Stalin Scholar Robert C. Tucker

Robert C. Tucker (1918-2010), Professor of International Studies Emeritus at Princeton University, died after a long illness in his Princeton, New Jersey home on July 29, 2010 at the age of 92. He was particularly known for his psychoanalytically informed contributions to Soviet studies in general and the life of Joseph Stalin in particular (Stalin as a Revolutionary, 1973, and Stalin in Power, 1992). His 1961 Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx also remains a standard work, as do his 1969 The Marxian Revolutionary Idea, his 1963 The Soviet Political Mind, and his 1995 Politics as Leadership.

Robert Tucker was born on May 29, 1918, in Kansas City, Missouri. After receiving a BA from Harvard in 1939 and an MA in 1941, he studied Russian, served in the Office of Strategic Services, and went on in 1944 to work in the U.S. embassy in Moscow where he served for the nine years until Stalin’s death in 1953. He had meant to stay in Moscow only two years, but he married Eugenia Pestretsova in 1946 and as a Soviet citizen who had married a non-citizen, she was denied an exit visa until after Stalin’s death in 1953. Tucker then returned to the United States and completed his doctoral work at Harvard in 1958, which was the basis of his

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seminal first book. He was employed at the Rand Corporation and Indiana University before joining the Princeton faculty in 1962, where he was founding director of the university’s Russian Studies program, until his retirement in 1984.

Readers of Clio’s Psyche will be particularly interested in Tucker’s use of psychoanalytic theory in his biographical volumes. Fortunately, this is a topic on which he wrote in his fascinating and instructive 1982 essay “Memoir of a Stalin Biographer,” which is available on the Internet at plaza.ufl.edu/b/paris/essays/tucker_stalin.html. Tucker reports that he was able to arrange for Karen Horney’s just-published 1950 Neurosis and Human Growth to be sent to him from Washington through diplomatic channels. In that period, the Russian public’s idealization of Stalin and through his image the Soviet State had reached almost comic proportions. Gradually it dawned on Tucker that what he was observing in the Soviet Union bore a close resemblance to Horney’s construct of the neurotic character type. Such individuals compensate for traumatic childhood experiences by developing idealized self-images which they seek to impose on others. In the case of an individual such as Stalin who has paranoid proclivities, the political system in effect becomes an extension of its leader’s personality. Regrettably, his colleagues in Moscow tried to laugh away his psychological interpretation of the Soviet regime’s having been organized around Stalin’s paranoia. Even after the fall of communism, Professor Tucker told Charlie Rose in a 1996 interview, millions in Russia “see Stalin as he wanted to see himself, as a statist, in belief of Russia as a great power. They find that Stalin is the kind of Stalin that needs to be maintained.”

No brief summary can substitute for a reading of Tucker’s work. In addition to consulting the essay referred to in the previous paragraph and Tucker’s highly readable biographical volumes, the interested reader should consult

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JSTOR (www.jstor.org) or some other internet data base to find Tucker’s many valuable articles on such topics as the psychology of totalitarianism and charismatic leadership.

It remains to remark on Tucker the man. He was a courtly gentleman, a broad-gauged intellectual, and a dedicated scholar and teacher. The high esteem in which his students and colleagues held him was evident in their tributes to him at his October 2010 memorial service. In my own case, I never failed to profit from his friendship and colleagueship, which were enriched by the time we spent together as Fellows at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences as well as at Princeton. It is an honor to have known him.

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