Erik P. Hoffmann
Robert C. Tucker died on July 29, 2010, at the age of 92. He was an outstanding teacher and mentor at Indiana University from 1958 to 1961, and from 1962 to 1984 at Princeton University. He had a special gift for encouraging and assisting former graduate students, whom he viewed as colleagues and friends. His generosity and graciousness were much appreciated by the present writer and many others.
Bob Tucker was an exceptionally insightful and multifaceted Sovietologist. His viewpoints were shaped by nine years (1944–53) of diplomatic and translation work in wartime and postwar Russia (including persistent efforts to bring his Russian wife to the United States), by wide-ranging interdisciplinary interests in the social sciences and humanities (notably psychology, sociology, history, and philosophy), and by pioneering efforts to benefit from and contribute to comparative political studies (especially theories of leadership and culture).
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 Marx and emphasized their “moralist,” “ethical,” and “religious” rather than political, economic, and social “essence.” Hs revised dissertation was published as Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx and followed by The Marxian Revolutionary Idea, The Marx-Engels Reader, and The Lenin Anthology. Moreover, Tucker was profoundly 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.
Tucker affirmed that change in Soviet political leadership was even more important than continuity in Russian political culture. He emphasized that Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin had very different personalities and mentalities. Also, Tucker contended that perceived options and portentous choices were greatly influenced by the diverse psychological traits of the top Soviet leaders, who periodically altered policymaking and implementation rules as well as domestic and foreign policies. And he argued that systemic changes came 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.
Tucker summarized his views on Stalinism as follows:
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 counterrevolutionary elements in its makeup, was a revolutionary phenomenon in essence; …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 and coauthors developed this thesis from various comparative, theoretical, and disciplinary perspectives in Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation.
Tucker rejected the view that Stalinism was an “unavoidable,” “inevitable,” or “necessary” product of Leninism. Acknowledging that “nonrevolutionary” political and economic development was a possibility, he affirmed that social engineering and state building were probabilities. 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. Especially important were Stalin's voracious appetite for personal, political, and national power and his relentless quest for personal, political, and national security. These themes were developed and documented at length in Tucker's magnum opus, Stalin as Revolutionary and Stalin in Power, two published volumes in an unfinished three-volume biography, and in other important works on Stalin, such as The Great Purge Trial, introduced by Tucker and coedited and notated with Stephen F. Cohen.
When Stalin died in 1953, Tucker experienced “intense elation” for personal and political reasons. His wife Evgenia 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). And Tucker saw a gradually, albeit fitfully, liberalizing Soviet polity, economy, and society and improving Soviet-American relations (with the possibility of significantly less domestic repression and international aggression).
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.
As Tucker detailed in The Soviet Political Mind and Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia, Stalin's successors did not consensually craft a post-Stalinist political system. A new 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. Foreswearing 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. For his alleged domestic and international “hare-brained schemes,” which included the Cuban missile crisis, Khrushchev was deposed 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.” Gorbachev made glasnost, perestroika, and democratization the cornerstones of a revolutionary ideology, which sparked a divisive public debate about the political content and policy implications of these concepts. More revolutionary, in the late 1980s, Gorbachev discarded the “Brezhnev doctrine,” withdrawing Soviet troops from Afghanistan and allowing East European countries in the Soviet bloc to choose their own types of political system. And, most revolutionary, from late 1990 to late 1991, Gorbachev unintentionally and Yeltsin intentionally spurred the disintegration of the Soviet Union, enabling the 15 union republics to develop their own types of nation-state.
The rivalry between Gorbachev and Yeltsin unequivocally confirmed Tucker's viewpoint that the personalities and mentalities of top Soviet leaders could clash viscerally and vindictively. And Tucker had long insisted that intraparty conflict was a catalyst of change in Soviet policymaking procedures and substantive policies. He observed in 1957: “Probably the most important single failing of Soviet studies in the West has been a general tendency to take pretty much at face value the Communist pretension to a ‘monolithic’ system of politics…. Not monolithic unity but the fiction of it prevails in Soviet politics. The ruling party has rarely if ever been the disciplined phalanx pictured by its image-makers.”
