Emotions, Trust, and Loyalty: The Fabric and Expression of Immaterial Relationships in History

It may seem strange to decide to review together four publications with titles as dissimilar as Rossiiskaia imperiia chuvstvand Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe, on the one hand, and “Trust and Distrust in the USSR” and Funding Loyalty: The Economics of the Communist Party, on the other. Yet emotion, trust, and loyalty are three concepts that historians have increasingly investigated in recent years, attempting to define them and construct a history of them from conventional sources, which usually do not discuss them directly. The equally interesting Loyalties, Solidarities, and Identities in Russian Society, History, and Culture, might also have been included in this already long list, and I will refer to it in this review. ¹In that volume, the concepts of loyalties, solidarities, and identities bring political and social historians into contact with historians of literature and art, who have long been exploring these concepts and analyzing emotions or feelings.

Reviewing these publications together is justified because emotions, trust, and loyalty (as well as, incidentally, solidarities and identities) all historicize an immaterial relationship between an individual and a context—which may be an institution, a system, or an event external to that person. By considering these books and articles together, we can observe a variety of uses of essentially relational terms, a multitude of sources and approaches that are rarely presented in the same context. This survey is an opportunity to show how large the divergences can be, but also to reveal the fruitfulness of interdisciplinary approaches. The editors and authors of the volumes reviewed here ask us to think of emotions or feelings as operative concepts that transcend time and space while being expressed in well-defined historical, social, and cultural contexts. Here I analyze whether their efforts have been successful, and whether these concepts provide an effective means to unify within a single approach a set of immaterial relations between individuals and communities, between individuals and situations. In particular, I examine how the term “emotions,” which groups into a single unit a set of terms to qualify (name) these relations, conveys a sense of robustness, thereby prompting unexpected connections. The purpose of such books, and of the authors and editors who write them, is to provide us, at the end of our journey through the gamut of emotions, with a consistent conceptual framework. One of the aims of this review is to examine the culmination of this process, beyond the rich insights of the works brought together here.

The contrast among the articles in the four publications is large but also revealing. Geoffrey Hosking seeks to construct the concept of trust within a precise, highly evocative, political and cultural timeframe. Similarly, Eugenia Belova and Valery Lazarev seek to materialize loyalty, or the production of loyalty, as far as possible by examining financial transfers and opportunities for promotion within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU); they focus on the inner workings of an institution over the period of its existence. By contrast, the editors Jan Plamper, Schamma Schahadat, and Marc Elie, on the one hand, and Mark Steinberg and Valeria Sobol, on the other, have constructed their problems around themes that take place between the late 18th century and the late 20th century; their discussions revolve around community of feeling, education of taste...