This special issue presents interdisciplinary approaches to decoding the deeper grammar of trust and distrust in socialist societies by applying methods from oral history and anthropology, social and cultural history, ethnography and sociology. To historicise trust and distrust, and to identify their traces in a wide range of sources, the authors studied the ideological and economic, moral and material, spatial and legislative as well as the subjective dimensions of state socialism. The contributors look at the shift from Stalinist violence towards a politics of trust and empathy as emotional forces and moral resources that made it possible to renegotiate a social contract among the state, society and the individual, and which also enabled the stabilisation of the Eastern bloc as a whole in the post-Stalin era. This special issue contributes to a history of trust and distrust that provides a further reflection on the debate about what socialism was and the ways in which this experience continues to exist in post-communist space.