Control of Information, Polarization, History in Dispute, and Distrust: Our Haunting Experiences in Russia and Poland and What It Underscores in the U.S.A. Today

Abstract

We have been haunted for over a decade by some of our experiences in Russia and Poland when, in 2012, we conducted research on organizational trust and experienced some of what is so troubling in the Russian culture of distrust the world is now witnessing with the invasion of Ukraine. This essay, while motivated by the events of 2022, is not written by political scientists or historians. We are communication scholars who study communication and trust in an array of different situations and contexts. We are focusing our attention in this essay on our own experiences in two cultures – Russia and Poland – writing through a trust lens that was the foundation of our 2012 research project and subsequent journal publications and a forthcoming book (Morreale & Shockley-Zalabak, 2015; Morreale & Shockley-Zalabak, 2014; Shockley-Zalabak & Morreale, 2022). Additionally, we describe some emerging similarities we see between our experiences as researchers working in Russia and Poland and the research work we subsequently conducted during the 2016 Presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and at the midpoint of the Trump presidency in 2018 (Shockley-Zalabak & Morreale, 2017, 2020, 2021).