Robert Charles Tucker (May 29, 1918 – July 29, 2010) was an American political scientist and historian. Tucker is best remembered as a biographer of Joseph Stalin and as an analyst of the Soviet political system, which he saw as dynamic rather than unchanging.
Biography
Born in Kansas City, Missouri, he was a Sovietologist at Princeton University. He graduated from Harvard College, earning an A.B. magna cum laude in 1939, followed by an A.M. in 1941. He served as an attaché at the American Embassy in Moscow from 1944–1953. He received his PhD degree from Harvard University in 1958; his doctoral dissertation was later revised and published as a book. His biographies of Joseph Stalin are cited by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies as his greatest contribution. At Princeton he started the Russian studies program and held the position of professor of politics emeritus and IBM Professor of International Studies Emeritus until he died.
Tucker was a scholar of Russia and politics. His viewpoints were shaped by nine years (1944–1953) of diplomatic and translation work in wartime and postwar Russia (including persistent efforts to bring his Russian wife to the United States),Martin Douglas, "Robert C. Tucker, a Scholar of Marx, Stalin and Soviet Affairs, Dies at 92", The New York Times, August 1, 2010, p. A4. by wide-ranging interdisciplinary interests in the social sciences and humanities (notably history, psychology, and philosophy), and by creative initiatives to benefit from and contribute to comparative political studies (especially theories of political culture and leadership).
Tucker married a Russian, Eugenia (Evgeniia) Pestretsova, who eventually emigrated with him and taught Russian for many years at Princeton. His daughter Elizabeth is a senior editor on the radio program Marketplace, American Public Media. Her husband, Tucker's son-in-law Robert English, is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern California.
Basic ideas
Tucker's Harvard University doctoral dissertation was in philosophy and challenged the dominant interpretations of Soviet and Western theorists. He linked the ideas of the young and mature Karl Marx and emphasized their "moralist," "ethical," and "religious" rather than political, economic, and social "essence". His revised dissertation was published as Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (1961) and was followed by a collection of innovative essays on Marxian theories of revolution, modernization, and distributive justice as well as comprehensive anthologies of the writings of Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin.Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1961); Robert C. Tucker, The Marxian Revolutionary Idea (New York: Norton, 1969); Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1972); and Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Lenin Anthology (New York: Norton, 1975).
Tucker presented lucidly formulated views on tsarist and Soviet politics. He affirmed that change in Soviet political leadership was even more important than continuity in Russian political culture. He contended that psychological differences were more important than ideological similarities in Soviet leadership politics and that Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Mikhail Gorbachev had very different personalities and mentalities.Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Soviet Political Mind (New York: Norton, rev. ed. 1971), ch. 9, 207 and 225. He emphasized that the different psychological make-ups of Russia's top political leaders invariably produced different perceptions of situations and options, which, in turn, periodically altered policymaking and implementation procedures as well as domestic and foreign policies. He argued that systemic changes came not only in October 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized power, and in December 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, but also in the mid-1930s, when Lenin's one-party dictatorship was transformed into Stalin's one-man dictatorship, and in the mid-1950s, when oligarchic one-party rule filled the power vacuum created by the dictator's death. He underscored that Soviet and post-Soviet Russia's political development progressed in distinctive stages, which were the products of leading officials' choices among viable options at key junctures. Tucker's main stages were: War Communism (1917–1921), New Economic Policy (1921–1928), Revolution from Above (1928–1937), Neo-Tsarist Autocracy (1937–1953), Thaw (1953–1964), Stagnation (1964–1985), and Perestroika (1985–1991).Many outstanding articles were reprinted in Robert C. Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind: Stalinism and Post-Stalin Change (New York: Norton, 1963, and rev. ed., 1971); and Robert C. Tucker, Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia: From Lenin to Gorbachev (New York: Norton, 1987).
Stalinism
While involuntarily remaining in Stalinist Russia, Tucker was greatly influenced by psychoanalytical theories of neurosis, paranoia, and self-idealization. He recognized such traits in Stalin and hypothesized that "psychological needs," "psychopathological tendencies", and "politicized psychodynamics" were not only core elements of Stalin's "ruling personality", but also of Stalinism as a "system of rule" and Stalinization as the process of establishing that rule—"Neo-Tsarist Autocracy".Tucker, "The Dictator and Totalitarianism," in The Soviet Political Mind, rev. ed., 30-32, 42; and Stalin in Power, 1-9 ff.I hold that Stalinism must be recognized as an historically distinct and specific phenomenon which did not flow directly from Leninism, although Leninism was an important contributory factor. ... Stalinism, despite conservative, reactionary, or counter-revolutionary elements in its makeup, was a revolutionary phenomenon in essence; ... Stalinist revolution from above, whatever the contingencies involved in its inception and pattern, was an integral phase of the Russian revolutionary process as a whole; ... notable among the causal factors explaining why the Stalinist revolution occurred, or why it took the form it did, are the heritage of Bolshevik revolutionism, the heritage of old Russia, and the mind and personality of Stalin.Tucker, "Stalinism as Revolution from Above," in Robert C. Tucker, ed., Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York: Norton, 1977), 77-108, quote at 78 (italics in original); a shorter version was reprinted in Tucker, Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia, 72-107, quote at 73 (italics in original).
