This is a frustrating volume. That trust is important to democratic transition is its central assumption, but only the final chapter asks whether it is true or why it should be. Instead, most of the chapters discuss how the communist experience affected relations of trust. But some chapters make claims about communist society that generalize solely from the Stalinist period, while others concern the experiences of particular countries to a point where the precise relationship to communism is left unclear. In the end, the only unifying aspect of the book is each chapter's discussion of some aspect of trust in relation to some aspect of the former Soviet bloc.

The first two chapters, written or cowritten by the editor, offer an interesting theoretical discussion of trust and its role in different types of societies. Ivana Markova seeks to develop Georg Simmel's claim that trust is the precondition of social relations, and she argues that in democratic societies trust is related to risk and that in totalitarian societies it is related to fear. The problem, though, is that she claims that “totalitarianism … collapsed in 1989” (p. 18), suggesting that fear was all-pervasive until then, as if the passing of Stalinism more than two decades earlier was of no great consequence. But as signified by the emergence of dissident movements whose activists knew what might face them, and by the increased responsiveness of late communist systems to the economic needs of citizens, state–society relations changed markedly in the post-Stalinist period in a way that affected feelings of trust. Even when it comes to Stalinism, claims that the state engaged in a “persistent effort to stimulate mutual distrust among citizens” (p. 9) ignore the importance new ruling parties placed in gaining trust from average citizens. For since they did not legitimate their rule through elections, they could only hope to do so through gaining popularity. The massive class-based affirmative action programs carried out by all new communist parties were an important attempt to build bonds of trust between the poorest, especially rural youth, and the state. A discussion of the relationship of dependence to trust would have been useful.

While no chapter in Trust and Democratic Transition in Post-Communist Europe tackles this issue, some do offer a more historicized view of the communist era. Consequently, they put more emphasis on the durability of networks. In an excellent chapter, Geoffrey Hosking, for example, notes how communism's totalitarian aspirations produced a multitude of networks in which trust was a central component. Precisely because the state was unable to control everything, it required that people learn to depend on one another. He speaks of various “forms of social solidarity” in Russia and the Soviet Union, and shows how that old Russian village commune, the Soviet communal apartment, and the Soviet industrial enterprise itself all required a considerable degree of trust and cooperation. Indeed, it is the demise of these “communities of egalitarian poverty” (p. 60) in the postcommunist era, he argues, that has proven quite damaging. In this account, it is democratization that has sundered trust. In Alena Ledenova's account, “forced trust” is a long-standing concept in Russia: She traces the concept of krugovaya poruka, or collective responsibility, from tsarist to post-Soviet times.

Jacek Kochanowicz argues, similarly, that lack of trust toward the state in Poland has been accompanied by high levels of trust in the family and, particularly during the Solidarity period, within the workplace as well. Because of the long history of foreign domination, family had long been a place of retreat, while the same logic of failed totalitarianism as in Russia led to strong horizontal bonds on the job. Strong interpersonal relations substituted for vertical ties of trust, and Kochanowicz argues reasonably that this helped small business growth after 1989, without building political legitimacy.

Wanda Dressler offers a chapter on the effort to build up trust among diverse ethnic groups in Estonia, Moldova, and Kazakhstan. Arguing that “trust lead to cooperation, participation, and reciprocity even if institutions are weak” (p. 129), she suggests that there is greater trust between ethnic groups in the latter two countries than in Estonia because it is reinforced there by clan systems and a more legitimate Soviet heritage.

In the one essay that attempts to measure distrust, based on surveys from the 1990s, William Miller, Tatyana Koshechkina and Ase Grodeland argue that people in postcommunist Europe do not distrust the system as a whole but only specific institutions, and for specific reasons. Challenging an unstated but implicit claim of the book, Miller et al. suggest that high levels of distrust in state institutions may be a problem not of citizens but of institutions. And this leads directly to John Dunn's concluding chapter, which asks why we should even expect that democratization facilitates trust, or why the lack of trust should be seen as dangerous to democracy: “The experience of democracy anywhere is as apt to prove inflammatory as it is consoling—to provoke anger, or even outrage,” particularly “for those who lack virtually any market power” and are constantly being told “that they have no rational alternative to endorsing … their resulting impotence” (pp. 203–4).

Dunn thus suggests that distrust can be a healthy sign: “What is the point of democracy if not to be free to distrust for oneself and to act on one's distrust?” (p. 204). From this different perspective, appearing unfortunately only in the conclusion, the communist record does not look to be so damaging to civic judgment after all. The distrust of state institutions that use “democratization” as a pretext for policies that impoverish and disempower the weak may be a sign that people fully have their wits about them, and that communist rule was not “bad for the political intelligence” (p. 205). The book's final chapter thus calls into question the volume's assumptions that widespread distrust is a blight on people's democratic capabilities and a bad omen for liberal democratic success. Had alternative hypotheses concerning the nature of the trust/democracy connection been raised in the beginning, the various chapters might have contributed to an important debate. Future studies on trust in changing political systems need to interrogate, rather than accept, current assumptions.