versions. Stalin, though at times he resisted
a flamboyant personality cult, was able henceforth to ensure that all public
media depicted him as a worthy successor to Lenin, as a supremely capable
leader and as the outstanding embodiment of Marxism in its contemporary
development. As his cult advanced, traditional epithets evoking tsars and
patriarchs were combined with motifs suggesting irrefutable, scientifically
guaranteed ideological certainty. The image of Stalin became the keystone
of the regime’s discourse of trustworthiness.16
Essential to this fabrication of popular trust was, however, the projection
of equal and opposite distrust directed against all potential enemies. After
the murder of Kirov in December 1934 — whoever was responsible for it —
Stalin’s violent distrust turned against the highest figures in the party-state
apparatus. At first he focused on those who had supported one or another
opposition during the 1920s, a process which culminated in three show
14
J. Arch Getty, ‘Afraid of Their Shadows: The Bolshevik Recourse to Terror, 1932–1938’,
in Manfred Hildermeier (ed.), Stalinismus vor dem zweiten Weltkrieg: neue Wege der
Forschung, Munich, 1998, pp. 169–89.
15
R. W. Davies, Oleg V. Khlevniuk and E. A. Rees (eds), The Stalin-Kaganovich
Correspondence, 1931–36, New Haven, CT, 2003, p. 184 (italics in the original).
16
Frank J. Miller, Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and the Pseudofolklore of the
Stalin Era, Armonk, NY, 1991; Jan Plamper, The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of
Power, New Haven, CT, 2012; Sarah Davies, ‘Stalin and the Making of the Leader Cult in
the 1930s’, in Apor Balazs et al. (eds), The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships: Stalin
and the Eastern Bloc, Basingstoke, 2004, pp. 29–46.
10 GEOFFREY HOSKING
trials in August 1936, February 1937 and March 1938. After the first, the
trial of the ‘Trotskyist-Zinovievite Centre’, Ordjonikidze wrote to Stalin
declaring:
Shooting them wasn’t enough. If it had been possible, they should have
been shot at least ten times […]. They caused tremendous harm to the
party. Now, knowing what they’re made of, you don’t know who’s telling
the truth and who’s lying, who’s a friend and who’s a double-dealer […].
People don’t know whether they can trust this or that former Trotskyite or
Zinovievite.17
Such a statement from Ordjonikidze is especially striking, since it appears

he was still trying to distinguish between truth and falsehood inside his
own Commissariat of Heavy Industry.18
As distrust became ever more pervasive, Stalin directed it even against
‘normal’ apparatchiks, who had never belonged to any ‘opposition’ or
‘deviation’. Senior officials in economic ministries had by now acquired
strong departmental interests of their own. Many provincial party leaders
had dug themselves in and gathered their comrades around them; they
were dedicated to conserving their power and enjoying the good things of
life in a society of scarcity. They were also vying with one another to secure
huge dollops of investment for the industrial projects of their regions. The
genuine ideological conflict of the 1920s having passed, their paramount
commitment was not to any particular party line, but to the defence of their
power and privileges, and the enlargement of their economic empires.19
At the Central Committee plenum of February–March 1937, Stalin
declared war on this tendency. He condemned vedomstvennost´
(departmentalism, defence of institutional interests) and warned that:
Agents of foreign states have been conducting their wrecking, diversionary

