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),[1] 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).
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".
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.
... 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.
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.
[9] 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.
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).
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".
[13] Gorbachev made glasnost, perestroika, and democratization the centerpieces of a revolutionary ideology, which sparked a divisive public debate about the political content and policy implications of these concepts.
The rivalry between Gorbachev and Yeltsin unequivocally confirmed Tucker's contention that the personalities and mentalities of top Soviet leaders could clash viscerally and vindictively.
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.
In 1987, Tucker affirmed: '"Marxism-Leninism' is not at present a rigidly defined set of dogma that allows no scope for differences of interpretation on matters of importance, as it was earlier on.
This concept focuses attention on the psychological rift between the Russian state and society and on the "we-they" mentality of Russia's coercive elites and coerced masses.
Tucker stressed that this "evaluative attitude" was embraced and reinforced by the most violent and impatient state-building and social-engineering tsars, especially Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great.
[19] Indeed, expectations and assessments of "dual Russia" seem to have greatly influenced the decisions and actions of tsars and commissars, revolutionaries and bureaucrats, and ordinary citizens of Russian and non-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.
In 1987, he affirmed: "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.
"[24] In 1993, he elaborated: "Although communism as a belief system ... 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.
"[25] And, in 1995, he added: "The banning of the CPSU, the elimination of communism as a state creed, and the breakup of the USSR as an imperial formation marked in a deep sense the ending of the Soviet era.
Tucker's focus on the diverse mind-sets and skill-sets of Soviet leaders supported his early critique of the totalitarian model, which he faulted for paying insufficient attention to the institutionalized pathologies and idiosyncrasies of autocrats and oligarchs.
Tucker also criticized the totalitarian model for downplaying the conflicts and cleavages, inefficiencies and incompatibilities, and "departmentalism" and "localism" in purportedly "monolithic" and "monopolistic" regimes.
He affirmed that oligarchs perceived opportunities and liabilities in diverse ways and often struggled over power and policy, especially at historical turning points with viable options.
In 1969, he assumed 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.
[30] 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.
[33] 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".