Spotlighting an important element of cultural continuity, Tucker coined the concept of “dual Russia.” This concept focuses attention on the attitudinal and psychological rift between the Russian state and society and on the “we-they” mentality of Russia's coercive elites and coerced masses. The masses view “autocratic state power as an alien power in the Russian land. The relation between the state and the society is seen as one between conqueror and conquered.” Tucker stressed the importance of such legacies from the tsars Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. And he also stressed that Alexander II's “great reforms” spawned the Russian revolutionary movement, especially the ends-justify-the-means calculations and organizational structures of the movement's militant and conspiratorial wings. Indeed, perceptions and evaluations of “dual Russia” seem to have greatly influenced the thinking and behavior of tsars and commissars, revolutionaries and bureaucrats, and ordinary citizens of Russian, as well as of nonethnic Russian ethnicity.
Tucker used the concept of “dual Russia” to elucidate a very important component of de-Stalinization:
The [Khrushchev] regime, it would appear, looks to a rise in the material standard of consumption as a means of reconciling the Russian people to unfreedom in perpetuity. But it is doubtful that a policy of reform operating within these narrow limits can repair the rupture between the state and society that is reflected in the revival of the image of a dual Russia. A moral renovation of the national life, a fundamental reordering of relations, a process of genuine ‘unbinding,’ or, in other words, an alternation in the nature of the system, would be needed.
Tucker distinguished between “ideal” and “real” culture and found these concepts especially useful during periods of transition from one type of political system to another. In 1987, he stated, “The pattern of thinking one thing in private and being conformist in public will not vanish or radically change simply because glasnost has come into currency as a watchword of policy. Changing the pattern will take time and effort and, above all, some risk-taking openness in action by citizens who speak up … [and] forsake the pattern of pretence which for so long has governed public life in their country.”
And in 1993, Tucker elaborated,
Although communism as a belief system, meaning a set of ideal culture patterns, norms, ideals, or values, is dying out [in post-Soviet Russia], very many of the real culture patterns of the Soviet period, including that very “bureaucratism” that made a comeback after the revolutionary break in 1917, are still tenaciously holding on. Now it becomes possible for the student of post-Communist politics to go at the study of it with an awareness that the historical background of the present period is of great importance and continuing relevance.
Tucker also coined the concept of “the revolutionary mass-movement regime under single-party auspices,” which he viewed as a general type of authoritarian regime with communist, fascist, and nationalist variants. Tucker's purpose was to stimulate both cross-national and cross-temporal comparisons of authoritarian political systems and social movements. He hypothesized that Soviet Russian history is “one of different movements and of different Soviet regimes within a framework of continuity of organizational forms and official nomenclature.”
Noteworthy is the mixture of continuity and change in Tucker's analysis and the emphasis he placed on the top leader's mental health. The psychological or psychopathological needs and wants of a movement-regime's leader are “the driving force of the political mechanism,” and the movement-regime is “a highly complicated instrumentality” for expressing the leader's primal emotions in political behavior. Stalin's self-glorification, lust for power, megalomania, paranoia, and cruelty are viewed as integral components of Stalinist official ideology, “dictatorial decisionmaking,” domestic and foreign policies, policy implementation, and state penetration of society. And Tucker was not content with description and documentation of Stalin's motives and beliefs; he sought to explain their psychological origins, interactive development, and tangible consequences for Stalin individually and for Stalinist rule.
Tucker's focus on the diverse mindsets and skill sets of Soviet leaders supported his early critique of the totalitarian model, which he faulted for paying insufficient attention to the institutionalized idiosyncrasies and impulses of autocrats and oligarchs. Also, Tucker criticized the totalitarian model for downplaying the conflicts and cleavages, inefficiencies and incompatibilities, and “departmentalism” and “localism” in purportedly “monolithic” and “monopolistic” regimes. He underscored that an autocrat's top lieutenants often were bitter rivals, rank-and-file party officials often withheld negative information from their superiors, and “family groups” or “clans” often resisted state controls in informal and ingenious ways.