and espionage work, with the active participation of Trotskyists, affecting
to a greater or lesser extent all, or almost all, our economic, administrative
and party organizations. [They] have wormed their way not only into
lower level organizations but into some responsible posts as well.
17
Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Master of the House: Stalin and His Inner Circle, translated by
Nora Seligman Favorov, New Haven, CT, 2009, p. 154.
18
Ibid., p. 159.
19
James Harris, The Great Urals: Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System,
Ithaca, NY, 1999.
These agents’ strength lay in the fact that they held party membership
cards:
The party card grants them political trust and opens access for them to
all our institutions and organizations […]. They have deceived our people,
have abused that trust, have discreetly practised their wrecking and
betrayed our state secrets to enemies of the Soviet Union.
Too many party members were gullible, he charged, and exhorted them
never to forget that the Soviet Union was surrounded by hostile capitalist
powers, and to exercise ‘vigilance, real Bolshevik revolutionary vigilance’.20
Stalin dramatized this narrative of conspiracy and betrayal in the show
trials of 1936–38. Distrust became rampant and out of control. Even those
who were convinced they themselves were innocent of the charges against
them could not feel sure that those arraigned alongside them were equally
blameless. Those accused in show trials were themselves devoted to the
party and its monopoly rule. They had put complete trust in it, and had
no available political or moral platform on which they could take a stand
and proclaim a countervailing truth. They had no alternative narrative
with which to explain what had gone wrong. In most cases it is impossible
to say whether they denounced ‘enemies’ out of conviction or cynically to
save their own skin and perhaps seek advancement. The key point is that
extreme polarization of trust and distrust was now the modus operandi of
the entire system.21
Most workplaces responded by staging their own dramas of trust and
distrust. Employees were encouraged to ‘unmask enemies’ among their
colleagues and even — perhaps especially — their superiors. They could
do so by writing to their partkom, to the enterprise wall newspaper, to a
local party official or to the NKVD. There were many transgressions they
might ‘signal’: social origin, ideological errors, apparent responsibility
for a work accident, previous concealed political activity, a connection to
someone previously convicted or living abroad. The denunciation could
be anonymous and no evidence needed to be provided. Local officials had
to respond in some way to each denunciation, since failure to do so was
20
‘Materialy fevral´sko-martovskogo plenuma TsK VKP(b) 1937 goda’, Voprosy istorii,
3, 1995, pp. 3–4, 8.
21
Gabor Rittersporn, ‘The Omnipresent Conspiracy: On Soviet Imagery of Politics
and Social Relations in the 1930s’, in J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning (eds), Stalinist
Terror: New Perspectives, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 99–115.
12 GEOFFREY HOSKING
construed as ‘harbouring enemies’, and was considered far more serious
than wrongful prosecution.22
The bizarre interweaving of distrust and trust can be seen in the last
letter Bukharin wrote to Stalin as he awaited his trial.23 Throughout his
letter, Bukharin drew a total distinction between political and personal
trust. He reiterated that the party must be unanimous and ruthless towards
its enemies, and even potential enemies. In his letter he tried to imagine
himself in Stalin’s position, leader of a party carrying out ‘universal-
historical tasks’. He praised the idea of a general purge, which drew in not
only the guilty, but also ‘persons potentially under suspicion’, and hence
perhaps not guilty at all. He called the purge ‘great and bold’, necessary
because of ‘the pre-war situation’ (which justified distrust towards the
outside world) and ‘the transition to democracy’ (which justified distrust
towards internal enemies). He could, he said, even see a justification for his
own approaching fate, since he too had taken part in factional struggles
and undermined party unity:
One has to react to danger posed by the fact that people inevitably talk
about each other and in doing so arouse an everlasting distrust in each
other. (I’m judging from my own experience. How I raged against Radek,
who had smeared me, and then I myself did the same thing.) In this way
[i.e. by a general purge], the leadership is bringing about a full guarantee
for itself.
In other words, he acknowledged that leading the party to success in a

hostile world required the maximum distrust, vigilance and ruthlessness.
Yet at the same time he was desperate to restore personal trust between
himself and Stalin. Almost unbelievably, he actually beseeched Stalin’s
forgiveness for his disloyalty:
God, what a child I was. What a fool! And now I’m paying for this with my
honour and with my life. For this forgive me, Koba. I weep as I write […].
Oh, Lord, if only there were some device which would make it possible for
you to see my flayed and tormented soul! If only you could see how I am
attached to you, body and soul, quite unlike Stetskii or Tal´.24
22
Goldman, Terror and Democracy, especially chapter 6.
23
The English text of Bukharin’s letter is in J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov (eds), The
Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939, New Haven, CT,
1999, pp. 556–60. I have modified the translation in a few places, drawing on the Russian
original in Istochnik, 1993, no. 0, pp. 23–25.
24
A reference to two officials of the party’s press department, who had given evidence
The letter displayed, then, an intense and incongruous mixture of
emotions. On the one hand Bukharin had no illusions about Stalin’s cold-
blooded vengefulness and therefore his own likely fate, which he accepted
in the name of party unity. Yet, on the other hand, he still wanted to
invoke their old comradeship, to put his trust in Stalin’s friendship, and
to re-establish his own reputation for trustworthiness. This is not just a
tactical ploy, as one can see from Bukharin’s undignified, confused and
inconsequential language.
Stalin’s personality was ideally suited to a milieu of uncontrolled social
distrust. Cautious, flexible, hard-working, tenacious, vigilant, vengeful
and ruthless, he was also a thorough organizer and a master of detail. In
short, he was a virtuoso operator in a society of rampant distrust. That was
what enabled him to exploit the domination his colleagues had conceded
to him, and eventually to move on from being the mediator between them
to becoming the master over them. Thenceforth rivalry among the leaders
was conducted as a ‘struggle for Stalin’s soul’, a manoeuvring for position
in the competitive field created by his ‘balancing of trust and mistrust
against one another’.25 In his memoirs, Khrushchev recalled that:
All of us around him were temporary people. As long as he trusted us to

a certain degree, we were allowed to go on living and working. But the
moment he stopped trusting you, Stalin would start to take a closer look.
Then the cup of his distrust would overflow, your inexorable turn would
come, and you would follow in the steps of those who were no longer
living.26
Jörg Baberowski argues that Stalin’s behaviour was that of a Mafia

