De-Stalinization
When Stalin died in 1953, Tucker experienced “intense elation” for personal and political reasons. His wife, Evgenia Pestretsova, 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). 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).
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 (1963 and 1971, rev. ed.) and Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia (1987), Stalin’s successors did not consensually craft a post-Stalinist political system. An oligarchic 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. 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.”
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. 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 Boris Yeltsin intentionally spurred the disintegration of the Soviet Union, enabling the fifteen union republics to develop their own types of nation-state. Gorbachev at the time was the indirectly elected president of the Soviet Union, and Yeltsin was the directly elected president of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, by far the largest and most important union republic. 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. Tucker had long insisted that intraparty conflict was a catalyst of change in both 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, and Lenin’s well-known Resolution on Party Unity of 1921 has largely been honored in the breach.”
Tucker was keenly aware that Soviet ideology could divide or unify leading party officials and could weaken or strengthen party discipline.
During the Gorbachev years, a reformist official ideology clashed with a conservative operational ideology, and this conflict fractured the party. 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. Gorbachev is propounding his own version of it while recognizing—and deploring—that far from all his party comrades share it.” Indeed, freer expression of aspirations and grievances destabilized as well as de-Stalinized state-society relations and disintegrated as well as democratized the Soviet polity and society.
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