The article deals with the problem of trust and management correlation in the Russian higher education. The purpose of the article is to identify the nature of the links between these phenomena and analyze possibilities of trust development in the context of the authoritarian way of managing the higher education system. Attention is drawn to the novelty of the problem statement, caused by dissatisfaction with the University’s educational communities with the existing management system and the desire to find a way to resist it in the form of introducing the principles of trust into the system of inter-community relations. The interpretation of two key categories - trust and management in higher education, shows their types, models and ways of their transversion. A significant part of the article is devoted to the analysis of three main communities - students, scientific, pedagogical and managerial workers, and inter-community relations in higher education through the prism of empirical research on the relationship of trust and management in higher education. The article presents data from two studies, during which a low level of trust in the University management community on the part of students and research and teaching staff was recorded. It is established and shown in the article that this level is clearly correlated with a low level of trust in the main institutions of power and management in the country. The last section of the article is devoted to this problem. The conclusion that the author comes to is that in the current conditions of the authoritarian regime in the country, much, almost everything, is subordinated to the management of the higher education system and specific universities. However, there are certain small areas of relationships over which management has no power. Trust remains one of these few and inaccessible oases.