boss. Leaders of criminal gangs cannot turn to police or law enforcement
officials when things go wrong; hence they depend on the total loyalty
of their followers. Anyone suspected of disloyalty they have to eliminate
ruthlessly and demonstratively, together with their dependents. That was
Stalin’s modus operandi.27
against Bukharin.
25
The phrases are taken from Benno Ennker, ‘“Struggling for Stalin’s Soul”: The
Leader Cult and the Balance of Social Power in Stalin’s Inner Circle’, in Heller & Plamper,
Personality Cults, pp. 161–95, and his ‘The Stalin Cult, Bolshevik Rule and Kremlin
Interaction in the 1930s’, in Balazs, The Leader Cult, p. 93.
26
N. S. Khrushchev, Vospominaniia: vremia, liudi, vlast´, 4 vols, Moscow, 1999, 2, p. 77.
27
Jörg Baberowski, Verbrannte Erde: Stalins Herrschaft der Gewalt, Munich, 2012, pp.
29, 308–17.
14 GEOFFREY HOSKING
Did Stalin actually believe the grotesque fantasies on account of which
he murdered his ‘enemies’? That is impossible to say. He and the Bolshevik
leaders had created such an all-enveloping narrative of total trust and total
distrust that they themselves had to follow it through to the bitter end,
whether or not they believed it all. Anyone who hesitated was doomed. In
those circumstances Stalin was able to indulge his desire for untrammelled
power and his ruthless drive to get rid of all possible ‘enemies’. But the
intense distrust took its toll of him too, if one is to believe Khrushchev, who
asserts that towards the end of his life Stalin once said to him: ‘I’m done for.
I don’t trust anyone. I don’t even trust myself.’ 28 If he did indeed say that,
then he had reached the logical end-point of the process which had lifted
him to supreme power.
The effect of the poisonous atmosphere on the general population,
especially on young people, who had never known another world, was
to stimulate a constant and pervasive paranoia. As a young worker later
recalled, everything was attributed to enemies:
At school they said: ‘Look how [the enemies] won’t let us live under
Communism — look how they blow up factories, derail trams, and kill
people — all this is done by enemies of the people.’ They beat this into our
heads so often that we stopped thinking for ourselves. We saw ‘enemies’
everywhere.29
As a result the ordinary everyday exchange of thoughts, hopes and

feelings became impossible, or possible only between those who trusted
one another on the basis of intimate knowledge. Many human relationships
were frozen by non-communication. Children grew up believing this was
normal. One child whose father was arrested in 1936 later recalled:
‘You’ll get into trouble for your tongue.’ That’s what people said to us
children all the time. We went through life afraid to talk. Mama used
to say that every other person was an informer. We were afraid of our
neighbours, and especially of the police.
Another recalled:
I knew subconsciously that I had to keep quiet, that I could not speak, or
say what I thought. For example, when we travelled in a crowded tram, I
28
Khrushchev, Vospominaniia, 2, p. 77.
29
Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, London, 2007, p. 274.
knew I had to remain silent, that I could not mention anything, not even
things I saw out of the window.30
Mikhail Prishvin, a writer by no means wholly opposed to Stalin, noted

in his diary in October 1937:
People have completely stopped trusting each other. They go about their
work and do not even whisper to one another. There is a huge mass of
people raised up from poor social backgrounds who have nothing to
whisper about: they just think ‘That’s how it should be’. Others isolate
themselves to whisper, or study the art of silence. Yet others have simply
learnt to keep quiet […]. Gas masks are no use! What we need to protect
ourselves against is psychological infection, the mask of gloom and
silence.31
Even the sphere of private, trusted relationships was not immune

