Robert C. Tucker, a Scholar of Marx, Stalin and Soviet Affairs, Dies at 92 (NYT)
Robert C. Tucker, a distinguished Sovietologist whose frustrations in persuading the authorities in Stalin’s Russia to let his new Russian wife accompany him home to the United States gave him crucial and influential insights into the Soviet leader, died Thursday at his home in Princeton, N.J. He was 92.
The cause was pneumonia, his wife, Evgeniya, said.
Mr. Tucker commanded wide attention with two biographies of Stalin that used psychological interpretations to explain how he had achieved and exercised power. In essence, he described a severely disturbed man who employed clever, often cruel means to defend his neurotic self-conception.
“He believed Stalin was a deeply paranoid personality,” said Stephen F. Cohen, who has written extensively on Soviet affairs. “He was trying to make the world safe for himself.”
In a speech in 1988, George F. Kennan, the diplomat and Russian scholar, called Mr. Tucker “one of the great students of Stalin and Stalinism.”
Mr. Kennan said there was a temptation to dismiss figures like Hitler or Stalin as “incomprehensible monstrosities” whose formative lives were beside the point. But Mr. Tucker, he said, marshaled “a seriousness of purpose, an historical insight and a scrupulousness of method” to regard Stalin as a malleable human being shaped by a childhood so harsh that he created, as a defense, an inflated self-image....
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The cause was pneumonia, his wife, Evgeniya, said.
Mr. Tucker commanded wide attention with two biographies of Stalin that used psychological interpretations to explain how he had achieved and exercised power. In essence, he described a severely disturbed man who employed clever, often cruel means to defend his neurotic self-conception.
“He believed Stalin was a deeply paranoid personality,” said Stephen F. Cohen, who has written extensively on Soviet affairs. “He was trying to make the world safe for himself.”
In a speech in 1988, George F. Kennan, the diplomat and Russian scholar, called Mr. Tucker “one of the great students of Stalin and Stalinism.”
Mr. Kennan said there was a temptation to dismiss figures like Hitler or Stalin as “incomprehensible monstrosities” whose formative lives were beside the point. But Mr. Tucker, he said, marshaled “a seriousness of purpose, an historical insight and a scrupulousness of method” to regard Stalin as a malleable human being shaped by a childhood so harsh that he created, as a defense, an inflated self-image....