These themes were developed from comparative, theoretical, and interdisciplinary perspectives and were documented at length in Tucker's magnum opus, the two published volumes of an unfinished three-volume biography of Stalin, and in other important works on Stalin and Stalinism.Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879-1929: A Study in History and Personality (New York: Norton, 1973); Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941; Robert C. Tucker and Stephen F. Cohen, eds., The Great Purge Trial (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1965); and Tucker, ed., Stalinism.
Tucker rejected the view that Stalinism was an "unavoidable," "ineluctable," or "necessary" product of Leninism. He highlighted the similarities between tsarist and Stalinist nationalism and patrimonialism, as well as the warlike brutality of the "Revolution from Above" in the 1930s. The chief causes of this revolution were Stalin's voracious appetite for personal, political, and national power and his relentless quest for personal, political, and national security. The chief consequences were the consolidation of Stalin's personal dictatorship, the creation of a military-industrial complex, and the collectivization and urbanization of the peasantry. And the chief means of achieving these ends included blood purges of party and state elites, centralized economic management and slave labor camps, and genocidal famine in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.Tucker, "Swollen State, Spent Society: Stalin's Legacy to Brezhnev's Russia", in Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia, 116 ff.; and in Erik P. Hoffmann and Robbin F. Laird, eds., The Soviet Polity in the Modern Era (Hawthorne, NY: Aldine Publishing Co., 1984), 48 ff.
Stalin's irrational premonitions, trepidations, and aggressions—intermixed with his rational perceptions, predispositions, and calculations—decisively influenced Soviet domestic politics and foreign policies during and after World War II. Of particular significance were Stalin's forced resettlement of entire non-Russian nationality groups, skillful negotiations with wartime allies, atomic espionage, reimposition of harsh controls in postwar Russia, imposition of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe, and Cold War military-industrial, geopolitical, and ideological rivalry with the United States.John Lewis Gaddis, "The Cold War: A New History" (London: Penguin, 2007), 8-14.
De-Stalinization
When Stalin died in 1953, Tucker experienced "intense elation" for personal and political reasons.Robert C. Tucker, "Memoir of a Stalin Biographer", The International Karen Horney Society, 6 (last updated June 18, 2002) His wife, Evgenia Pestretsova, was soon granted a visa to the United States (and his mother-in-law joined them a half-decade later after a face-to-face request to Khrushchev). Tucker saw a gradually, albeit fitfully, liberalizing Soviet polity, economy, and society and an improving Soviet-American relations (with prospects for much less conflict and much more cooperation).
For Tucker, Stalin's demise posed the question "What shall take the place of Stalinism as a mode of rule and pattern of policy and ideas"? The central issues in Soviet politics were the "desirability, forms, limits, and tempo" of de-Stalinization.Tucker, "The Politics of Soviet De-Stalinization," in The Soviet Political Mind, rev. ed., 199.
As Tucker detailed in The Soviet Political Mind (1963 and 1971, rev. ed.) and Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia (1987), Stalin's successors did not consensually craft a post-Stalinist political system. An oligarchic system emerged as the byproduct of struggle over power and policy among reformist and "conservative" party and state leaders, whose factions and coalitions increasingly sought the support of subnational party and state officials. Forswearing the use of violence to resolve intraparty disputes and outmaneuvering rivals in bureaucratic infighting, Khrushchev revitalized the party and reasserted its leading role vis-à-vis the state bureaucracies. But his international and domestic "hare-brained schemes"—above all, the Cuban Missile Crisis—led to his ouster by Brezhnev's "collective leadership", whose costly and prolonged military buildup helped to produce (in Tucker's apt words) "a swollen state" and "a spent society".Tucker, Robert C., "Swollen State, Spent Society," in Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia, 108-139; and in Hoffmann and Laird, eds., The Soviet Polity in the Modern Era, 41-67.