to the invasion of terror and its evocations of universal distrust. Iuliia
Piatnitskaia was the wife of a Comintern official, Osip Piatnitskii, who was
arrested in July 1937. She had been attracted to him through his devotion to
Marxist ideology. She trusted him because of his devotion to his work and
his refusal to exploit personal relationships for selfish ends. She accepted
willingly ‘that he was the most modest and honest of people, that we
[she and their children] came well down his list of priorities and that we
received nothing from those in power except occasionally by accident’.32
Osip’s arrest plunged Iuliia into a wholly new and terrifyingly unstable
world of material deprivation and, worse, of boycott by all her and her
husband’s former colleagues. The only way she could make sense of what
had happened was to draw on the stock of images and narratives by which
high party officials had always lived, and which were now being reiterated
at full volume by Ezhov and Stalin. Osip, she concluded, had been
surrounded by spies, counter-revolutionaries, or at best corrupt careerists
who had not shared his ideals but had betrayed them. She applauded
Ezhov’s drive to eliminate such enemies. Hearing that Bukharin and others
were about to be executed, she imagined for them in her diary an even
worse fate, being displayed to the public in a cage to die a lingering death:
30
Ibid., pp. 251–52, 254.
31
M. M. Prishvin, Dnevniki, 1936, 1937, St Petersburg, 2010, pp. 762–63.
32
Iuliia Piatnitskaia, Dnevnik zheny bol´shevika, Benson, VT, 1987, p. 45.
16 GEOFFREY HOSKING
Let them see us struggling together for a happier life, let them see how we
love our leaders, who do not betray us, how we are defeating fascism, while
they are idle, fed like beasts, and not regarded as people.33
She even allowed the paranoid official narrative to poison her relationship
with her younger son, Vovka. When he received a bad school report (the
older one Igor´, had by this time, been arrested):
I reminded him that he was the son of an ‘enemy of the people’, that he
showed by his behaviour that he was the brother of an ‘enemy’, and so on.
Tears came to his eyes, and he said, ‘Am I guilty that I am the son and
brother of enemies? I don’t want you to be my mother, I want to go into an
orphanage.’ 34
With the closing down of any public space for the circulation of
information and ideas, or for the redress of grievances, quite a number
of Soviet citizens responded by writing personal letters to authority
figures, such as Stalin, Molotov or Kalinin, or to Pravda. Total distrust
is intolerable, and many of these letters display a kind of surrogate trust
— either simulated, or ‘hope against hope’, or in some cases perhaps even
genuine. They exemplify what Alena Ledeneva (against most social science
literature on the subject, but I think rightly) calls ‘forced trust’.35 Her
argument is corroborated and developed further by Alexey Tikhomirov
in his article below.36 These letters typically appealed to a leader to rectify
some abuse or to help the writer in a difficult situation for which there
seemed to be no other solution. Writers would often address the recipient
as a trustworthy figure (Tovarishch Zhdanov, chutkii, rodnoi) and continue
in terms like ‘knowing your love and care for children’. They would lay
out the trustworthy credentials of the writer (‘decorated shock worker’,
‘mother of three children’, ‘I am a Communist since 1918 and lost my
health — an arm — for the new life’) and then expound a story of innocent
suffering, sometimes identifying ‘enemies’ who had inflicted it, and
conclude by asking for a personal intervention. In a significant minority of
cases, some official remedial action did follow, so that such letters offered
33
Ibid., p. 88.
34
Ibid., pp. 75–76.
35
Alena Ledeneva, ‘The Genealogy of Krugovaia Poruka: Forced Trust as a Feature
of Russian Political Culture’, in Ivana Marková (ed.), Trust and Democratic Transition in
Post-Communist Europe, Oxford, 2004, pp. 85–108.
36
See pp. 78–118.
a stunted replacement for a public sphere.37 In many cases, of course, they
also added to the denunciations which fuelled the Terror. In the absence of
regular procedures for identifying abuses and sorting them out, the desire
to trust someone in power was acute — and not always hopeless.
Alexander Livshin suggests in his article38 that such letters exemplified
the tensions which arose out of the Communists’ attempt to create
their own variety of ‘social capital’. It had such rigid boundaries that it
necessarily posited ubiquitous ‘enemies’ and thereby engendered such high
levels of distrust that social capital was being undermined even as it was
being created.
The Soviet Union after Stalin

