The Paradoxes of Trust: The Russian Revolution and Soviet Society

Generalised social trust is essential for the peace and prosperity of any society. Under serious strain as the 1905 revolution revealed. In 1917-21 the new Soviet Government deliberately destroyed or fatally weakened most of the symbolic systems & institutions which earlier had sustained at least a limited measure of social trust: the Orthodox Church, the universities and the academy; the public media; property, the rule of law, the family, banking, money and most of internal trade. The result was a society of virulent generalised distrust, which reached its climax in the Stalinist terror of 1936-8. In this atmosphere, the security police had unlimited licence to act on any suspicion to arrest, imprison, enslave and/or murder any citizen. In the long run such a society proved intolerable even to its rulers, and both Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders had to devise a way of keeping control without relying on undiscriminating terror. Few societies have experienced such a total breakdown of social trust, but we should not assume that any society is totally immune to it.