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), 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.
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. 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).