Eventually the disfunctionality of this situation presumably became obvious
to Stalin. Terror had removed key personnel from the administration,
police and armed forces, while those not arrested were often too terrified to
take necessary decisions. Moreover, it had become difficult or impossible
to hire replacement cadres with any confidence, as Cynthia Hooper
shows in her article below.39 Even Stalin could not exercise power if the
levers of that power were broken. He began to circulate instructions that
denunciations were to be much more carefully examined before action was
taken. The Terror was wound down, beginning in late 1938 and, though it
was never altogether abandoned, was never renewed on remotely the same
scale.40 By that time, in any case, Soviet ideology had begun to create its
own narratives of stability, normality and historical memory, as well as to
codify and consolidate its own rituals, customs and practices.
Moreover, antibodies had begun to arise. Apparatchiks were learning
to defend themselves by mutual protection — essentially, the customary
Russian practice of krugovaia poruka, collective responsibility, under
which those who served each other’s interests and especially those of their
immediate superiors would also cover up for each other and enable each
other to avoid accountability.41 Yoram Gorlizki suggests, in his article
below, 42 that in the late Stalin period limited forms of trust emerged which
facilitated cooperation and enabled the political system to function more
smoothly than it would otherwise have done.
37
Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Supplicants and Citizens: Letter Writing in Soviet Russia in the
1930s’, Slavic Review, 55, 1996, 1, pp. 78–105.
38
See pp. 57–77.
39
See pp. 26–56.
40
Khlevniuk, Master of the House, pp. 199–201, 251.
41
Ledeneva, ‘Genealogy’, especially pp. 100–04.
42
See pp. 119–46.
18 GEOFFREY HOSKING
At all levels of society people improvised their own little cover-up
societies, what Merle Fainsod long ago called ‘family circles’ or ‘mutual
protection associations’, whose members tacitly or explicitly agreed
not to inform on each other: again, forced trust or at least trust under
extreme pressure.43 People had a direct interest in activating this kind of
solidarity, since if one member of the group was denounced and arrested,
other members were likely to be as well. Inevitably, though, these ‘family
circles’ were fragile, since the pressures of life and the NKVD constantly
gnawed away at them. Initially, Stalin’s Terror had been specifically aimed
at destroying them. When the Terror eased, they became somewhat more
stable, and they provided much of the framework for the party-state
apparatus and for the socio-political structure of the post-Stalin Soviet
Union.44
It would be wrong to identify these associations unambiguously with
resistance to the state. In fact the Soviet state both moulded itself to them
and tried to take them over. In his stimulating study of the individual
and the collective in Soviet society, Oleg Kharkhordin has shown how the
post-Stalin leaders, especially Khrushchev, gave priority to the gestation of
collectives (kollektivy, each with its own aktiv, or core activists) as a means
of social control preferable to terror.45 This was to be part of the drive to
replace the state with ‘social self-administration’, under the guidance of
the party. The institution of comrade courts offers an example. Both at
the workplace and the dwelling place local soviets, trade unions or house
committees set up panels of ordinary employees or tenants, empowered
to deal with colleagues’ minor infringements. Those courts could impose
small fines, corrective labour (without imprisonment) and recommend
demotion at work or eviction from housing. They were intended to humanize
the judicial system, make it more trustworthy and locally accountable,
and thereby contribute to the development of socialist community life.
Experience suggests, though, that they functioned spasmodically and too
often became vehicles for personal intrigues and petty jealousies — hence
often, no doubt, an instrument of ‘family circles’.46
43
Merle Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled, revised edn, Cambridge, MA, 1963, pp. 235–37,
388–89, 575.
44
Yoram Gorlizki, ‘Too Much Trust: Regional Party Leaders and Local Political
Networks under Brezhnev’, Slavic Review, 69, 2010, 3, pp. 676–700.
45
Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study in Practices,
Berkeley, CA, 1999, chapter 7.
46
See Peter H. Juviler, Revolutionary Law and Order: Politics and Social Change in
the USSR, New York, 1976, pp. 81–82, and Harold J. Berman, Justice in the U.S.S.R.: An
Interpretation of Soviet Law, 2nd edn, Cambridge, MA, 1966, pp. 288–91.
Even without the semi-formalization embodied in comrade courts,
from the late 1940s professional and employee collectives were beginning
to take control over most aspects of their members’ working lives, and
sometimes to encroach on their private lives too. Workplaces became
sites for the distribution of all kinds of benefits and life-chances, from
health care to paid holidays — at times including the provision of basic
foodstuffs (since otherwise hunting for them in poorly supplied state shops
necessitated taking time off from work).47 These collectives took the form
of hierarchical patron-client networks, bonded by collective responsibility
and loyalty to the leader. One can see this process at work in scientific
institutes, each of which was developing its own repertoire of distinctive
doctrines and practices. Links between the director and the members
were partly ideological — adherence to a particular theory or approach
to the subject — and partly personal, consisting of trust built up through
experience of common work and also through the director’s capacity to
acquire benefits from higher authorities while fending off their unwanted
intrusions.48
Such ‘mutual protection associations’ were formed out of fear, and they
deadened any sense of personal legal responsibility, but on the other hand
they had the potential to become humanly warm and mutually supportive,
especially after the Terror eased in the mid 1950s. Colleagues would gather
after work to drink together, swap cynical anecdotes and exchange the
rumours which supplemented the news available in the heavily censored
press. The independent social commentator and philosopher, Aleksandr
Zinov´ev, used to maintain that every Soviet workplace was a ‘primary
collective’ where the ostensible productive function was secondary to
enabling people to conduct the normal and essential business of their lives
in spite of the omnipresent pressure from the state:
At the level of the primary collective people not only work, they spend time
in the company of people they know well. They swap news, they amuse
themselves, do all kinds of things to preserve and improve their position,
have contacts with other people on whom their well-being depends, go
to innumerable meetings, get their vacation vouchers, living space and
supplementary foodstuffs.49
47
Sheila Fitzpatrick and Alf Lüdtke, ‘Energizing the Everyday: On the Breaking and
Making of Social Bonds in Nazism and Stalinism’, in Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick
(eds), Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, Cambridge, 2009, p. 290.
48
Aleksei Kojevnikov, ‘Rituals of Stalinist Culture at Work: Science and the Games of
Intraparty Democracy circa 1948’, Russian Review, 57, 1998, pp. 25–52.
49
Aleksandr Zinoviev, The Reality of Communism, London, 1984, p. 114.
20 GEOFFREY HOSKING
In other words, they attempted to recreate the mutual trust in each other
and in the future which was constantly under threat from the political
environment and from memories of the Terror. At the same time, they
were component units in the production process, and primary cells in the
social hierarchy. They both supported the regime and frustrated it.
As a graduate student at Moscow University in 1964–65 I experienced
a little of this culture. Foreigners were naturally difficult to integrate into
Soviet collectives, but the MGU Foreign Department did its best. Lidia
Pavlovna, the official who dealt with us, assumed that we were a collective,
who met regularly, knew what each other was doing and took decisions
together. The first thing we had to do on arriving in Moscow was to elect
a starosta (elder). Subsequently, any but our most trivial requests had to
go through the starosta, who as a consequence was obliged to visit the
Foreign Department almost every day, and was left with little time to do
the research he had come to conduct.
Similar collectives formed the basic matrix in the cultural world.
The most celebrated example is Novyi mir under Aleksandr Tvardovskii,
whose editorial board was appointed by the Soviet Union of Writers and
indirectly by the Cultural Department of the CPSU Central Committee. All
the same, during the 1950s and ’60s, the editors formed a tight collective,
promoting a more open discourse about the history of Soviet society than
was normally acceptable to the authorities. To accomplish their intentions,
they had to conduct a daily battle with the censors, Writers Union officials
and the Central Committee Cultural Department. They had high ideals for
the civic role of their journal, derived from the nineteenth-century Russian
tradition of the ‘thick journal’. They not only published their favoured
writers but tried to draw them into their own collective, and into regular
contact with their readers, whom they conceived as an extension of that
collective. For their part, readers became devoted to the monthly ‘blue
volume’, with its probing style and high literary standards.50
Trust and distrust were part of the daily life of Novyi mir — readers’
trust of the journal, editors’ trust in each other and in their favoured
writers, supplemented by distrust of censors, rival journals, ideological
and literary opponents.51 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn felt that Tvardovskii
was a benevolent but dominating apparatchik trying to take him over as
a kind of superior serf (like, say, Josef Haydn at the Eszterházy court):
50
Edith Rogovin Frankel, Novyi mir: A Case Study in the Politics of Literature, 1952–58,
Cambridge, 1981, and Dina R. Spechler, Permitted Dissent in the USSR: Novyi mir and the
Soviet Regime, New York, 1982.
51
See in detail in V. Lakshin, Novyi mir vo vremena Khrushcheva: dnevnik i poputnoe,
Moscow, 1991, and A. Kondratovich, Novomirskii dnevnik, 1967–1970, Moscow, 1991.
He felt as though he had created me, moulded me from clay, and would
always prescribe the best solutions for all my problems and lead me along
the glittering path of fame. His assumption (though I had never made any
such promise) was that henceforth I would never take any important step
without seeking his advice and approval.52
Solzhenitysn was not entirely wrong in his diagnosis of Tvardovskii.

