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Zones of violence are spaces in which violence against other human beings becomes normal; they are characterized as places where primal trust in institutions and rules has been lost. While Jörg Baberowski initially used this concept to refer to Nazi Germany, I assert that its lessons are just as applicable to the Soviet Union, especially during the 1930s. In order to demonstrate this, I highlight how, already in tsarist Russia, institutions and communities had been shaken up by the processes of industrialization and urbanization. Moreover, when the Bolsheviks came to power they aimed to further weaken the symbolic systems and destroy the institutions - thus the existing bulwarks of habitual trust were enfeebled or eliminated. Universal distrust was now the modus operandi of the entire system, which simultaneously demanded total trust in the Party. This demonstrates why Soviet society developed the way that it did. The use of violence as a political tool became simply routine: shoot first, ask questions afterwards. In this milieu everyone became fearful and distrustful - a hyper-vigilant, paranoid outlook burnt itself into the whole structure of society, lasting right to the end of the Soviet Union and even after. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the main reasons for the exceptional virulence of the 1930s Terror was that the Soviet Union was an extremely low-trust society. Most institutions which had underpinned social trust before 1917 had been weakened or destroyed. The Bolsheviks' messianic and apocalyptic outlook excluded any way of explaining setbacks except by identifying 'enemies', which further intensified distrust. Stalin's personality was ideally suited to exercising power in this atmosphere. Eventually Soviet citizens learned to create antibodies, 'mutual protection associations', against terror from above, and those associations formed the basic matrix of post-Stalin society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduces Russian historian Arsenii Roginskii's December 4, 1981 final article published in the journal "Pamyat". Career achievements; Arrest of Roginskii for forgery of official documents which confer rights or exempt from obligations; Views on the RSFSR Criminal Code.