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

信任是个人生活和现代社会运作的重要组成部分。不仅是民主国家，而且像苏联国家和战后东欧的社会主义政权这样的国家也需要信任，这是社会融合和政治秩序稳定的关键资源。但是，一个独裁政权需要多少信任才能确保政权的生存能力？宣传国家是如何产生使自己合法化所必需的信任的？人们在日常生活的不安全感中是如何经历信任和不信任的？这些问题的答案对于理解后共产主义国家的民主过渡问题和解释今天的新专制制度是如何产生的非常重要。我的项目，信任和不信任的文化历史在苏联1917-1991年，是一个历史研究，以阐明信任和不信任的作用，在组织苏联的政治秩序。我假设，苏维埃国家通过强迫信任的矛盾原则保持了社会凝聚力：官僚系统的无效使人们感到无助，迫使他们不信任官方机构，并加入想象中的信任网络，最终受到党和国家领导人的保护。因此，强迫信任成为共产主义现代性的一个关键特征：在对敌人--其他思想的人--彻底不信任的背景下，增长的普遍不信任是产生对领导人的强制性个人化信任的基本先决条件。我把信任和不信任看作是社会建构的、政治导向的和个人经历的情感，随着时间的推移而改变。通过观察多重意义和空间，话语和仪式，信任和不信任的机构和代理人，本研究考察了塑造数百万苏联人民日常生活的政策和实践，并定义了苏联文明的语法，从开始到现代性的另一种情景的下降。

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.