But Vladimir Lakshin was also right to accuse Solzhenitsyn of disloyal
behaviour, of exploiting the journal without recognizing that he would be
nobody if Tvardovskii had not ‘launched’ him.53 Their conflicting accounts
of the relationship reflect the dialectic of loyalty and disloyalty, trust and
distrust, which prevailed in the later decades of the Soviet Union.
The immense house-building programme which began in the 1950s
provided many ordinary people for the first time with a private sphere,
where they could be (almost) certain of not being overheard and denounced
to the authorities. Intellectuals in particular took advantage of this privacy
to gather informally for more uninhibited discussions than had been
advisable in communal apartments. Those of us who recall Soviet life from
the 1960s onwards will know how much trust and distrust meant at least
to intellectuals and the employees of universities and research institutes.
In order to meet people not envisaged in one’s official study plan, one
had to arrange one’s life according to semi-conspiratorial routines. One
should not tell anyone whom one was meeting; to ask friends about
their friends was highly improper, guaranteed to arouse distrust. I was
exhorted only to phone friends from street telephone booths, never from
the university telephones which, it was assumed, were being monitored by
the KGB. Telephone conversations should be brief and to the point, and
contain a minimum of information. (I amassed a treasured collection of
little two-kopeck coins, required to operate the telephone slot-machines.
They cropped up quite rarely in one’s change, presumably because
other Muscovites were doing the same. So I was always furious when
— as happened quite often — the telephone swallowed my coin without
connecting me to anyone.)
Such precautions might be thought paranoid. In fact, however, they
were fully justified. The KGB under Iurii Andropov considered that
‘dissent’ was ‘ideological sabotage’, part of an elaborate plot instigated by
Western intelligence services to undermine the Soviet Union. A special
52
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf: Sketches of Literary Life in the Soviet
Union, translated by Harry Willetts, New York, 1979, p. 48.
53
Vladimir Lakshin, Solzhenitsyn, Tvardovsky and Novy Mir, translated and edited by
Michael Glenny, Cambridge, MA, 1980.
22 GEOFFREY HOSKING
Fifth Directorate was created within the KGB to combat dissidents, and
Andropov warned its members in 1979:
In the political sphere any kind of ideological sabotage is directly or