Having lived and worked in Stalin's Russia for nine years, Tucker had a rich experiential and empathic understanding of Soviet everyday life, which included terror, deportation, deprivation, bureaucracy, and a cult of devotion to a despotic leader. Tucker could feel as well as analyze the similarities and differences between the realities and ideals of Soviet totalitarianism. And, noting that the totalitarian model was the dominant cross-national component of Sovietology, Tucker called for more and better comparative analysis of Soviet politics and for mutually beneficial ties with mainstream political science. In short, he rejected the “theoretical isolationism” of Sovietology and its widely held presupposition that Soviet politics was “a unique subject matter.”
Tucker practiced what he preached. Not only did he compare Soviet and tsarist Russian political leaders, but he compared various types of political leadership in various contexts. In Politics as Leadership, he argued that leadership is “the essence of politics.” He surveyed “the process of political leadership,” “leadership through social movements,” and “leadership and the human situation.” He elaborated on the sociopsychological maxim that “situations defined as real are real in their consequences.” He analyzed the diagnostic, prescriptive, and mobilizing functions of leadership. And he underscored that a leader's definition of a situation could be self-fulfilling and must be communicated effectively to different audiences:
The political process is influenced by many a material factor, but it has its prime locus in the mind. Not only is it a mental process when leaders learn about and analyze the causes of circumstances that have arisen, when they interpret the circumstances' meaning in relation to various concerns, when they define the problem situation for their political communities and decide on what seems the proper prescription for collective action. Mental processes are also pivotally involved—now in the minds of followers or potential followers—when leadership appeals for positive response to its policy prescription.
In sum, Bob Tucker was a leading scholar and educator. He led by personal example—his values and character—and by professional example—his creativity and productivity. He addressed issues of fundamental importance to the social sciences and humanities. He pioneered linkages between political science and Russian studies. He buttressed independent-minded and open-minded viewpoints with cogent reasoning, clear writing, illuminating cases, and fresh evidence. He lectured and tutored enthusiastically and welcomed constructive dialogue. He expanded students' and colleagues' academic interests and enhanced their analytical capabilities. Thus, his exemplary research, teaching, and mentoring merit high praise and deep gratitude.
Frederic J. Fleron, Jr.
Robert C. Tucker died at home in Princeton, New Jersey, on July 29, 2010, at age 92. He is survived by his wife, Evgenia Pestretsova; their daughter Elizabeth “Liza” Tucker of South Pasadena, CA; a sister; and two grandchildren. He is survived as well by a host of grateful students and colleagues that include his son-in-law Robert D. English, an associate professor at the School of International Relations, University of Southern California.
Other obituaries have focused on Tucker's work in the American Embassy in Moscow during Stalin's later years and his two most important books on Stalin. Here, I wish to draw attention to other important aspects of his scholarly and pedagogical contributions to the field of communism studies, the discipline of political science, and the interrelationship between them.
What younger generations of comparativists in political science may not know is that Bob Tucker was at the forefront of efforts to bring the comparative study of communist systems into the discipline of political science and the field of comparative politics. In 1969, he assumed the chairmanship of the Planning Group on Comparative Communist Studies sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies under a grant from the Carnegie Corporation. During his six-year tenure as chair, the Planning Group convened a number of international conferences that shed new light on the similarities and differences among communist regimes. The proceedings of these conferences were reported to the profession through the publication of several conference volumes. Tucker's tenure as chair also saw the expansion of the Planning Group's Newsletter on Comparative Studies of Communism, which presented shorter discussion pieces on the subject of its masthead.
