Robert C. Tucker - Authoritarian Political Systems

Authoritarian Political Systems

Tucker coined the concept of “the revolutionary mass-movement regime under single-party auspices,” which he viewed as a general type of authoritarian regime with communist, fascist, and nationalist variants. Tucker’s purpose was to stimulate both cross-national and cross-temporal comparisons of authoritarian political systems and social movements. He hypothesized that Soviet Russian history is “one of different movements and of different Soviet regimes within a framework of continuity of organizational forms and official nomenclature.”

Noteworthy is Tucker’s emphasis on the top Soviet leader’s mental health and its ramifications for political change and continuity. The psychological or psychopathological needs and wants of a movement-regime’s leader are “the driving force of the political mechanism,” and the movement-regime is “a highly complicated instrumentality” for expressing the leader’s primal emotions in political behavior. Stalin’s self-glorification, lust for power, megalomania, paranoia, and cruelty are viewed as integral components of Stalinist “real culture,” operative ideology, “dictatorial decisionmaking,” domestic and foreign policies, policy implementation and resistance, and state penetration and domination of society. And Tucker sought not only to describe and document Stalin’s motives and beliefs, but also to explain their psychological origins, interactive development, and tangible consequences for Stalin individually and for Stalinist rule.

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. As he noted, an autocrat’s top lieutenants often were bitter rivals, rank-and-file party officials often withheld negative information from their superiors, and “family groups” or “clans” often resisted state controls in informal and ingenious ways.

Having lived and worked in Stalin’s Russia for nine years, Tucker had rich experiential knowledge and instinctive comprehension of everyday life in the USSR, which included family, friends, favors, work, and bureaucracy as well as fear, deprivation, persecution, surveillance, and hypocrisy. He could feel as well as analyze the similarities and differences between the realities and ideals of Soviet totalitarianism. And, because the totalitarian model was the dominant cross-national component of Sovietology, Tucker called for more and better comparative analysis of Soviet politics and for mutually beneficial ties with mainstream political science. In a word, he rejected the “theoretical isolationism” of Sovietology and its widely held presupposition that Soviet politics was “a unique subject matter.”