indirectly intended to create an opposition which is hostile to our system
— to create an underground, to encourage a transition to terrorism and
other extreme forms of struggle, and, in the final analysis, to create the
conditions for the overthrow of socialism.54
This is the kind of rhetorical escalation which had led to Stalin’s Terror.
The KGB’s methods under Andropov were less extreme, but they certainly
included planting informers in intellectual circles to discover who was
circulating samizdat or smuggling literary texts abroad for publication.55
In the economy trust and distrust also formed the basic texture of
life. In most economies money functions as a lubricator of generalized
trust: it enables one to exchange goods and services with people one does
not know, will probably never meet again, and has no other reason for
trusting. Other expedients, such as gift or barter, are much clumsier and
operate only within a much reduced radius of trust.56 In the Soviet Union,
however, money functioned in an idiosyncratic fashion. The crucial sectors
of the economy used money in a vertically partitioned manner: that is,
any enterprise received money as a unit of account from its ministry, to
enable it to acquire the raw materials, spare parts, fuel, food and so on
required for production and workplace facilities, as well as the wages to
pay its employees. But that money could not be spent outside the vertical
partition, except to make the purchases envisaged in the five-year plan. If
an enterprise needed supplies or services from elsewhere not foreseen in
the plan — and most enterprises quite often did — then it had to turn to
unofficial sources of supply and pay for them in some other way, typically
by the exchange of goods or services, that is, by barter, a pre-monetary
device.57
54
Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin
Archive and the History of the KGB, New York, 1999, p. 330.
55
Ibid., chapters 19–20.
56
The greatest sociologist of trust, Georg Simmel, placed money at the centre of his
vision of society. See his The Philosophy of Money, translated by Tom Bottomore and David
Frisby, London, 1978.
57
Joseph S. Berliner, ‘Monetary Planning in the USSR’, in his Soviet Industry from
Stalin to Gorbachev, Aldershot, 1988, pp. 1–20, and his Factory and Manager in the USSR,
Cambridge, MA, 1957, chapters 11–12.
Overall, then, money did not cut across boundaries of administrative
authority, as is usual, but rather buttressed them by serving as one means
for the imposition of that authority. In the Soviet Union money reinforced
dependence — and therefore forced trust — on enterprise directors,
ministries and party secretaries. The easiest way to secure regular supplies
of food and everyday consumer goods was to order them through one’s
workplace through the system of zakazy (orders) or talony (coupons
awarded to specially favoured individuals). Nomenklatura hierarchs
received especially favourable terms at raspredeliteli, literally ‘distributors’,
special stores where scarce goods were not only available, but very cheap.58
Ordinary people unable to satisfy their needs in the state economy of
scarcity had to have recourse to blat, the mutual exchange of goods and
services. This might be hierarchical or horizontal: through a patron with
good access to official sources or through a friend able to acquire foreign
goods or with a link to the underground economy, where ‘illegal’ goods
were obtainable.59 Blat occupied a shadowy area between the gift economy,
the barter economy and the market economy. It inevitably entailed trusting
people one would not normally trust — exemplifying another variant of
‘forced trust’.
Hannah Arendt once proposed that totalitarian rule tended to
‘atomize’ society by destroying old social bonds and substituting universal
surveillance and terror. In one sense this was certainly true. Yet it is also
true that new kinds of social bonds were generated, though totally unlike
anything envisaged by the party.60 They enabled the planned economy
to continue functioning, but at a level of reduced efficiency, and thus
eventually generated a widespread perception that the Soviet Union could
not cope with its own economic problems. That perception certainly
contributed to its final crisis and downfall.61
In the non-Russian republics hierarchical patron-client relationships
tended to take on an ethnic character. Brezhnev’s watchword of ‘stability
58
Alena V. Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal
Exchange, Cambridge, 1998, pp. 93–96.
59
Stephen Lovell, Andrei Rogachevskii and Alena V. Ledeneva (eds), Bribery and Blat
in Russia: Negotiating Reciprocity from the Early Modern Period to the 1990s, Basingstoke,
2000; Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours, and ‘Blat and guanxi: Informal Practices in
Russia and China’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 50, 2008, pp. 1–27.
60
Sheila Fitzpatrick and Alf Lüdtke, ‘Energizing the Everyday: On the Breaking and
Making of Social Bonds in Nazism and Stalinism’, in Geyer and Fitzpatrick, Beyond
Totalitarianism, pp. 266–301.
61
Caroline Humphrey, The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after
Socialism, Ithaca, NY, 2002, chapter 1.
24 GEOFFREY HOSKING
of cadres’ reinforced this tendency. According to Mikhail Gorbachev, there
was a kind of ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ between Brezhnev and republican
party secretaries: they were left free to organize their republics as they
saw fit, as long as they continued to support and praise the centre.62 In
these circumstances ethnic distinctions — which after all were in many
ways fostered and encouraged by Soviet cultural and educational policy
— assumed ever increasing importance. Russians gradually began to find
that they no longer automatically received priority in the allocation of jobs,
housing and educational opportunities. During the 1970s inter-republican
migration flows slowed and then went into reverse. There was a general
tendency for co-ethnics to regroup in their native republics, and Russians
began to return to the RSFSR, though this did not become a flood till the
late 1980s.63
In Misztal’s terms, this ethnic concentration is understandable. Other
things being equal, it is easier to trust people of one’s own ethnic origin,
who share the same language, customs and social memory. Background
assumptions, clothes, gestures and body language are easier to ‘read’.
Co-ethnics do of course quite often come into conflict with each other,
but even then it is at least easier to elucidate the reasons and try to sort
them out. The political scientist Henry Hale explains the significance
of ethnicity in terms similar to Misztal: it offers ‘uncertainty reduction’.
That is to say, ‘ethnic markers become convenient cognitive shorthand
for rapidly inferring a wide range of information about a person one
has never actually met before’. So it helps one ‘navigate the social world’.
Ethnic symbols transmit a sense of a common fate, ‘due largely to the
myths of common origin and history they typically imply’. They lower
communication barriers. They often ‘coincide with other important
determinants of humans’ life chances (e.g. socio-economic status, value
systems, way of life)’.64
Such ethnic markers and the boundaries they created became more
important in the later decades of the Soviet Union. As Hale notes, they
were not necessarily decisive on their own, but combined with other
grievances they did give politicians a ready weapon with which to advance
the project of secession.65 In this sense, reconfiguring the vectors of trust
and distrust played a major role in the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
62
Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs, London, 1996, pp. 112, 144.
63
V. M. Kabuzan, Russkie v mire, St Petersburg, 1996, pp. 240–41, 263–65; Robert J.
Kaiser, The Geography of Nationalism in Russia and the USSR, Princeton, NJ, 1994, ch. 6.
64
Henry E. Hale, The Foundations of Ethnic Politics, Cambridge, 2008, pp. 242–43.
65
Ibid., pp. 245–56.
The articles which follow suggest that the terms ‘trust’ and ‘distrust’,
for all the methodological problems they pose, can usefully be applied to
the systematic study of the Soviet Union. It was a society many of whose
basic structures were determined not only by the political system as such,
but also indirectly by the configurations of trust and distrust generated
by that system in a society many of whose stable landmarks had been
destroyed by war, revolution and rapid social change. One might say, in
fact, that dilemmas of trust and distrust became the main preoccupation of
most Soviet citizens as they sought to maximize life chances and minimize
dangers. The paroxysms of distrust manifested in Stalin’s Terror eased in
later decades, but left permanent outlines in the Soviet landscape. They
help to explain the collapse of the Soviet Union, and they have not entirely
disappeared in post-Soviet Russia.