The intellectual tone for much of the work of the Planning Group under Tucker's leadership was set by his paper “Culture, Political Culture, and Soviet Studies,” written for a 1971 conference on Communist Political Culture convened at Arden House in Harriman, New York. Subsequently published in Political Science Quarterly (1973) and as the opening chapter in his book Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia (1987), that paper set forth the hypothesis that “if Communism in practice tends to be an amalgam of an innovated cultural system [Marxism] and elements of a national cultural ethos, then divergences of national cultural ethos will be one of the factors making for developmental diversity and cultural tension between different [Marxist] movements.” Subsequent conferences of the Planning Group explored the extent of those divergences and developmental diversities, including a third element in the amalgam that he had overlooked—components of imported foreign culture, including technology—but to which he was quite receptive.
Although perhaps best known for his seminal troika on Joseph Stalin (the third volume of which remained unfinished at the time of his death), the corpus of Tucker's scholarly work was significant, among other reasons, for moving communism studies and particularly Soviet studies away from narrow area studies and helping place them within the parameters of political science and the social sciences. His desire to move Soviet studies in that direction can be found in one of his earliest works, on the first page of an article entitled “Towards a Comparative Politics of Movement Regimes,” published in the American Political Science Review in 1961. This article was reprinted in an important collection of Tucker's early essays—The Soviet Political Mind (1963; rev. ed. 1971)—that included such important essays as “The Image of Dual Russia,” a classic piece that is still assigned by many of us at the beginning of our graduate and undergraduate courses on Soviet and Russian Politics.
Tucker's highly regarded work on Stalin drew on the theories of psychologist Karen Horney, providing us with insights into the feared (and still revered by some in Russia) Soviet leader and demonstrating the significance of psychology theories for understanding political leadership. Rather than merely describing Stalin's cruelty, paranoia, and mental quirks, Tucker was more concerned with explaining Stalin's psychological make-up—and that's where Horney's theories proved invaluable to him. He found in Horney's work the study of “neurotic character structure” that included such attributes as the “search for glory” and a “need for vindictive triumph.” It was Horney's 1950 book Neurosis and Human Growth that particularly inspired him while serving as a member of the American embassy in Moscow at the time. A half century later, he was quite candid in acknowledging the role of that work in the development of his own thinking: “Instead of dealing in such abstract categories from a book of psychology, I was now using that book as guidance in a biographer's effort to portray his subject as an individual.”
Notwithstanding his “intellectual fascination with [Horney's] unusual hypothesis,” Tucker in the end confessed that his biography of Stalin “never became—fortunately—the political-science tract that it started out to be” (emphasis added). He was quick to add, however, that “neither did it become a conventional biography of a historically influential person.” While this may indicate growing frustration at his own attempts to marry Soviet studies and the social sciences, he nevertheless remained sympathetic to and supportive of such attempts by his own students and colleagues.
Tucker's interest in political leadership was by no means confined to Joseph Stalin. Indeed, he addressed the subject of political leadership in a much broader context in his 1981 book Politics as Leadership, in which he viewed politics as leadership rather than as power. Such an approach, he argued, was more useful to students of society, since it was more comprehensive and could open up more areas to political analysis than could the more orthodox view of politics as power. In his preface to the 1995 revised edition of the book, Tucker restated two fundamental propositions that had guided his inquiries into political leadership: (1) “political leadership often makes a crucial difference in the lives of states and other human communities” and (2) “leadership—although the term itself has a positive resonance—can be a malignant force in human affairs as well as a force for good.” His collected works clearly demonstrated the veracity of both propositions.
As a member of the political science faculties at Indiana University (1958–61) and Princeton University (1962–84), Tucker inspired new generations in Soviet studies whose works have enriched our understanding of politics in the USSR and Russia. It was my good fortune to have studied with him at Indiana University before he moved to Princeton, and to have worked with him on a number of projects, including some of those discussed previously.
A gathering of many of Bob's students and colleagues, his Norton editor, and Ambassador George F. Kennan saluted him at a 1988 Princeton conference and banquet in his honor on the occasion of his seventieth birthday.
Bob Tucker was a seminal scholar and revered mentor. His inspiration and achievements will live on in his students, their students, and their students.