Hosking TrustDistrustUSSR 2013

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Hosking TrustDistrustUSSR 2013

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Trust and Distrust in the USSR: An Overview

Author(s): Geoffrey Hosking

Modern Humanities Research Association, University College London, School of

The Significance of Social Trust

Geoffrey Hosking is Emeritus Professor of Russian History at UCL SSEES.

Slavonic and East European Review, 91, 1, 2013

1. Normative coherence: the confluence of law, morality and custom to

2. Stability. The first condition will operate more effectively if it is long-

3. Openness. It is important that the structure of society and government

4. Accountability. When things go wrong, as happens even in high-trust

Soviet Society in the 1930s

All of Misztal’s and Sztompka’s pre-conditions of trust had been

Here Kaganovich combines political, moral and personal grounds for

Such a statement from Ordjonikidze is especially striking, since it appears

Agents of foreign states have been conducting their wrecking, diversionary

In other words, he acknowledged that leading the party to success in a

All of us around him were temporary people. As long as he trusted us to

Jörg Baberowski argues that Stalin’s behaviour was that of a Mafia

As a result the ordinary everyday exchange of thoughts, hopes and

Mikhail Prishvin, a writer by no means wholly opposed to Stalin, noted

Even the sphere of private, trusted relationships was not immune

The Soviet Union after Stalin

Solzhenitysn was not entirely wrong in his diagnosis of Tvardovskii.

In the political sphere any kind of ideological sabotage is directly or

You might also like